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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Classic Thinkers series
- Sprache: Englisch
Few thinkers have provoked such violently opposing reactions as Edmund Burke. A giant of eighteenth-century political and intellectual life, Burke has been praised as a prophet who spied the terror latent in revolutionary or democratic ideologies, and condemned as defender of social hierarchy and outmoded political institutions.
Ross Carroll tempers these judgments by situating Burke’s arguments in relation to the political controversies of his day. Burke’s writings must be understood as rhetorically brilliant exercises in political persuasion aimed less at defending abstract truths than at warning his contemporaries about the corrosive forces – ideological, social, and political – that threatened their society. Drawing on Burke’s enormous corpus, Carroll presents a nuanced portrait of Burke as, above all, a diagnostician of political misrule, whether domestic, foreign, or imperial. Burke’s lasting value, Carroll argues, derives less from the content of his specific positions than from the difficult questions he forces us to ask of ourselves.
This engaging and illuminating account of Burke’s work is a vital reference for students and scholars of history, philosophy, and political thought.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
Life and Political Career
Burke’s Intellectual Context
Burke and Political Theory
Scope of the Book
Notes
1 The Foundations of Society
Natural Religion and Natural Society
Sympathy, Imitation, and Ambition
The Lure of the Sublime
How Words Move Us
Notes
2 Representation and Political Association
The Danger of an Unresponsive Parliament
The
Present Discontents
and the Case for Political Association
Instructions, Mandates, and the Work of a Representative
The Limits of Virtual Representation
Public Service and Popular Favour
A Consistent Defence of Parliamentarism
Notes
3 Political Reform and Constitutional Change
Toleration and Liberty of Conscience
Public Finance Reform and the System of Influence
Reforming the Franchise
Reforming the Slave Trade
Burke as Theorist of Reform
Notes
4 Freedom and Revolution
Rational (and Social) Freedom
Freedom and Constitutionalism
Democracy and the Danger of Majority Tyranny
Preserving the Intergenerational Contract
The Real Rights of Man
Chivalry, Family, and Aristocracy
Habit, Custom, and Resistance
The Regicide Republic and Burke’s Political Economy
Notes
5 Conquest and Colonization
Exemplary Conquest and the Misuse of Violence
Conquest and Law
Perpetual Conquest and Minority Tyranny in Ireland
Colonies, Independence, and the Rights of Man
Conquest without Settler Colonialism
Notes
6 Corporate Tyranny and Imperial Responsibility
A New Kind of Conqueror
Extending the Whig Critique of Arbitrary Power to India
Rebels, Tyrants, and Justified Resistance
Inattention and Permissive Injustice
Indignation and Sympathetic Revenge
Rewarding Injustice
Notes
Epilogue
A Diagnostician of Misrule
Burke’s Political Ethics
Notes
Bibliography
Manuscript
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Series Title
Classic Thinkers
Richard T. W. Arthur,
Leibniz
Ross Carroll,
Edmund Burke
Terrell Carver,
Marx
Daniel Davies,
Maimonides
Daniel E. Flage,
Berkeley
J. M. Fritzman,
Hegel
Bernard Gert,
Hobbes
Thomas Kemple,
Simmel
Ralph McInerny,
Aquinas
Dale E. Miller,
J. S. Mill
Joanne Paul,
Thomas More
William J. Prior,
Socrates
A. J. Pyle,
Locke
Michael Quinn,
Bentham
James T. Schleifer,
Tocqueville
Craig Smith,
Adam Smith
Céline Spector,
Rousseau
Justin Steinberg and Valtteri Viljanen,
Spinoza
Andrew Ward,
Kant
Edmund Burke
Ross Carroll
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Ross Carroll 2024
The right of Ross Carroll to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3864-5 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3865-2 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023947420
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Dedication
For Celeste
Acknowledgements
It is an unfortunate testament to how long this book has taken me to write that I need to thank not one but four editors at Polity for their patience and perseverance. George Owers commissioned me to write the book and gave me invaluable advice on the initial proposal (drawing on his own considerable knowledge of Burke as he did so). Pascal Porcheron gave me solid pointers midway through the process. Finally, Ian Malcolm and Ellen MacDonald-Kramer have done a marvellous job at guiding me over the finish line. My deepest gratitude goes to them all.
The writing also extended across different homes and employers. When I agreed to write the book in 2018, I was a visiting scholar at University College Dublin, where I benefited greatly from talking about Burke with Katherine O’Donnell. I completed much of the writing at the University of Exeter, where my friends and colleagues at the Political Theory Reading Group generously gave me advice on Chapter 3 and provided a wonderfully supportive working environment. It was an honour to have a Burke scholar of the calibre of Iain Hampsher-Monk as a colleague at Exeter and every chapter of this work bears his influence. Richard Bourke and Daniel O’Neill offered me valuable encouragement at various stages of the process. I finished the book having just moved to Ireland to take up a new job at Dublin City University. The result is that the book was started and finished in the city of Burke’s birth (and my own). I am also grateful for the financial support I received from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Book Publication Scheme at Dublin City University.
