In one of history’s many ironies, Edmund Burke’s role as the forefather of a modern political and cultural movement is paralleled only by Karl Marx. While Burke (1730-97) had inspired some tradition-minded individuals in Europe and America throughout the 19th century, it was the publication of Russell Kirk’s seminal The Conservative Mind (1953) that associated Burke firmly with Anglo-American conservatism. For Kirk and other conservatives, Burke’s critique of the French revolutionaries provided the fuel for their own critique of contemporary socialism, secularism, and the dismissal of tradition in the name of progress. Later, Burke’s vision of social change provided an alternative, as passionate as it was rational, to the revolutionary dreams of the Sixties. Even rapid social change should be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, he reasoned, and it should arise out of the deepest constitutional tradition of a particular people. He passionately embodied his thought in a stream of metaphors: he imagined reform as medical care for an ill parent and the constitution as a precious yet dilapidated estate needing repair. The sympathizers of the French Revolution are transmuted into grasshoppers, who “make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle”–imperturbable, loyal Englishmen–repose “beneath the shadow of the British oak.” For Kirk and others, Burke’s combination of political philosophy and poetic prose was the perfect response to liberal and Marxist critique of the Anglo-American tradition.
Reviewed favorably in The New York Times, Time magazine, and elsewhere, The Conservative Mind appeared early in the Eisenhower Administration, when people were eager to understand what seemed to be a growing conservative movement. In Kirk’s treatment, Burke fathered a tradition that crossed the Atlantic in the lives and work of John and John Quincy Adams, John Calhoun, James Fenimore Cooper, and the perspective of Tocqueville on America. In England, the Burkean tradition descended through Coleridge and Sir Walter Scott, Newman and Disraeli. When he got to the 20th century, however, Kirk could find few significant political leaders in the Burkean tradition–Churchill is barely mentioned and Robert Taft not at all. Instead, Kirk found the tradition carried on by writers like T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and C.S. Lewis, and by people we would call public intellectuals–George Santayana, Irving Babbitt, and Michael Oakeshott.
Significantly, this list includes poets and historians, churchmen and philosophers, which properly locates Burke’s significance in a larger cultural history rather than in politics alone. For all their diversity, these figures are generally skeptical of the apostles of progress while calling attention to the traditions and achievements of the past. While they are notably intellectual, they are dubious of attempts to reduce politics to a set of problems that a purely rational intelligence can solve. They refuse to separate questions of taste from questions of morality. They tend to be reverent toward God and distrustful of both the romantic faith in the individual self and the technological faith in gadgetry. They prize what Burke called the “little platoons” of society–the families, neighborhoods, and associations of Tocqueville–while doubting the modern, omnicompetent state.
From here it is but a short step to rejecting many of the presuppositions of liberalism: that morals are relative to one’s cultural place and time; that the past is presumed to be benighted, while change is progressive; that the government is capable of solving social ills by accumulating sufficient knowledge and will to overcome them.
For 35 years, up until the fall of Communism, political liberals protested this use of Burke in contemporary political argument. To a degree, the tussle over Burke’s legacy was a substantive interpretive debate. The major contested point was whether Burke adhered to a “natural law tradition” (as Kirk and his allies maintained), extending back to Aquinas, Cicero, and Aristotle. This tradition sees politics as an activity in which man fulfills his natural place in a divinely created social order by his rational participation in a universal moral law. The authority of natural law transcends any particular legislation or tradition. The problem for the “natural law” side is that Burke deeply respects the lessons of history, custom, and the common law. “Conventional” is a good word in Burke’s lexicon, for conventions usually embody the wisdom of many people over many years. It may seem, therefore, that history and “prescriptive” laws (rather than an ahistorical natural law) are Burke’s sole foundations. But Kirk was correct on this point: Burke’s critique of English exploitation of Ireland and India clearly rests on his conviction that the treatment of Catholics and Indians violated a deeper, natural law which could alone give legitimacy to historical practices or prescriptive laws.
