Disjecta Membra

Convenient platitudes: the distortion of Edmund Burke, pt. I

Were he alive today, it is possible that Edmund Burke would have been an impassioned advocate on behalf of the Black Lives Matter movement and familial causes for social and civic justice. The commonly applied moniker, ‘the father of modern political conservatism’, conjures up an image of a stolid defender of tradition, one who railed against ‘liberal’ progress; a fearful onlooker more concerned with appealing to the ‘canonised forefathers’ of the national past for guidance than with boldly confronting the problems of the present.[1] This picture compliments one aspect of Burke, albeit as seen through a retrospective and therefore presumptuous lens, but it enshrouds a great deal more. Burke was not a ‘conservative’, and any effort to brand him as such should be deemed fraudulent by virtue of its historical anachronism; partly because the distinction between ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’, as well as the two separate ideologies supposedly encompassed by each, is a product of the nineteenth-century.[2] Moreover, as we shall see, Burke would have reviled at most of the views and arguments espoused by those on the modern conservative right, and for which his ideas have often been appropriated and misconstrued to afford them some manner of justification; for he was the ‘philosopher of conservatism’, apparently – in the sense by which Marx was the philosopher of ‘Marxism’. Such a view only distorts Burke, rendering him malicious, obstinate, and reactionary; a figure to be denounced rather than respected. Our purpose here is to restore some clarity to this image; to reveal Burke for what he was rather than how he has usually been represented.[3]

He was a thinker and a politician – a thinker primarily and by vocation; a politician by accident, although the accident would seem his essence.[4] As the nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish historian W.E.H. Lecky once remarked:

There is no political figure of the eighteenth-century which retains so enduring an interest, or which repays so amply a study, as Edmund Burke … and there is perhaps no English prose writer since [Francis] Bacon whose works are so thickly starred with thought. The time may come when they will no longer be read. The time will never come when men would not grow the wiser by reading them.[5]

Here lies the root of his enduring interest, and the warrant for his redemption from those who would misconstrue him. He occupied a period wherein the ambition of ‘commoners’ deriving from the burgeoning middle-class and established professions, whose growing wealth easily translated into social status and thus political capital, began to erode the once solid hold of the British landed aristocracy over the levers and offices of power.[6] Some of these ‘new men’, chiefly the lawyers, even worked their way into Parliament. Of this select few, Burke’s career was especially unusual. He owed his ascension not to professional or commercial success, as was the case of William Pitt the Elder (commonly identified throughout his life as the ‘Great Commoner’, for he was born without a title and resolutely refused to accept one), but to the sheer force of his stirring eloquence and powerful imagination. For Samuel Johnson, the luminary writer of the age and friend of Burke, he was ‘an extraordinary man’, whose ‘stream of mind [was] perpetual’.[7] Such were his high estimation of Burke’s talents that upon hearing of his election to Parliament, Johnson regaled: ‘Now we who know Burke, know, that he will be one of the first men in this country’.[8] ‘You could not stand five minutes with that man beneath a shed while it rained[, due to his abrasive and confrontational personality], but you must be convinced you had been standing with the greatest man you had ever seen’, as Johnson once related to his eminent biographer, James Boswell.[9]

Contemporaries were evidently enthralled by Burke’s rhetoric, though the vivid images he was able to evoke in his prose and the powerful emotions he was able to elicit in his speeches. Once, when contesting his Bristol Parliamentary seat in September 1780, and when outlining his principles before a group of supporters, he spoke for just three minutes, and yet there were ‘very few dry eyes’ in the audience.[10] Posterity has likewise been captivated by his published works, in which ‘he brings thought to bear on politics’, in Matthew Arnold’s assessment, and ‘saturates politics with thought’.[11] Chief among these is the Reflections on the revolution in France (1790), a major text in the pantheon of modern political thought and a sustained work of rhetoric, or persuasion. For William Hazlitt, Burke’s ability to impress upon his readers the importance and vitality of his ideas, achieved through a masterful blending of detail with a philosophical analysis of political relations, was ‘his chief excellence’.[12] He was a master of expressive flair, but he was most conspicuous and forceful in his dexterity for moral argument and judgment. He was a philosophical politician rather than a political philosopher; his thoughts were fashioned in response to the cut and thrust of unfolding events, as an active participant and astute observer. He was not a solitary thinker, in the manner commonly (but wrongly) ascribed to David Hume; he articulated his ideas in response to active situations rather than in isolation to them, and so they carry a particular aura reflective of their milieu that must first be discerned and then appreciated; for it does not present itself. It is true, therefore, that one can only read his works in the context of their time and intellectual climate which, in theory, should set the parameters of any authentic interpretation; which would allow us to appreciate as justified the vehemence with which Burke met the French Revolution, but this has only infrequently translated into practice. A number of past commentators referred to the ‘rage’ of Edmund Burke when discussing his Reflections in particular, but usually extend this characterisation to encompass his political and intellectual career as a whole. But such convenient platitudes no longer hold up; there was far more to Burke than they often imply, and recent scholarship has done much to illustrated this point.

