Madeleine Armstrong: There’s no freedom without the family

The cult of the individual leads to tyranny, not liberty

The state of the institution of the family has always preoccupied the minds of those who embrace a conservative political ideology. For no-one is this more true than Edmund Burke, who wrote so memorably of it in his 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France: 

“To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ, as it were) of public affection. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.”

Margaret Thatcher quoted these lines in her speech to the First International Conservative Congress in 1997, claiming that Burke’s idea of the little platoon has ‘been more often quoted than understood’. She interpreted Burke to mean that ‘what is public ultimately exists for what is private – that it is the family (not the state or nation or even Church) which is the basic institution of our society, without which all the rest collapses’. 

But the centrality of the family structure to political order is frequently now underestimated, with Burke’s famous phrase invoked vaguely in defense of local civic institutions. At the Onward Social Fabric Summit in 2022, Sajid Javid argued that Burke’s ‘timeless insight’ about the little platoon ‘was about the importance of the intermediary institutions that sit between the individual and the State,’ encompassing not only the family but also ‘faith groups, community networks, charities and so much more’.  

What are we to make of the family today? In Britain at least, it is often viewed through the lens of socio-economic utility; an oppositional form to liberal freedom, yes, but serving a (reluctantly) important function. The number of people living alone in Britain has more than doubled since 1974:  high rates of divorce, delayed marriage and suppressed birth rates are seen as policy problems rather than philosophical ones. Constraints, bonds, and duty: all values that family ties embody; values that hold little stock in a world of frictionless competition. To defend the family may at times appear to be an attack on liberty.  

Burke, however, knew that the family was the most important ‘little platoon’ because it was the best defense against the rise of tyranny. Abolishing the family will bring about less freedom, not more. His understanding of the connection between family and liberty was based upon his knowledge of the history of world empires. He observed in Ireland, India, and France that conquering and tyrannical powers often began with the destruction of family life. In Burke’s view, liberty depended upon the strength and security of relationships within the family, in its many cultural forms. 

Burke drew his idea of the platoon from the Roman historian Tacitus. Following his remark on the little platoon in the Reflections, Burke criticised the National Assembly for dividing France into départements. He described these new divisions as ‘colonies of the rights of man,’ and compared them to ‘that sort of military colonies which Tacitus has observed upon in the declining policy of Rome,’ citing the following passage of the Annales: 

‘Not, as once, were entire legions with their tribunes, centurions, and privates in their proper ranks all settled so as to make, by their unanimity and mutual concern, a civil community; but unknown to each other, from different platoons, without leaders, without mutual affections, as if from a different race of beings, unexpectedly drawn together in one, more like a plurality than a community.’ (emphasis added) 

The French Revolution was an imperial project, its aim being to establish an ‘empire of the rights of man’ across the globe. Burke argued, first of all, that liberty could not be founded upon abstract rights of individuals, because individuals could not be abstracted from the places and people to which they were born. Furthermore, ‘when the members who compose these new bodies of cantons, communes, and departments, arrangements purposely produced through the medium of confusion, begin to act,’ Burke predicted, ‘they will find themselves, in a great measure, strangers to one another.’ This dissociation was dangerous, Burke warned, because when people were no longer motivated to cooperate by mutual affection and responsibility, ‘laws are to be supported only by their own terrors’. 

The breakdown of family life during the French Revolution was, to Burke, the first and clearest warning sign of tyranny. In his view the real intention of the National Assembly was to weaken local and familial identities so as to encourage an all-consuming devotion to the state. In France, divorce was legalised and made easier to obtain for both men and women; parents and children treated each other with suspicion, and even violence as potential ‘enemies’ of the revolution; laws of inheritance were rewritten so that estates had to be divided equally among children in perpetuity, effectively rendering it impossible to retain a family home over generations.

Burke would have compared the attacks on family ties in France to the oppression of Catholics in Ireland, Hindus and Muslims in India, and slaves in America and the West Indies. Long before the French Revolution, Burke fought against the Popery laws that were designed to eradicate Catholics in Ireland by making it impossible for them to inherit family property unless they converted to Protestantism. He accused the East India Company of publicly humiliating and torturing native, landowning families who refused or were unable to pay the high taxes imposed upon them, and for using English courts to override local customs and deprive Hindus and Muslims of their inheritances. The denial or abolition of the rights of families in Ireland and India was central, in Burke’s view, to their systematic oppression. 

Burke warned that the breakdown of family life would not lead to freedom but tyranny. In his view, the individualism supported by the French Revolution would only lead to social isolation, thereby oppressing the individual by increasing his or her dependence upon the state. This is the Burkean insight to which Conservatives in the United Kingdom ought to pay greater attention. The UK has one of the highest rates of family breakdown in the OECD. This breakdown is not merely a social issue – but a serious threat to liberty. 

Madeleine Armstrong recently completed her PhD at Cambridge University, focusing on the family in Edmund Burke's political thought