While we have difficulty in reconciling the conventional with the natural, most 18th-century figures did not. For Burke, all sorts of conventional institutions and practices–politics, family arrangements, the fine arts and even landscape gardening–are potentially “natural,” for they properly exercise the latent possibilities within nature. Burke crisply summarized this deeply unromantic, unrevolutionary view thus: “Art is man’s nature.” And if art–even “artifice”–is natural to us, then the actual political laws by which we live should bear some resemblance to the natural law. As Burke put it in one of his last writings, “Constitutions furnish the civil means of getting at the natural.”1
If the Burke revival was hard on liberals, it was devastating to radicals. Unlike the true liberal (or conservative), the radical ideologue presumes that political reality can be adequately comprised by a simple, abstract theory. For the ideologue, all significant evil is social (not personal) in nature; it is caused by an oppressive social system; a complete transformation of the social system will end this oppression; the intellectual description of this system is a political act of a high order; and the morality of the radical in perpetrating any particular injustice cannot be questioned, for his loyalty to a higher, metaphysical justice will cover a multitude of sins.
Since 1999, those of us who live in the upper Midwest have witnessed a farcical reprise of these stock responses with the capture of a former member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, Sara Jane Olson. When Olson was charged with a politically correct hate crime–placing a bomb in a patrol car in order to murder the officers–her defenders quickly raised $1 million in bail and asked why the police didn’t pursue “real” criminals. Olson’s activism, theatrical involvement, and good taste won her a place in People magazine’s list of the 25 most intriguing people of 1999. To listen to news sources like Minnesota Public Radio, her intended victims were merely the cars where the bombs were placed, not flesh and blood. In 2003, she was sentenced for yet another crime: her role in killing a bank customer during a 1975 sla heist. Olson didn’t lose her establishment supporters until the fall of 2001, when she first pleaded guilty, then later maintained her innocence publicly and tried to retract her plea: she had lied to the court, she said, because jurors are now less willing to acquit an accused terrorist. She was “truly a victim of September 11,” her lawyer said. “We were young and foolish,” she had told her probation officers. Burke understood this character thoroughly when it was born in the French Revolution. His critique is both beautiful and devastating: “Nothing can be conceived more hard than the heart of a thoroughbred metaphysician,” wrote Burke near the end of his life:
Their humanity is not dissolved. They only give it a long prorogation. They are ready to declare, that they do not think two thousand years too long a period for the good that they pursue. It is remarkable, that they never see any way to their projected good but by the road of some evil. . . . Their humanity is at their horizon–and, like the horizon, it always flies before them.2
When this character was given second life in the West, especially in the Sixties, Burke was once again at the center of debate–thanks to the work of Kirk and his associates. Since the death of European communism, however, the polemical use of Burke has largely passed away, while a more general interest in Burke has risen. What’s more, nearly everyone now accepts the significance of “natural law” to Burke’s thought, as evidenced by the brief but significant mention Fred Lock gives this concept in his biography.
In light of Burke’s significance, it is astonishing that there has been no standard biography of him since his papers were released from the private holdings of the Earl Fitzwilliam to the Sheffield Central Library in 1949. Carl B. Cone’s fine two-volume Burke and the Nature of Politics (1957, 1964) focuses rather narrowly on political events. Russell Kirk’s biography (1967) was popular in its appeal and focused on the ideas Kirk had already explored. Conor Cruise O’Brien’s The Great Melody (1992), though at times brilliantly written, is guided almost exclusively by his preoccupation with Burke as the Irish Outsider. The slim value of these earlier biographies may be gauged by their virtual irrelevance for Lock’s work.