Two external reviewers at Polity provided very helpful feedback on the manuscript. As did Jonathan Barry (at very short notice!). My family were hugely supportive, even if my father required convincing that anyone outside Ireland would really be all that interested in a book about an Irishman. My nephews Sebastian, Jude, and Reuben deserve special mention, not least because I inexplicably failed to thank them in the acknowledgements to my last book (an omission that did not go unnoticed!). Celeste McNamara offered me her love, her sanity, her formidable intellect, and her keen eyes across the entire work. She makes everything I do better and makes me better too. I dedicate this book to her.
Ross Carroll
Dublin, September 2023
Abbreviations
Unless otherwise stated all references to Burke’s works are to the nine-volume Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke edited by Paul Langford and published by Oxford University Press. This is abbreviated to W&S followed by the volume number as a roman numeral and then the page number. All references to Burke’s letters are to the ten-volume Correspondence of Edmund Burke edited by Thomas Copeland and published by Cambridge University Press. This appears as Corr. followed by the volume number (again in roman numerals) and page number. Complete references are contained in the bibliography.
Introduction
In one of his earliest unpublished manuscripts a young Edmund Burke described what he called the ‘Character of a Fine Gentleman’.1 Such a character, Burke claimed, is ‘no Scholar’ and comes across as effortlessly wise instead of witty. He is affable, ‘entertains no extremes of opinion’, and ‘scarcely ever’ enters into disputes or arguments.2 He is mostly idle and gives the impression of being entirely ‘disengaged’ from the business of the world. He glides through life with ‘great Smoothness’ and is praised and respected ‘by everybody’.3
By these standards Burke himself was no fine gentleman. Even though he tried to wear his erudition lightly he was very much a scholar, and could not resist using wit to excoriate an opponent (he reminded one biographer ‘of a horse-soldier in an engagement, exercising preliminary sabre-flourishes over the head of an enemy on foot previous to putting him to death’).4 His opinions could veer easily into extremes, notwithstanding his reputation as a moderate. He was never shy about entering a dispute, and made an entire career out of arguing with people. He was very much an engaged figure and threw himself into the business of politics with more relish than probably any other thinker in this series. Far from moving through life smoothly, he experienced countless setbacks in his relations with others (some of his own making) and, while he won ample praise in his lifetime, he was also despised in equal measure.
Had Burke truly been a fine gentleman, however, he almost certainly would be less interesting to study. It is unlikely that a fine gentleman could have delivered a four-day long harangue against a former Governor of Bengal that riveted the attention of a gallery of onlookers and the British press. A fine gentleman would have gently chided the elderly Dissenter Richard Price when he misinterpreted English constitutional history, rather than subjecting him to a lengthy diatribe in the opening pages of Reflections on the Revolution in France, thereby igniting the mother of all pamphlet wars. Even those who regret how, in later years, Burke dedicated his talent to defending the aristocracy have to concede that he did so with a ferocious energy that surpassed most members of that class. Burke was far too prickly and combative ever to approximate his portrait of a fine gentleman; but it is partly that prickliness and combativeness that make him such a fascinating figure.
It is Burke’s thought rather than his character that will concern us here. But as will soon become apparent, a key contention of this book is that separating Burke the thinker from Burke the wit, Burke the political brawler, and Burke the scorner, is easier said than done.5 Indeed, it is not clear that such a separation should even be attempted. There are some political thinkers whose principal ideas can be studied without needing to know much about the texture of their life, personality, and career. Burke is not one of those thinkers. Many (perhaps most) of Burke’s contributions to thought are contained in letters, pamphlets, speeches, and other occasional pieces of writing, rather than concentrated in a handful of philosophical masterworks. This means that even readers determined to distil a Burkean philosophy from the messiness of eighteenth-century political argument will have to know something of the world in which Burke was operating, as well as something about the passions, attachments, priorities, and commitments of the man himself.
Life and Political Career
Burke was born in 1729 in Dublin, a city rapidly developing into an important commercial and political hub in the British imperial system. Much has been made of the religious background of his parents, and not without reason. Burke’s father, Richard, was Protestant, though may have converted to that religion from Catholicism to gain admission to the legal profession.6 Burke’s mother, Mary Nagle, was from a Catholic gentry family from the Blackwater Valley in Cork, whose fortunes had declined along with the Jacobite cause they supported. Burke spent some formative periods of his childhood in this region of Ireland. From age six to eleven he lived with his uncle, Patrick Nagle, in the same house in Ballyduff in which his mother grew up. During those years he attended a hedge-school, a type of informal school set up to educate the Catholic Irish gentry in defiance of the anti-Catholic Penal Laws. Some scholars have traced Burke’s later sympathy with dispossessed Catholic landowners back to these experiences with his mother’s family.7 Certainly the fact that Burke grew up in a family with a keen sense of having lost out in the Cromwellian conquests is significant.
Burke’s initial plan was to follow his father into law and much of his early education prepared him for that path. He attended a Quaker school at Ballitore where he was taught by an able schoolmaster and committed abolitionist, Abraham Shackleton, a fact that may help to explain Burke’s later interest in reforming the slave trade. As was fitting for a young man with ambitions for a legal career, Burke entered Trinity College in Dublin in 1744 and set about developing the rhetorical gifts that would later grab the attention of various English patrons (the debating society or ‘Club’ that Burke founded at Trinity inspired the College Historical Society, which exists to this day). In 1750 Burke crossed the Irish Sea and began training in law at Middle Temple in London, but he seems to have devoted as much time to literary pursuits as to his legal studies. These literary obsessions eventually yielded fruit with the publication of A Vindication of Natural Society (1756), a satire on Lord Bolingbroke’s deistic attack on revealed religion. That same year, while recuperating from an illness in Bath, Burke met Jane Mary Nugent, whose virtues he extolled in another unpublished ‘character’ from around this time (her eyes, Burke swooned, ‘command’ with virtue instead of authority ‘like a good man out of office’, which was probably how Burke imagined himself for much of his career!).8 He married Jane in March, 1757, and she immediately dedicated herself to four decades of managing his affairs, which, Burke later confessed in his will, were often in a ‘state of much derangement and embarrassment’.9 In that same year he published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, a naturalistic account of human aesthetic experience that is the closest thing to a systematic treatise that Burke ever wrote.
