Although the arguments were not new, the French Revolution led the English increasingly to consider social theory and the religious base of their society. Religious arguments could be used both to validate the social order and to teach men in every class the duties necessary to maintain it. It could cement the unity of the community both in a local and in a national sense, and it could impose restraints and sanctions on unregenerate man and so order his social behaviour.

The social hierarchy

Edmund Burke was both the apostle and the prophet of social theory in this sense. Most in advance of his contemporaries was the centrality of the role of religion as a restraining and reconciling agent in society which he outlined in his Reflections. This concentration and emphasis was rarely found in other writers before 1793. Rather more of his contemporaries echoed his vision and defence of a divinely ordained social hierarchy which he produced in response to disputes in the Whig party in 1790–1 when he was anxious to establish that his interpretation, rather than that of Fox, was in the true Whig tradition. But this also did not become commonplace until 1793–4.

Burke assumed that all except the Jacobins accepted that God gave men their station in society and that, being placed in that rank by divine not human will, they were intended to fulfil the role assigned them. He assumed that men consented to these social and civil obligations because they arose from the ‘predisposed order of things'. That order involved a complex, social and economic hierarchy which should not be queried, for to doubt it would be to question God's wisdom.