Fred Lock has given us what we need: a well-researched, largely impartial account of the flow of Burke’s life, season by season, to the degree that it can be known. Lock’s first volume (of a projected two-volume biography) takes Burke from his childhood through the disastrous elections of 1784. In that year–due partly to Burke’s failed work on a new policy for India in 1783–his Whig party went into a long-term opposition and the younger Pitt rapidly consolidated Tory power. Burke’s beloved leader, the Marquis of Rockingham, had died and the new head of the Whig party, Charles James Fox, lacked the character that Burke thought crucial in a great leader. The second volume of Lock’s biography will take Burke from this low point through the two struggles which engaged him until his death in 1797, against British exploitation of India and against the revolutionary changes in France and Europe as a whole.
Lock seems to have scoured every newspaper in the late 18th century, read every source of the Parliamentary debates, and perused all the diaries (mostly unpublished) of everyone connected with Burke. If there was a 1772 play satirizing British nouveaux riches returned from India–one of Burke’s major concerns from 1782 on–Lock makes it a helpful part of the story. If Burke’s constituents exchanged letters before an upcoming election, Lock gauges their relevance to Burke’s character and career. The tedium of this labor must have been enormous, but Lock has converted it into a confident and at times entertaining book.
In this volume, Lock provides numerous short descriptions of 18th-century life that illuminate Burke’s life for general readers and specialists alike. Some of these sketches give life to Dublin (where Burke was born) and Irish schooling from elementary through college training. Others depict a London legal education (which Burke hated) and journalism, in which Burke attempted to launch a career. Still others describe pensions, aesthetic theory, divorce laws, electioneering, and the 18th-century Cabinet. All of these affected Burke’s life significantly, and many of them affected his thought. Lock’s explanations are brief, substantial, and extraordinarily helpful for placing Burke’s thought in personal and historical context.
Those who know Burke only as the opponent of the anti-monarchical French revolutionaries will be surprised at Lock’s description of Burke’s consistent hostility to King George III. From 1769, just four years after he entered Parliament, through the second Rockingham ministry (1782), near the end of this volume, Burke opposed any influence from the king over the Cabinet. In addition, his at times rancorous promotion of “economical reform,” from 1780 on, reduced the monarchy’s ability to dole out patronage to personal friends and helped pave the way for a modern civil service.
A feature of Lock’s biography that may surprise even the specialist–yet which is particularly timely today–is Burke’s strong commitment to farming. Agricultural experimentation was a progressive, Enlightenment project, which Burke shares with 18th-century figures such as Jefferson and Madison. Regrettably, Lock does not explore how farming links Burke imaginatively with the world of the Roman republic, which was formative for Burke’s thought, or how “property” more generally becomes an essential aspect of Burke’s political philosophy.
Admirers of Burke will be most uncomfortable with Lock’s description of his need to have a monopoly on truth and virtue. Beginning with his “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents” (1770)–the most important, early defense of political parties–Burke’s hostility to the opposing Tory party shows an unnecessarily personal side. Burke was perhaps the first major figure to recognize that parties should be viewed as indispensable to free, constitutional government, rather than as disloyal conspiracies. “In reality, however,” writes Lock of Burke’s true feelings, “there will be only one ‘good’ party, to which all men of virtue will naturally gravitate.”
Burke’s tendency to invest his side with a “monopoly of virtue and integrity” extended at times to personal as well as political issues, writes Lock. This suggests an insecurity in Burke’s thought that is perhaps a congenital problem of conservatives. For some, it may unmask his rhetoric and diminish it to little more than special pleading. And the stakes will become much larger in Lock’s succeeding volume, where the French Revolution and the treatment of India will come to involve even more of Burke’s emotional life.
On the other hand, part of Burke’s attraction is precisely the personal nature of his knowledge. He digested mountains of information, and it nourished his heart and imagination as well as his brain. That’s what enabled him to “reason in metaphor,” as Coleridge remarked. Ask any group of students about the teachers and authors who most profoundly affected them. Nearly all will name one whose personal commitment connected learning with the largest affairs of life. That is Burke’s appeal as well, and it may connect his pre-Enlightenment sensibility to our postmodern times.