At this point Burke appeared to be settling into the life of a man of letters.10 He became the founding editor of the Annual Register, a review of current literary and philosophical works, and composed many of the entries himself (he would continue to interest himself in the Annual Register long after he became a member of parliament). Had he continued in this vein then Burke could still have established himself as a thinker of note, or at the very least as an arbiter of literary taste in a city teeming with authors jostling for recognition, but he probably would never have won notoriety as a political thinker. Burke’s gradual transition from mere writer to philosopher-statesman began in 1759 when he won employment as a private secretary to William Gerard Hamilton (nicknamed ‘Single Speech Hamilton’ because his maiden speech in parliament was supposedly his first and last noteworthy intervention). During Burke’s period of service, Hamilton cycled through a number of important posts, including Chief Secretary to Halifax, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. After six years Burke grew tired of playing second fiddle to a man who was his equal in age but inferior in talent. By contrast, Burke’s next employer – Charles Watson-Wentworth, the Second Marquess of Rockingham – was both a political heavy-weight and more than willing to give Burke his chance in the limelight.
Many political thinkers have flourished under the protective wing of a powerful aristocratic sponsor: Hobbes had Cavendish, Locke had Shaftesbury, Burke had Rockingham. It was Rockingham who drew Burke into the centre of British politics and Rockingham’s influence that secured him his first parliamentary seat for Wendover (it would be another nine years before Burke would have to campaign for votes in a contested election). When Burke purchased a sizeable estate of 600 acres in Beaconsfield to establish himself as a country gentleman and indulge his passion for farming, he did so at least in part with money raised from Rockingham connections.11 It was on behalf of the Rockingham Whigs that Burke would pen his first major political tracts. In his Short Account of the Late Administration, published just days after Rockingham’s resignation as Prime Minister in 1766, Burke dutifully defended his patron’s record in government. Four years later, Burke’s Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (considered by some to be the first modern party manifesto) pleaded the necessity of principled parliamentary opposition as a bulwark against conniving courtiers and their agents in parliament, but also presented the Rockingham Whigs as exemplifying what an effective opposition party should look like. Even towards the end of a nearly three-decade long parliamentary career Burke took pride in his party loyalty, complaining in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791) that the Whig party had abandoned him over the French Revolution, rather than the reverse.
Despite his personal fidelity to Rockingham and commitment to his party, the charge that Burke was a hired pen or political hack has never stuck. From the start, Burke was a shaper of party policy rather than a mere mouthpiece for his aristocratic superiors, and Rockingham relied on Burke’s judgement as much as Burke relied on Rockingham’s practical support. Long before Rockingham’s untimely death in 1782 (cutting short the Marquess’s second term as Prime Minister), Burke had established a reputation for himself as an independent political operator who was unafraid to upset his colleagues if needs be. On all of the great issues of the day – from the crisis of the American colonies to the reform of the franchise – Burke carved out positions that were recognizably his own.
If Burke occasionally found himself at odds with his party, he still more often parted ways with his constituents. In 1780, after six years serving as representative for Bristol (his second seat), Burke declined to seek re-election, knowing full well that he had alienated his electorate. The account he gave to Bristolians justifying his actions in parliament has since been recognized as a masterful set of reflections on the dilemmas of representation. Often forgotten, however, is that this was also an expression of defiance in a moment of political defeat. Burke knew his support for the liberalization of Irish trade, a softening of the penalties for debtors, and further toleration for Catholics had angered those who voted for him before and that he now stood little chance at the ballot box. He was defending his vision of representation to an audience that he would soon cease to represent.
Burke tasted fame in parliament but rarely held office, serving only briefly as Paymaster of the Forces in the early 1780s. For the most part he spent his career criticizing government policy from the opposition. He was a leading critic of Lord North’s policies towards Britain’s American colonies and predicted correctly that coercing the colonists into paying taxes would fuel demands for independence (an outcome Burke profoundly regretted). Burke also fought to reform Royal finances in an attempt to rein in what the Rockingham Whigs took to be the overbearing influence of the Crown over parliament. From 1788 to 1795 he led the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, former Governor General of Bengal, and a man that Burke held responsible for the worst crimes committed by the East India Company as it transformed itself from a company of tradesmen into an instrument of conquest. Although Hastings was eventually acquitted, Burke prided himself on having brought the plight of India to public attention.
