They made and recorded a sort of institute and digest of anarchy, called the Rights of Man.

Edmund Burke wrote this line amid his sustained critique of the French Revolution and the revolutionary political theory that, in his view, abstracted “rights” from inherited law, custom, and social obligation. In the early 1790s Burke argued that the National Assembly’s declarations and constitutional experiments replaced historically evolved liberties with speculative principles, encouraging instability and legitimizing the overthrow of established institutions. The phrase targets the revolutionary codification of universal “rights of man,” which Burke saw not as a safeguard of ordered freedom but as a rhetorical charter for dismantling monarchy, church, and traditional civil arrangements—what he feared would culminate in disorder and coercion.

Burke’s wording is deliberately sardonic: an “institute and digest” suggests a formal handbook or legal compendium, but he claims it is a compendium of “anarchy.” The point is not that rights are meaningless, but that rights asserted in the abstract—detached from concrete constitutional inheritance and the mediating institutions of society—can become a license for perpetual revolution. By calling it “recorded,” he implies that once such principles are canonized, they acquire an authority that can be invoked to justify sweeping political rupture. The line encapsulates Burke’s broader argument that stable liberty depends on tradition, prudence, and continuity rather than ideological blueprints.