Perhaps it’s unfair to expect a biographer who wishes a long life for his book to explore these kinds of connections for the present. If you are willing to pay well over $100 for this book, or even borrow it from the library, your interest in Burke may be assumed. But taken in itself, Lock’s biography does not explain why Burke remains so great a figure to this day. To take an 18th-century measure of his significance: apart from prime ministers and royalty, Burke figures far more often than any other contemporary in the political caricatures of his day. He occupied the public stage more than any other person outside of the Cabinet. To take a modern measure: who are the politicians from the crucible of the late 18th century who still contribute to the political questions that haunt us? There are several fathers of the French and American Revolutions and (with the possible additions of Wilberforce and Mary Wollstonecraft) a single British figure, Edmund Burke.
The reason for Burke’s continuing significance, after the end of the Cold War, is that Burke thought deeply and well about the dynamics of social change. No modern thinker of any stripe can ignore his approach to this issue:
A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Without such means it might even risk the loss of that part of the constitution which it wished the most religiously to preserve.3
The French revolutionaries and their British admirers sought a wholesale rejection of the historic and actual traditions, customs, and laws of their lands. There was no part of the constitution that they wished “most religiously to preserve.” At the same time, they exalted the individual–his rights, his ability to understand political problems fully, his power to create a just society. Similar tendencies still predominate in our own culture, from children’s television programs that begin with the conviction that all of our customary judgments–prejudices–are bad, to academic ideologies that routinely judge the past by the fleeting assumptions of the day, through to the Seven Habits assumption that individuals can and should create their own happiness.
At the same time, a contrary wind has been gaining force over the last 20 years. Its effects can be seen in such diverse ways as the popularity of the film versions of the novels and plays of Austen and Shakespeare and the rise of interest in traditional liturgy and spiritual disciplines among both Gen-Xers and their parents. The force behind this wind is the recognition of tradition as a way of knowing, a way that sees a rationality beyond the limits of the scientific method while avoiding the irrationalism and individualism of postmodernity. Burke is its greatest exponent in the 18th century; the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer has been perhaps its most eloquent spokesman in more recent years. The rediscovery of tradition as a way of knowing may become Burke’s greatest contribution to the 21st century.
Like Swift, Johnson, and other 18th-century British writers we still read, Burke was skeptical of Enlightenment rationalism. He did not share the modern confidence in the natural reason of an individual mind. He doubted that reason, freed from its cultural moorings and directed by Descartes’ clear and distinct ideas, would lead infallibly to truth. Indeed, Burke’s first published work, A Vindication of Natural Society (1756), is a satire of Enlightenment reasoning about politics, as illustrated most notably in Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (1755). Burke satirizes Rousseau’s enlightened trust in pure, logical method as the access to truth as well as his skeptical stance toward “artificial,” historical traditions.
To the end of his life, the limited but dependable guidance of tradition over the supposed brilliance of the individual modern inquirer remains a central theme in Burke’s work: “An ignorant man, who is not fool enough to meddle with his clock,” he laments in 1791, is “sufficiently confident to think he can safely take to pieces, and put together at his pleasure, a moral machine of another guise”–namely, the British Constitution. Of this modern kind of reasoning, Burke continues, “they who truly mean well must be fearful of acting ill.”4 By contrast, Burke typically addresses a problem by entering into constitutional history in search of a traditional practice that, considered by a prudent imagination, speaks to the present. For instance, in his Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies (1775), he reminds Parliament that England achieved peace with Scotland and Wales when they were given more expansive rights in the English polity. Likewise, peace with the rebellious Americans is likeliest, he argues, if their rights are expanded.