The final years of Burke’s life and career were decidedly mixed. On the one hand, his scathing 1790 commentary on French affairs, the Reflections on the Revolution in France, earned him a host of new admirers and a royal pension, while also drawing replies from some of the finest polemicists of the late eighteenth century, including Catharine Macaulay, Thomas Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft. At the same time, it was a period of political isolation and personal grief. In 1791 Burke broke tearfully from Charles James Fox, his long-time ally in the Whig cause, on the floor of the Commons, over their differing views on the French Revolution, virtually ostracizing himself from the party he had served for nearly three decades. He looked on in dismay as the misgovernment of Ireland made Catholics there receptive to the French revolutionary doctrines that he detested. In 1794 his son Richard, who had campaigned strenuously for the rights of Irish Catholics, died suddenly at thirty-six years old, having just taken over his father’s last parliamentary seat of Malton. Burke made little attempt to conceal his grief, even in his published writings (in his Letter to a Noble Lord he remarked bitterly on how many of the joys of family that his critics took for granted were now denied him).12
Burke spent his last three years urging the government of William Pitt to continue war with the new French republic and, if possible, restore the Bourbon monarchy by military intervention. Having spent much of his career preaching political moderation and disclaiming violence as a blunt instrument of politics, Burke ended it by savaging those who proposed that Britain enter peace negotiations with France. Upon his death in 1797 Burke was buried in a wooden coffin, supposedly (according to a probably apocryphal local tradition) because he reckoned a quickly decaying cover for his corpse would reduce the chance that Jacobin sympathizers would later exhume it for desecration.13 Burke’s body was indeed eventually disinterred, but only so that it could be placed in a lead casket beneath his pew in Beaconsfield church.
Burke’s Intellectual Context
The popular conflation of the French Revolution with modernity has prompted many to think that because Burke opposed the former then he must have been suspicious of the latter. Nothing could be further from the truth. Burke was an ardent modernizer and reformer who embraced Enlightenment notions of religious toleration, commerce, and the application of new knowledge to the improvement of everything from agriculture to statesmanship. The Enlightenment ideal of sociability was particularly important to him and, from his student days, Burke placed great stock on the power of conversation to soften manners and advance learning. Like many aspiring men of letters in eighteenth-century Britain, he absorbed Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws and relied heavily on its analysis of political regimes and their respective animating principles. Burke can only be considered anti-Enlightenment if the term ‘Enlightenment’ is restricted to a narrow clique of freethinkers and atheist philosophes, a narrowing that no serious scholar would now allow.14
Particularly influential on Burke’s thinking were figures associated today with the Scottish Enlightenment. Burke was personally acquainted with David Hume and engaged with his ideas from the start, dedicating the Preface of the second edition of his Philosophical Enquiry to a polite refutation of Hume’s ideas about taste. And, while he disagreed more heatedly with Hume on certain topics (Burke took issue with Hume’s religious scepticism and fumed at what he took to be the prejudiced depiction of the 1641 Catholic massacre of Irish Protestants in Hume’s History of England), the stamp of the Scottish philosopher’s thinking on his own thought is clear.15 Burke also counted Adam Smith among his friends and shared many of the latter’s ideas on political economy and the benefits of free trade.
More than any particular argument or doctrine, however, Burke imbibed the Scottish Enlightenment passion for tracing the historical development of societies along a series of distinct stages from nomadic hunter-gatherer to animal husbandry, agriculture, and commercial civilization. He reviewed Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society for the Annual Register and enthusiastically endorsed William Robertson’s History of America. It was unsurprising that among Burke’s earliest writings – An Essay Towards an Abridgement of the English History, an Account of the European Settlements in America (co-authored with his friend William Burke), and the fragmentary Essay Towards a History of the Laws of England – were historical works written using the Scottish style of historical analysis, one that explained events by referring to the complex interplay of moral and physical causes. Because he followed Scottish historiographical trends, Burke shunned as naive any understanding of history that posited an essential similarity between ancient and modern societies, or which considered the former as containing easily applicable lessons for the latter. Similarly, when Burke objected to the French Revolution he did so not because the revolutionaries were driven by modern ideas but because he thought they imperilled modern civilization by reviving an atavistic form of politics that commerce and polite manners had gradually displaced.
Burke was also profoundly influenced by Scottish thinking in the realm of what would later be called ‘moral psychology’. Taking their cue from Francis Hutcheson’s An Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), eighteenth-century philosophers in Scotland searched for naturalistic explanations of human moral sentiments and behaviours. Fundamental to their inquiries was the concept of sympathy or the transmission of emotional states from one person to another. It was sympathy, the Scots argued, that allowed us to enter into the feelings of others and experience a version of their pain, pleasure, sorrow, or anger. Controversially, Hume and Smith looked to this process of emotional contagion to explain why human beings experienced repugnance for moral wrongs and hatred for malefactors, thus providing a non-rationalist and non-religious grounding for moral motivations. And, while Burke shied away from the irreligious implications of this sort of argument, he placed his own version of sympathy at the centre of his own understanding of moral psychology and political order. For Burke, it was the sympathetic communication of emotion that explained the power of an actor in a tragedy to make an audience weep, or of an orator to instil anger in a crowd. More than either Smith or Hume, however, Burke appreciated that anyone wishing to exercise political authority in society must retain a sympathetic connection with those they wish to govern. As we shall see, in his political thought Burke repeatedly emphasized how political regimes that forfeited the sympathy of the governed – whether through violence, neglect, lawlessness, or even just coarseness – were flirting with collapse.