He will always reward close attention, and welcome scrutiny. Through its influence on prevailing notions of aesthetic taste, ‘good government’, and ‘principled’ statesmanship, Burke’s contribution to eighteenth-century intellectual life in general, and then to modern political thought and practice in particular, equally warrant admiration. His views on liberty, tolerance, and both private (at the individual level) and public or civic morality (that of government and the state) resonate now as they did during his own age; one of great passion, innovation, and social, political, and mental revolution. Out of this age, the age of Enlightenment, which witnessed the ascent of popular democracy, western imperialism, and commercial capitalism to history, arose a world bearing the visage of something recognisably modern, and upon which Burke’s mark is firmly engraved.[13] As a conscientious witness to its birthing pangs, Burke was a historian of the human costs of commercial empire and a fierce and tireless critic of ‘arbitrary’ or ‘despotic’ governance where and as he saw it, but also an advocate of ‘gradualist’ liberal reform (never revolution, for reasons to be considered in pt. II). Though not obviously so.  ‘With Burke’, wrote Lecky, ‘an extreme dread of organic change coexisted with a great disposition to administrative reform’.[14] In its varied reception of Burke, posterity has tended to prioritise the former tendency and minimise the latter. This is because the ‘conservative’ rendering of Burke initiated by British Tories has won out over the liberal rendering initiated by the Whigs. Neither ‘idea’ of Burke is strictly faithful, and both carry the mark of their initiators. Burke was neither a ‘conservative’ nor a ‘liberal’, for he predated the rise of either term to common political parlance. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the nature of his legacy has been a complicated affair, with the parameters of interpretation largely delineated by two distinctive ideas of Burke, reflecting the differing preoccupations of those interested in him.[15]  One the one hand there is the ‘liberal’ rendition of Burke, largely based on his Irish, Indian, and American writings, in conjunction with his opposition to King George III’s endeavour to reinstate the power of the crown in Parliament; while on the other hand there has been a far more influential ‘conservative’ depiction of Burke, which has often been linked to the British Conservative Party,[16] and more recently equated to the forces of political, social, and cultural reaction in Ireland, Britain, and America. Put succinctly, the ideology of ‘Burkean conservatism’ centres round several key concepts, primarily derived from his Reflections, such as 'the authority of tradition', the organic, historic conception of society, and the necessity of order, religion, and property. Thus Burke, who never produced a theory of government, is now generally referred to as the 'founder of modern conservatism’.[17]

He formulated no ‘political philosophy’, as in the systematic sense of this term (i.e. Marxism), whereby it designates a unified body of doctrines (the Greek, ‘organon’).  Following his eighteenth-century contemporaries, figures such as David Hume and Adam Smith, Burke would not have conceptualised ‘philosophy’ in this manner; as essentially a game of building abstract systems – how many would characterise twentieth-century century philosophy, which may consequently explain why Burke has sometimes been regarded by historians as espousing a philosophical or political system in his work, and particularly the Reflections.  It is far more likely, however, that such historians are not considering Burke in-himself and in the context of his own time, but the idea of Burke as a ‘political theorist’ created in the 1890s, where the appropriation of his ideas by those from political as well as scientific and philosophical backgrounds began to intensify.[18] Particular attention was placed on the Reflections, as it was argued that since the French Revolution elicited the most virulent reaction from Burke his condemnatory response contained the fullest articulation of his of ‘political philosophy’. ‘All circumstances taken together, the French revolution is the most astonishing [event] that has hitherto happened in the world,’ Burke noted, and in a tone often described as hyperbolic.[19] But such a criticism betrays a misunderstanding of Burke’s position and the intellectual structure that informed this judgment and legitimate concern; for the French Revolution was unprecedented, and by the time of Burke’s writing was ‘growing by moments into a strength to heap mountains upon mountains, and to wage war with heaven itself’.[20]

In his most strictly abstract work, A philosophical enquiry into the nature of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful (1757), Burke depicted the investigation of the roots and active course of the human passions as part of a larger intellectual endeavour; this was one component of a wider search into ‘the general scheme of things’, in so far as the goal was to reduce the complex to ‘utmost simplicity’, and thus ‘communicate to the taste a sort of philosophical solidity.’[21] To be a ‘philosopher’ in this period was to approach a subject, whatever subject it may be, in a careful, analytic, and inductive manner. ‘Philosophy’ was less a body of doctrines and more a state of mind; a style of thinking, and of writing, such that in principle it could be applied to any subject whatsoever.[22]  Burke was an Enlightenment ‘man of letters’ who was also an active politician; one must appreciate the latter point in tandem with the former. ‘I must see with my own eyes’, he once wrote. ‘I must, in a manner, touch with my own hands, not only the fixed, but the momentary circumstances, before I could venture to suggest any political project whatsoever, I must know the power and disposition to accept, to execute, to persevere. I must see all the aids, and all the obstacles. I must see the means of correcting the plan, where correctives would be wanted. I must see the things; I must see the men.’[23] He was a practical thinker averse to detached, rationalistic speculation, and this constitutes the basis of his thought; but it does not imply, as many commentators have taken to do, that he was without ‘principle’. His overriding preoccupation throughout his life with advancing liberty for those with, and with achieving liberty for those without (the Irish Catholics; American Colonists; subjects of the East India Company), would seem groundless otherwise.