Like Burke, Gadamer writes that tradition teaches us about human limitations. To read Aeschylean tragedy, Gadamer remarks, is to experience “human finitude. The truly experienced person is one who has taken this to heart, who knows that he is master neither of time nor the future.” Taking a leaf from Burke, Gadamer’s tradition, far from being an inert cultural reservoir of power, requires active engagement: “tradition is a genuine partner in dialogue, and we belong to it, as does the I with a Thou.”5
For both Gadamer and Burke, tradition is something that one belongs to and yet is “other” than oneself: “self-understanding always occurs through understanding something other than the self,” writes Gadamer. In order to gain insight from an encounter with the past, we need to acknowledge that we belong to the conversation with the past and to the speakers we find there. All such encounters occur within the historical tradition in which one is already situated. One cannot gain knowledge outside of this situation. Here is perhaps the place where Burke and Gadamer are at their most “postmodern.” Far from assuming that we can regard the past–or present–with scientific detachment or critical distance, they realize that where we begin is highly significant.
Burke and Gadamer acknowledge that we necessarily begin with certain “pre-judgments” about a situation, which we make before all the facts are in. Another word for these pre-judgments, for both thinkers, is “prejudice.” Prejudices may be legitimate or illegitimate, evil or good, but the fact is that no one is free of prejudice. The Enlightenment thinker has a prejudice in favor of “method” as the guarantor of truth. He or she assumes the individual’s own understanding is superior to that of past authority. Enlightenment thinkers like Thomas Paine, for instance, had strong prejudices against Catholics, against institutions, and for majority rule. But as Burke points out, majority rule is “one of the most violent fictions of positive law” and our acceptance of it is based on habit, not untaught nature. The chief prejudice held by Burke and Gadamer is that the past has something to teach us–something outside of ourselves, a true “other” or a “stranger” that we need to encounter if we are to understand any historical event, literary work, or philosophical question.
Burke’s prejudiced view of the British Constitution–his assumption that it had generally produced a free, ordered society–was the “whole” from which he began evaluating every new “part.” Gadamer calls such prejudices the “point of departure” for the problem of interpretation. They make up a “hermeneutical circle” from which one begins one’s encounter with new experiences and ideas.
For Burke, the question is usually whether the circle can properly expand to incorporate the new idea. For instance, Burke believed that the British Constitution could and should expand to include the right to vote for Irish Catholics. He sought to accommodate such reforms from within the British constitutional tradition. Such reforms were genuine, evolutionary changes, while remaining true to the genius of the constitution. But when something could not fit, such as the notion that revolutionary France could provide a model for British reform, Burke reacted negatively–and strongly. And not only does Burke defend his prejudice, he (like Gadamer) defends his traditional way of knowing as against the alleged enlightenment of contemporary progressives:
You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that we are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices. . . . We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. …
Your literary men, and your politicians, and so do the whole clan of the enlightened among us, essentially differ in these points. . . . With them it is a sufficient motive to destroy an old scheme of things, because it is an old one.6
Burke often contrasts the ease of the revolutionary mode of analysis to the difficulty of traditional thinking, sometimes with sarcastic exasperation: “all which the boasted wisdom of our ancestors has labored to bring to perfection for six or seven centuries, is nearly, or altogether, matched in six or seven days, at the leisure hours and sober intervals of Citizen Thomas Paine.”7 In contrast to Paine’s “citizen,” the kind of gentleman recommended by Burke must have “leisure to read, to reflect, to converse.” The books he should read most often, not surprisingly, are the classics.
As frequently happens in Burke, the immediate political issue turns into a larger, cultural one: do we read the “great books” because they engage us in permanently valuable conversations and stories, or do we find that they are primarily deposits of mistaken, oppressive views? Do we read them in order to know a stock of cultural literacy items, or do they help us evaluate the present-day assumptions that we take in with each unconscious breath?