A final tradition that is crucial for understanding Burke is Whiggism. The early eighteenth century saw a transformation of Whiggism from an ideology of resistance to one of political rule. The Whig political philosophy of 1688, of which John Locke was the most celebrated proponent, rejected the notion that kings ruled de jure divino (by divine right) and defended the right of subjects to resist (and even forcibly overthrow) tyrannical governments. They did so with an eye to ejecting the Catholic James II from the English throne and engineering the succession of the reassuringly Protestant William of Orange in his place. As with many revolutions, however, the ideas that inspired resistance to the old order soon morphed into dogmas that became dangerous to question. Regimes founded on acts of resistance are no more accommodating of dissent than their predecessors, and critics of Whig orthodoxies could find themselves in trouble. When the clergyman Henry Sacheverell denounced the Whig doctrines of toleration and resistance from the pulpit in 1709, the Whigs in the House of Lords impeached him in what was essentially a show trial, one designed to shore up the legitimacy of the revolution settlement once and for all.16 The Sacheverell trial remained unmatched for drama or political significance until Burke led the Whig impeachment of Warren Hastings nearly eight decades later.
In the 1790s, when Burke defended the core of what he took Whiggism to be, it is significant that he referred for precedent to the Whig managers of the Sacheverell trial rather than the first generation of Whigs, who had deposed the Stuart monarchy. As Burke understood it, Whiggism had as much to say about the exercise of governmental power as about resistance to it. This was the other, more neglected, side of Locke’s legacy. For, while Locke’s Two Treatises of Government contained ample material for revolutionaries, it also carved out space for the legitimate use of prerogative by executives who wished to skirt (or even bypass) the law in times of political emergency. The right of subjects to rebel could not, for Locke or any other Whig, negate the right of government occasionally to exercise extra-legal power for the common good. Burke, as we shall see, drew extensively from both sides of this Whig inheritance. He displayed little patience for anyone who believed that the victims of governmental oppression should passively endure their fate; indeed, resistance in his mind was as much a duty as a right. At the same time, Burke knew that commercial imperial states with expansionist aims such as Britain were bound to stumble into crises, and that effective government in such circumstances required a strong executive willing to exercise extraordinary powers in accordance with reason of state.17 The conundrum that Burke often faced was how to prevent governments from using the pretext of continual emergencies to enlarge their authority over time.
Burke and Political Theory
The richness and thematic variety of Burke’s writings mean that he can be studied from any number of disciplinary angles. A work like the Reflections on the Revolution in France will be found on syllabi in English literature, eighteenth-century studies, political science, gender studies, history, and even art history (given the number of print satires inspired by that particular work). It is also fair to say that regardless of what discipline a student of Burke starts out from, it is inevitable (or certainly desirable) that they will draw on the resources of other disciplines along the way. A resolutely mono-disciplinary study of Burke will always be a blinkered one. ‘An impoverished mind’, Sheldon Wolin once remarked, ‘sees an impoverished world’.18 Something analogous is true of studying Burke.
That being said, my approach in this book is very much to read Burke as a political theorist, for the best political theory is interdisciplinary to its core. To read Burke in this way is hardly novel, but it does nevertheless require a defence, not least because some have denied that Burke was a political theorist at all. One recent biographer has stated that Burke was ‘suspicious of political theory, and did not regard himself as a political theorist’.19 Another scholar has claimed that ‘Burke neither was nor wished to be a political theorist, and [...] it was only against his will that he was forced into theorizing’.20 Certainly there is a grain of truth to this; temperamentally Burke could be irritated by discussions of politics that reached too far into abstraction, and dismissing rival views as merely theoretical was one of his favourite rhetorical tactics. But just because Burke did not regard himself as a political theorist does not mean that we are forbidden from doing so. This is all the more so when we take stock of what the practice of political theorizing has actually entailed historically. There are, I suggest, three features that distinguish political theory as an intellectual activity, all of which are discernible in Burke’s writings.
In the first place, political theorists begin their theorizing from within the political realm, rather than examining or judging that realm from without. They imagine themselves as a citizen or other active political participant, and then work from there to see how the political institutions they inhabit can be improved through a continuous process of deliberation with other citizens. This is in contrast to the philosopher, who devises a standard of justice or a theory of an ideal society and then seeks to apply it from a vantage point removed from politics. For the philosopher, method is primary; politics forms merely one subject matter among the many upon which the philosopher might choose to reflect. Political theorists such as Hannah Arendt disavowed political philosophy in favour of political theory for precisely this reason. For Arendt, philosophy’s preoccupation with truth, necessity, and finality sat uneasily with politics’ commitment to opinion, contingency, and open-ended discussions that conclude only when (or if) a decision is taken.21 Unlike the philosopher, the political theorist dignifies politics rather than regarding it as a messy and compromised arena in which philosophical ideals go to die.
Arendt’s distinction between political theory and philosophy was far too sharp, even for her.22 Philosophy, needless to say, can certainly shape political action and there is no shortage of examples of philosophers shouldering the burdens of citizenship without becoming any less philosophical. All the same, once we acknowledge that there might be a tension between philosophers and political theorists, then Burke’s inclusion among the latter becomes more plausible. Burke, as we will have many occasions to see, was adamant that reflection about political concepts – whether freedom, rights, or the constitution – had to begin with knowledge and experience of the society in which these concepts were to be actualized. The philosophers he engaged most often – such as Montesquieu and Hume – may not have had extensive political experience themselves. But they did conduct exhaustive research into the historical development of the societies they reflected on, research that was inextricable from their political theorizing.
