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The Battle over Burke
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DanielO'Neill, Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016)
DavidBromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 February 2020
Extract
Like Karl Marx, Edmund Burke has remained a partisan figure, even though the specific partisan context in which he wrote is long gone. To a greater degree than Marx, however, Burke's partisan identity is itself frequently contested. Burke was a hero to the conservative writer Russell Kirk, who devoted his life to undoing the triumphs of twentieth-century American progressivism. But Burke was also a hero to Woodrow Wilson—whose presidency enacted and inspired so many of the progressive reforms that Kirk wanted to overturn—and to a number of the Victorian liberals who did so much to form Wilson's political mind-set.
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References
1 The twists and turns in how Burke has been politically identified are explored in Maciag, Drew, Edmund Burke in America: The Contested Career of the Father Modern Conservatism, (Ithaca, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jones, Emily, Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1830–1914: An Intellectual History (Oxford, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bourke, Richard, “What Is Conservatism? History, Ideology and Party,” European Journal of Political Theory 17/4 (2018), 449–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Kirk, Russel, Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered (New Rochelle, 1967)Google Scholar
3 Wilson, Woodrow, “Edmund Burke: The Man and His Times,” in Woodrow Wilson: Essential Writings and Speeches of the Scholar-President, ed. Dinuzio, Mario R. (New York, 2006), 83–92Google Scholar.
4 Jones, Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, chap. 4.
5 Mehta, Uday Singh, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pitts, Jennifer, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Bourke, Richard, Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton, 2015)Google Scholar.
7 Ibid., 16–17, 24, 926–7. Bourke argues that the utility of reading Burke is that this helps us see that some aspects of our world still resemble Burke's and were not transformed by the revolutions of the late eighteenth century. “Burke's anatomy of the crisis taught posterity to recognize the attitudes and structures that survived.” Ibid., 926–7.
8 For a positive assessment of Empire and Revolution in this journal, though with some concerns and criticisms, see Hampsher-Monk, Iain, “The Spirits of Edmund Burke,” Modern Intellectual History 15/3 (2018), 865–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 O'Neill, Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire, 7.
10 Bromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke, 6, 21–2.
11 To grasp Bromwich's belief in Burke's relevance one must read his writings on Burke together with his many of critiques of American politics since 2001. For one attempt to do this see Moyn, Samuel, “The Burkean Regicide,” The Nation 299/9–10 (2014), 33–9, at 36Google Scholar.
12 O'Neill, Daniel, The Burke–Wollstonecraft Debate: Savagery, Civilization, and Democracy (University Park, 2007)Google Scholar.
13 Ibid., 138.
14 O'Neill, Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire, 7.
15 Jennifer Pitts writes that “Burke opposed not the imperial relation per se but rather the spirit of domination, oppression, and exclusion that often characterized British imperial conduct.” Uday Mehta also makes clear that “Burke did not oppose the empire in the sense of calling for its immediate dismantling.” See Pitts, A Turn to Empire, 60; Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 157.
16 See Cannadine, David, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford, 2002)Google Scholar.
17 O'Neill, Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire, 45–6.
18 Ibid., 66.
19 Ibid., 52–4.
20 Ibid., 95. O'Neill (ibid., 175) explicitly denies that Burke was motivated by the natural rights of mankind in his effort to reform the East India Company.
21 Burke, Edmund, “Speech on Fox's India Bill,” Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 5, ed. Marshall, P. J. (Oxford, 1981), 384–5Google Scholar.
22 Ibid., 384.
23 Ibid.
24 Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 8, ed. Mitchell, L. G. (Oxford, 1989), 53–293, at 175Google Scholar.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., 176–7.
27 For a careful analysis of Victorian liberal commentary on Burke and how liberals dealt with Burke's analysis of the French Revolution see Jones, Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, chap. 4. Jones makes clear that while only a few Victorian liberal commentators subscribed entirely to Burke's critique of the French Revolution, most thought that it contained indispensable insights.
28 For a recent book that demonstrates just how far this was from being the fundamental principle of nineteenth-century British liberalism see Conti, Gregory, Parliament the Mirror of the Nation: Representation, Deliberation, and Democracy in Victorian Britain (Cambridge, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29 Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in Political Writings: A Vindication of the Rights of Men; A Vindication of the Rights of Women; An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, ed. Todd, Janet (New York, 1994), 1–63, at 11Google Scholar
30 Bromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke, 294–5.
31 Ibid., 245.
32 Ibid., 6.
33 Ibid., 19.
34 Ibid., 11–15.
35 Ibid., 15.
36 Ibid., 43–4.
37 Ibid., 89–96.
38 Ibid., 209–10, 424–5.
39 Ibid., 375–83.
40 In an article admittedly written well before this book, Bromwich notes Wollstonecraft's belief that Burke would have supported the Revolution had he been French. The general claim of the article is that Wollstonecraft “assimilates Burke's thinking about morality” and “builds on his argument for a moral imagination” in developing her more radical theory. See Bromwich, David, “Wollstonecraft as a Critic of Burke,” Political Theory 23/4 (1995), 617–34, at 628, 630CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
41 Bromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke, 23.
42 Ibid., 23.
43 Ibid., 22.
44 Bourke, Empire and Revolution.
45 Bromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke, 22.
46 O'Neill, Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire, 177.