Burke’s view is clear, by example more than by precept. He is among the most allusive of British prose writers. His use of Pope, Milton, Shakespeare, and the Bible shows a mind that lived imaginatively in fiction as well as in current events, in the past we well as in the present. Above all, Burke’s use of Greek and Roman writers–the “classics” of his day–provides a model for allowing the past to talk to the present.8
Some recent authors see Burke’s Latin quotations as a device to shut out the uneducated reader. But that misses the point entirely. Burke’s audience was deeply divided–as we are today–over the use of the classics. No one was neutral on that subject. The French Revolution had revived the “quarrel between ancients and moderns” from much earlier in the century. In 1792, Condorcet, a revolutionary who had recently offered himself as the dauphin’s tutor, issued a Report on Education that concluded Greek and Latin were too difficult for the French citizen to master. Moreover, because classical literature was “full of errors,” he said, the citizen’s education should come from reason and natural sentiment alone. Burke recognized that eliminating the errors of classical authors really meant eliminating the authors altogether. It ultimately meant eliminating the very idea of a classical author. The “death of the author” did not begin with Roland Barthes.
The classical world is especially well-suited to cultivate the individual, says Gadamer, because it “is remote and alien enough to effect the necessary separation of ourselves from ourselves.” Understanding a classical work, writes Gadamer
will always involve more than merely historically reconstructing the past “world” to which the work belongs. Our understanding will always retain the consciousness that we too belong to that world, and correlatively, that the work too belongs to our world.This is just what the word “classical” means: that the duration of a work’s power to speak directly is fundamentally unlimited.9
When Burke’s opponents rejected the classical world, many of them naÏvely assumed that they could know themselves and their own world immediately through natural sentiment and the use of newly developed, method-based modes of reason. They considered traditions, prejudices, and the habits that come down to us from the past shrouded in monkish superstition. Modern, progressive views of knowledge, by contrast, would discover truths that a classical education could never hope to find. But Gadamer argues that no world is fully present to itself–we are not fully self-aware, not fully in control of all the information we need. There are limits to our reason, no matter how brilliant, and limits to our perspective, now matter how broad.
Our ideas and truths do not come to us immediately at the end of a scientific chain of reasoning. All social and political truths come to us in a mediated form. They come to us clothed in actual practices, stories, and images. When Burke worries about those who would prefer the “naked reason,” therefore, it is not surprising that he responds with the image of “drapery”–clothing, in eighteenth century usage. “All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off,” he laments.
All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature . . . are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.10
But to get rid of all fashion, to strip away all decorum in the name of unmasking deceit will not reveal the truth: it will reveal nothing. To read Burke, by contrast, is to re-enter a pre-Enlightenment unity of heart and understanding, rationality and passion, artifice and nature, epistemology and aesthetics. Our constitutional arrangements are far different from the ones he knew or believed in. But if we hope to reconstruct a “moral imagination” for our post-Enlightenment future, we must look to Burke, among others, for discernment.
Daniel E. Ritchie is professor of English at Bethel College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of Reconstructing Literature in an Ideological Age: A Biblical Poetics and Literary Studies from Milton to Burke, and he has edited the Liberty Fund reissue of Burke’s Further Reflections on the Revolution in France.
1. Letters on a Regicide Peace (Letter No. 4). Select Works of Edmund Burke. 4 vols. Ed. Francis Canavan (Liberty Fund, 1999), Vol. 3, p. 384.
2. “Letter to a Noble Lord.” Further Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Daniel E. Ritchie (Liberty Fund, 1992), p. 315.
3. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Select Works. Vol. 2, p. 108.
4. Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs. Further Reflections on the Revolution in France, p. 196.
5. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method. 2nd rev. ed. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (Continuum, 1994), pp. 357, 358.
6. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Select Works, Vol. 2, p. 182.
7. Letters on a Regicide Peace (Letter No. 4). Select Works, Vol. 3, p. 351.
8. Burke’s use of older literature is among the difficulties of reading his work today. Fortunately a learned 19th-century editor, E.J. Payne, tracked down many of Burke’s references. Payne’s edition of Burke has been recently reissued in the well-bound, inexpensive, 4-volume set by Liberty Fund (Select Works of Edmund Burke, ed. Francis Canavan) from which I have quoted in this essay.
9. Truth and Method, p. 290.
10. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Select Works, Vol. 2, p. 171.
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