Second, political theorists are more concerned with an idea’s likely effects on the world as the theorist finds it than with that idea’s internal cogency or validity. As Burke stated in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, it was perfectly conceivable for a proposition to be ‘metaphysically true’ and yet ‘politically false’.23 This was more than just a plea for pragmatism. It reflected Burke’s recognition that the parsimoniousness or logical soundness of a given argument was of secondary concern compared to how society would look if people acted on its conclusions en masse. A powerful philosophical argument might be made for lowering the voting age to ten years old as a matter of justice to the young. But, even if they accept the logical force of the argument, the political theorist will pause before endorsing it until they consider what knock-on effects such a change would have on the rest of the political system and weigh whether the change is worth it.
Finally, political theory pays close attention to the language of political argument and, more especially, to rhetorical style. The reasonableness of an argument, the theorist recognizes, is rarely enough to compel acceptance. This is why the political theorist must study – and have recourse to – a range of rhetorical resources to persuade their audience. Such recourse to rhetoric is not about embellishing a pre-formed argument or sweetening it for the listener; rather, examination of the conditions of persuasion is part and parcel of developing the political theorist’s argument in the first place. Adducing what argument will best succeed requires sensitivity to the political grammars of a society, its opinions, its prejudices, and its customary ways of thinking and acting.24 The notion that reflecting on politics could be divided into a two-stage process, with the formulation of the argument preceding the decision of how it should be communicated or expressed, is foreign to political theory, as it was to Burke.25
This means that the terms Burke deployed were never determined in advance by the demands of his theory; they were dictated at least in part by the discursive materials that were available to him and that he thought would best suit the practical aim of persuasion. What one commentator calls Burke’s ‘majestically tangled prose’ was thus carefully calibrated to maximize its persuasive impact even at the expense of linguistic consistency.26 For example, Burke was adept at beefing up his rhetorical repertoire by appropriating the preferred keywords of his opponents (such as rights and democracy) and then re-purposing them to his own advantage.27 The result is a prose and oratory style that can look overly florid, logically contorted, and not as lean as we might like. But it is a style that must be examined closely when studying Burke as a political theorist.
There is a certain irony in the fact that Burke, the great orator, very often struggled to persuade his listeners. Some of his greatest speeches were in support of legislative projects or policies that either foundered immediately or were endlessly deferred. Many of his parliamentary colleagues found him too long-winded to be worth listening to at all (he earned the nickname ‘Dinner Bell’ because many of them took his rising to speak as their cue to retire for the evening). By the very end of his parliamentary career he cut a rather forlorn figure, crying loudly on the floor of the House of Commons for a military intervention to overthrow the French republic that few of his parliamentary colleagues were willing to entertain.
But this is to place the bar for success too high. Burke wrote and spoke with multiple audiences in mind; even when he failed to deliver the votes, he was undoubtedly successful in grabbing the attention of the public and shifting public debate. Burke was incensed in the aftermath of his most acute political failure – the acquittal of Warren Hastings – because up to the end he continued to hope that he (and justice) might prevail. Nonetheless, he still listed his work on behalf of Hastings’ Indian victims as the most valuable of his contributions to British politics.28 That he did so tells us much about what he took the task of the political theorist to be. Even if the immediate speech act failed to sway its audience, the impact on the deeper grammar of political life could still be considerable.
Scope of the Book
An inevitable limitation of a book of this sort is that it will omit much of interest and importance (there is a reason why short books on Burke are rare).29 The omissions in this case concern both texts and themes. In relation to the first, I have tried as best I can to communicate the breadth and variety of Burke’s political theorizing. Faced with the sheer bulk of his writings and speeches (the Langford edition of the Writings and Speeches is spread over nine lengthy volumes) I have had to devote less space to some works that are often assumed to be canonical. A usable introduction to Burke, for example, could focus almost exclusively on his most celebrated work, the Reflections on the Revolution in France. But that kind of focus risks distorting what made Burke significant in his own day and potentially of significance to ours. The Reflections was so hotly anticipated precisely because Burke was already a colossal figure on the British political scene and whatever he had to say about the French Revolution was always going to carry some weight. Any introduction to Burke truly worth its salt has to discuss at least some of the works that earned him that reputation in the first place. I have also found that gaining a rounder picture of Burke as a thinker requires examining his more minor speeches, unpublished texts (such as his draft reform of the slave trade), and private correspondence. Although some of his letters were undoubtedly written with an eye to publication (the Letters to Sir Hercules Langrishe are an example) Burke was often more unguarded in his letters than on the printed page or on the floor of the House of Commons and gave vent there to ideas that never made it into his more public performances.
I have also had to be selective in my thematic focus. Following the recent trend in Burke scholarship, the themes of conquest, colonization, and imperial governance will receive as much attention as more well-worn themes such as representation, revolution, and reform. In some cases, I have touched more lightly on a theme because explaining its importance to Burke would require more fine-grained contextualization than an introductory book of this sort could bear. More often, however, I neglect a theme only because it has been so ably handled elsewhere. In still other cases – such as Burke’s economic thought and religious thought – both considerations applied.30 Where possible, I have guided readers to more in-depth treatments of these themes in the endnotes.