We have briefly considered what Burke was not – a ‘raging’ reactionary; a stereotypical ‘conservative’. Now to the question of what he thought and why it matters.

[1] Quoted in J.W. Burrow, A liberal descent: Victorian historians and the English past (Cambridge, 1981), p. vi. This was Mary Wollstonecraft’s criticism of Burke and his Reflections on the revolution in France (London, 1790); that in his preoccupation with the past, he paid no attention to the present. See, idem, A vindication of the rights of men, in a letter to the right honourable Edmund Burke (London, 1790). [2] The best account of the conservative tradition is Edmund Fawcett, Conservatism: the fight for a tradition (Princeton, 2020). Fawcett has also written a comprehensive history of modern liberalism, Liberalism: the life of an idea (Princeton, 2018). [3] I follow the ‘revisionist’ line laid by Richard Bourke, Empire and revolution: the political life of Edmund Burke (Princeton & Oxford, 2015), and David Bromwich, The Intellectual life of Edmund Burke: from the sublime and beautiful to American independence (Harvard, 2014).  The latter two are intellectual biographies; and so, for the outstanding personal and psychological biography of Burke, see F.P. Lock, Edmund Burke: vol. I, 1730-1784 (Oxford, 1998); vol. II, 1784-1797 (Oxford, 2006). Additionally, one could consult Eamon O’Flaherty, ‘Edmund Burke’, The dictionary of Irish biography. Freely accessible online at: https://www.dib.ie/biography/burke-edmund-a1155. [4] Bromwich, The intellectual life of Edmund Burke, p. 5. [5] Quoted in Donal McCartney, W.E.H. Lecky: historian & politician, 1838-1903 (Dublin, 1994), p. 111. [6] Lock, Edmund Burke: vol, I, p. v.  For the wider context, see Paul Langford, A polite and commercial people: England 1727-1783 (Oxford, 1989). [7] Quoted in James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, R.W. Chapman (ed.) (Oxford, 1970), p. 696. [8] Ibid. [9] Quoted in Ferdinand Mount, ‘No theatricks,’ The London Review of Books, vol. 36, no. 16, Aug. 2014. Online at: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n16/ferdinand-mount/no-theatricks[10] Quoted in Bourke, Empire and revolution, p. 387. [11] Matthew Arnold, ‘The function of criticism at the present time’, in Essays and criticism (London, 1906), p. 17. [12] Edmund Burke, Reflections on the revolution in France, Conor Cruise O’Brien (ed.) (London, 1968); Hazlitt quoted in Bourke, Empire and revolution, p. 2. [13] For a good, comprehensive survey only published recently, see Ritchie Robertson, The Enlightenment: the pursuit of happiness (London, 2020). And for the most detailed study of Burke within this wider intellectual context, with all of its salient controversies that carved his perspective, see Bourke, Empire and revolution.[14] W.E.H. Lecky, History of England in the eighteenth-century, viii vols.(London, 1888), vol. iii, p. 225. [15] Bourke, Empire and revolution, p. 16; see also Emily Jones, Edmund Burke and the invention of modern conservatism, 1830-1914 (Oxford, 2017); Idem, ‘Conservatism, Edmund Burke, and the invention of a political tradition, 1885-1914,’ The History Journal, vol. 58, no 4 (2015), pp 1115-39; and Seamus Deane, ‘Edmund Burke in the USA’, in The Cambridge companion to Edmund Burke, David Dwan & Christopher Insole(eds) (Cambridge, 2015); Drew Maciag, Edmund Burke in America: the contested career of the father of modern conservatism (Ithaca, N.Y., 2013). [16] As is the implicit objective of the Tory MP and historian Jesse Norman, Edmund Burke: philosopher, politician, prophet (London, 2013). [17] Jones, ‘Conservatism, Edmund Burke, and the invention of a political tradition, 1885-1914,’ p. 1116; Edmund Burke, Reflections on the revolution in France, Conor Cruise O’Brien (ed.) (London, 1968). [18] Jones, ‘Conservatism, Edmund Burke, and the invention of a political tradition, 1885-1914,’ p. 1123. [19] Burke, Reflections on the revolution in France, p. 92. [20] Ibid. [21] Edmund Burke, A philosophical enquiry into the nature of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful (London, 1757), pp. i-ix. [22] See James A. Harris, Hume: an intellectual biography (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 18-9. [23] Quoted in Bromwich, The intellectual life of Edmund Burke, p. 5.