"Never think that you have made a reply, when you have only failed to remain silent. For there is nothing more loquacious than vanity." -St. Augustine
I will risk a little vanity now.
Thus it was that while he believed in the rights of Englishmen and in certain natural laws of universal application, he despised the "Rights Of Man" which Paine and the French doctrinaires were soon to claim invoilable.
I have taken to thinking of our constitutional rights as the rights of Americans, yet I worry that such an attitude is contrary to the universal spirit of the Declaration of Independence. Is Burkean conservatism then in tension with the American founding? Perhaps not:
Edmund Burke believed in a kind of constitution of civilized peoples; with Samuel Johnson, he adhered to the doctrine of a universal human nature. But the exercise and extent of these rights can be determined only by prescription and local circumstances
There seems to be something missing between these two sentences. I think both Burke and Kirk would eschew framing political involvement as merely the exercise of rights. But I'm not familiar enough with their thoughts to know if they avoid the similar trap of framing politics as the fulfillment of duties. Would they have followed classical political theory in viewing politics as part of the ethical quest for human excellence?
My brief observation is that I can't guess how Straussian Burke was! The long answer, well -- I'm going to my bookshelf -- is that if he was much read in Aristotle then the missing part must be found in other sentences, if not in Aristotle himself.
From the part that is missing there would be no demerit for his endorsement of duties, provided that he recognized that duties, or any law, must be in some way grounded in something outside itself--this is what Kant did not consider. In true Enlightenment style, he was enamored with the Deism of the a-priori grounding of all human endeavors, a deism which, needless to say, ended with the enthronement of Reason in the French Revolution. So it may be that Burke rather understood duties as Voegelin had, and even St. Paul had, namely that law or duty is a symbol grounded beyond the law itself. But I can't speak for Burke, this is merely a favorable conjecture based on Kirk's claim that Burke knew his Aristotle. But certainly, Burke's prime modus operandi was against the principles of revolution that threatened England from the Continent.