A final sort of omission requires less by way of apology. Readers who open this book hoping to find a primer in early conservative thought will be disappointed. This is not only because the ideology of conservatism is a nineteenth-century creation that would have been unrecognizable to Burke.31 Nor is it because Burke’s metamorphosis from Irish Whig into the founder of English Toryism had less to do with what he actually wrote than with what late Victorians decided to make of him for their own political purposes.32 It is also because viewing Burke through that lens poorly captures the particular nature of his passions and political commitments. If a conservative is defined as a defender of a hierarchical social order, then Burke certainly fits under that banner.33 But then, so many of his contemporaries could join him there that ‘conservative’ quickly loses purchase as a useful organizational category. How and to what end Burke defended a hierarchical society will prove much more illuminating than the brute fact that he did so. Alternatively, if conservativism is understood more as a disposition, or a kind of cautionary attitude towards change, then it becomes unclear whether Burke qualifies at all. Burke spent most of his career agitating for some sort of change or another, whether it was the dismantling of the anti-Catholic Penal Laws in Ireland, the liberalization of imperial trade, or the reform of the East India Company. And he often did so in ways that would make the cautiously minded wince. Burke was more than capable of presenting his case in a controlled manner, but he was also a pugnacious debater with a taste for flamboyance, who fulminated, fumed, and raged at his opponents. Readers looking to Burke as a kind of window into the psychological profile of the sober conservative are asked to look elsewhere for now.34 Approach him on his own terms first and then see what kind of thinker, speaker, and writer you are confronted with.
Notes
1
Burke, ‘The Character of a Fine Gentleman’,
W&S
I, 62.
2
Ibid., 62–4.
3
Ibid.
4
James Prior,
A Life of Edmund Burke
(London: G. Bell and Sons, 1891), 500.
5
One recent biographer has tried to do exactly this by dealing with Burke’s ‘life’ first and then his ‘thought’ afterwards. Jesse Norman,
Edmund Burke: The Visionary Who Invented Modern Politics
(London: William Collins, 2013).
6
Bourke declares it ‘overwhelmingly probable’ that Richard Burke’s ancestry was Catholic. Richard Bourke,
Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 31. Among Richard’s more significant clients was likely the Jacobite commander James Cotter who was tried and executed for rape in 1720. O’Donnell is certain this Richard Burke of Dublin was Burke’s father. Katherine O’Donnell, ‘The Image of a Relationship in Blood: Párliament na mBan and Burke’s Jacobite Politics’,
Eighteenth-Century Ireland / Iris an Dá Chultúr
15, (2000): 104. Bourke is less certain and finds it only ‘conceivably’ the case that the Richard Burke who defended Cotter was Edmund Burke’s father. Bourke, 31.
7
Most notably Luke Gibbons,
Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
8
Burke, ‘Character of [Jane Burke]’,
W&S
I, 60.
9
The will is reproduced in Peter Burke,
The Public and Domestic Life of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke
(London: N. Cooke, 1854), 299.
10
As late as 1761 Horace Walpole saw fit to say this of Burke: ‘he has not worn off his authorism yet – and he thinks there is nothing so charming as writers and to be one – he will know better one of these days’. Walpole cited in Carl B. Cone, ‘Edmund Burke’s Library’,
The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America
44, no. 2 (1950): 155.
11
Carl B. Cone, ‘Edmund Burke, the Farmer’,
Agricultural History
19, no. 2 (1945): 65.
12
‘I live in an inverted order’, he lamented. ‘They who ought to have succeeded me are gone before me. They who should have been to me as posterity are in the place of ancestors.’ Burke, ‘Letter to a Noble Lord’,
W&S
IX, 171.
13
Burke,
The Public and Domestic Life of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke
, 306.
14
It is now more common to speak of Enlightenments in the plural. See Jonathan Israel, ‘Enlightenment! Which Enlightenment?’,
Journal of the History of Ideas
67, no. 3 (2006): 523–45. Burke could be argued to be part of several. Pocock sees Burke as representing ‘one kind of Enlightenment in conflict with another’ in his confrontation with the French
philosophes
. J. G. A. Pocock,
Barbarism and Religion: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon
, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 7. Gibbons presents Burke as an adherent of an ‘ethnographic enlightenment, sensitive to cultural differences, inherited loyalties and the contingencies of time and place’. Gibbons,
Edmund Burke and Ireland
, xiii.
15
Burke felt personally targeted by Hume’s slights against those who denied the 1641 massacre. See David Berman, ‘David Hume on the 1641 Revolution in Ireland’,
Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review
65, no. 258 (1976): 110.
16
As Iain Hampsher-Monk aptly notes, the ‘Whig managers at the Sacheverell trial had tried to put the genie [of resistance] firmly back in its bottle, but it kept escaping’. Iain Hampsher-Monk, ‘Edmund Burke in the Tory World’, in
The Tory World: Deep History and the Tory Theme in British Foreign Policy, 1679
–
2014
, ed. Jeremy Black (Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 189.
17
As Armitage puts it in summary of Burke, ‘any law might be suspended, though only under the compulsion of extreme necessity and in the interest of the preservation of the political community’. David Armitage, ‘Edmund Burke and Reason of State’,
Journal of the History of Ideas
61, no. 4 (2000): 624.
18
Sheldon Wolin, ‘Political Theory as a Vocation’,
American Political Science Review
63, no. 4 (1969): 1073.
