Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 04:1 (Spring 2022)
Article: The Christian Family And The Burkean Body Politic
Author: Hunter Baker

Eikon 4.1 (Spring 2022) p. 54

The Christian Family And The Burkean Body Politic

Hunter Baker

Hunter Baker (J.D., Ph.D.) serves as the Dean of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Union University.

The Christian Family And The Burkean Body Politic

Aristotle identified the fundamental political unit differently than would most people today. While we tend to look to the individual as the source of our politics, Aristotle began with the procreative pair, the man and the woman. Without the man and the woman together, a political community has no ability to project itself into the future. In his Politics, Aristotle (referred to by Aquinas simply as “the philosopher”) draws out the way the family develops into an extended family, then a village, a city, and so on. One might consider that the word “king” contains “kin” within it. The king is the chief of the kin. The state, composed of several villages, represents a kind of final community.1 (Considering society as a kind of grand structure built on a foundation of families might lead one to experience a bit of unease when we consider the weak

Eikon 4.1 (Spring 2022) p. 55

ties that characterize many families today.)

Edmund Burke, the intellectual grandfather of philosophical conservatism (as opposed to a kind of retail political conservatism), likewise attached great importance to the small associations in society of which the family is the most organic. The quotation that is perhaps most often pulled from his logorrheic Reflections on the Revolution in France and which went through a period of frequent usage by American politicians was his invocation of the “little platoon”:

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 affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.2

Now, Burke was not writing primarily to emphasize the importance of the family, but to reject the radical, society-wide designs of the French Revolution. He mentioned the “little platoon” not so much to defend an institution (the family) that did not at that time need much protecting, but rather to encourage a tighter focus on small things where much of life actually happens and is enjoyed rather than on large, macro-revolutions.

Nevertheless, that much-mentioned short quote contains an important idea that extends well beyond the immediate context of criticizing and refuting the French revolutionaries. The use of the quote by American politici...