19
F. P. Lock,
Edmund Burke
, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 330.
20
C. B. Macpherson,
Burke
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 14.
21
Hannah Arendt, ‘Philosophy and Politics’,
Social Research
57, no. 1 (1990): 73–103.
22
Frederick M. Dolan, ‘Arendt on Philosophy and Politics’, in
The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt
, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 262.
23
Burke, ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’,
W&S
VIII, 112.
24
As Hampsher-Monk writes, for Burke the ‘very materials of political reality are constituted of opinion, and rhetoric is the skill of dealing with them’. Iain Hampsher-Monk, ‘Rhetoric and Opinion in the Politics of Edmund Burke’,
History of Political Thought
9, no. 3 (1988): 461.
25
‘Burke’s style’, MacPherson rightly noted, ‘was a necessary device: the style was the man.’ MacPherson,
Burke
, 35.
26
Don Herzog, ‘Puzzling through Burke’,
Political Theory
19, no. 3 (1991): 336.
27
Paddy Bullard,
Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 150–1.
28
See Epilogue.
29
The last one of note was MacPherson’s
Burke
of 1980 which was an impressively slender 83 pages.
30
The most comprehensive account of Burke’s views on political economy is now Gregory M. Collins,
Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke’s Political Economy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). On the place of religion in his thought see Ian Harris, ‘Burke and Religion’, in
The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke
, ed. Christopher Insole and David Dwan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 92–103. But see also Iain Hampsher-Monk, ‘Burke and the Religious Sources of Skeptical Conservatism’, in
The Skeptical Tradition Around 1800: Skepticism in Philosophy, Science and Society
, ed. Johan van der Zande and Richard H. Popkin (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998).
31
On the belated construction of conservatism as a coherent ideological tradition, and the placing of Burke within that tradition, see Richard Bourke, ‘What Is Conservatism? History, Ideology and Party’,
European Journal of Political Theory
17, no. 4 (2018): 449–75.
32
The authoritative account of the creation of Burke as a conservative is Emily Jones,
Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1830
–
1914: An Intellectual History
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Victorian liberals also claimed Burke for liberalism, in what Kramnick called the ‘embourgeoisement of Burke’. Isaac Kramnick, ‘The Left and Edmund Burke’,
Political Theory
11, no. 2 (1983): 196.
33
For a reading of Burke that relies on something like this understanding of conservatism see Corey Robin,
The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). For a similar interpretation that stresses Burke’s commitment to upholding the racial and civilizational hierarchies fostered by the British empire see Daniel I. O’Neill,
Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire
(Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).
34
The boldest attempt to explain Burke’s politics through his psychobiography remains Isaac Kramnick,
The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative
(New York: Basic Books, 1977).
1The Foundations of Society
Burke is not generally known as a thinker who was fond of speculating about the foundations of society. On the contrary, readers have applauded his warning that peering too closely into the origins of our social customs and institutions would only brew disaffection with them and invite social unrest.1 Such a reading of Burke is not entirely baseless. Burke certainly despaired of philosophers who, having allegedly discovered that civilization was founded on deceit and violence, leapt to the conclusion that it must therefore be illegitimate. In the worst-case scenarios, he feared, such inquiries could encourage attempts to replace established social institutions with improved imaginary alternatives. Idle inquiries into where society came from and how it may have gone astray were never, to Burke’s mind, politically innocent.
Burke’s hostility to speculation into society’s origins has, however, been overstated. This becomes particularly clear when we consider his first major publications, the Vindication of Natural Society (1756) and the Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). On the surface at least, both texts qualify as philosophical investigations into the origins of social life. The first engages in a clever ploy by taking freethinker attacks against revealed religion and then extending them to civil society, thereby ironically portraying all government as one massive and pernicious fraud. Just as priests had spun tales to justify their authority, Burke pretended to claim, so too had governments conjured lies about their indispensability to peace, justice, and prosperity to secure obedience. Exactly what Burke was up to with this excoriation of the institutions he would spend much of his life defending will be examined below, but for now it should be noted that only a writer sincerely interested in how society came about could have written it.
The second work, the Philosophical Enquiry, took as its theme the origins of our distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. Ostensibly this was a psychological treatise purporting to explain how different objects and experiences stimulate different mental and emotional responses. In fact, however, the scope of the book was much wider. By plumbing the depths of our psychology, Burke explored how social relations came into existence as well as anatomizing passions such as obedience, deference, and respect that political society relied on for its continued existence. If Burke occasionally feigned scorn at philosophical work on the origins of society, he did so from a place of deep familiarity with the genre and the questions that gave rise to it.
Examining each of these works in turn offers a valuable opportunity to see Burke’s mind at work on serious theoretical issues before he became swept up in the cut-and-thrust of parliamentary business. It also gives us a chance to see which of the ideas that made him famous originated in this pre-political stage of his career. At the same time, however, we need to guard against projecting the concerns, commitments, and passions of the older Burke onto the younger.2 There is a tendency among historians of political thought to read a thinker’s work teleologically and to regard early works as either immature or, at best, faint anticipations of what was to come. The early Burke is worth reading on his own terms, not least because there was arguably no other point in life when he was so unencumbered by political responsibility and thus so free to let his mind roam.
Natural Religion and Natural Society
As a satire that required a readership alert to irony, the Vindication of Natural Society
