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THE SPIRITS OF EDMUND BURKE

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RichardBourke, Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 September 2017

IAIN HAMPSHER-MONK
IAIN HAMPSHER-MONK*
Affiliation:
Department of Politics, University of Exeter E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

In the 1970s, when I began to take interest in Burke, not only was there was no collected Correspondence, but there was not even any modern edition of his Works. I successively purchased secondhand copies of the six-volume Bohn edition, and then (in the flush of a modest pay rise) of the Boston Little, Brown edition. The interpretive work was not extensive, and heavily influenced by two kinds of presentist preoccupation—both distinctively anglophone. One was the preoccupation with Burke's “contribution” to elements of the English Constitution—party government, the nature of representation, financial management—and his success in characterizing its customary, gradualist, pragmatic political culture, subsequently identified as “conservatism.” The other—prominent in American readings—comprised energetic attempts to recruit Burke into Cold War polemics: the clash between Burke and the French Revolutionaries (and their British supporters) presaging the clash between Marxism–Leninism and Western, free-market democracy. For scholars of a Straussian persuasion this involved reading into Burke a commitment to neo-Thomist natural law. These parameters spun an intellectually vertiginous confusion of issues. Quite how Burke's opposition to Paine was supposed to cohere with their shared defence of the America he (Paine) helped to create raised a number of historical issues. But instead of resolving these it was the implications of merely supposing them to be coherent that constituted the interpretive field. Controversies focused on whether Burke's political identity was conservative or liberal—anachronistic lexical markers, further complicated by their different connotations on either side of the Atlantic—and on how to characterize the “philosophical core” of his thinking. These too were contested in often disarmingly proleptic categories: liberal, utilitarian, collectivist. Looking back, this ideological fog was only made possible by the absence of any reasonably clear sense of eighteenth-century political-theoretical discourse within the categories and preoccupations of which to situate the man.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , November 2018 , pp. 865 - 877
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

1 Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. Thomas Copeland et al., 10 vols. (Cambridge and Chicago, 1958–78); Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford et al. (Oxford, 1970–); Lock, F. P., Edmund Burke, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1998, 2006)Google Scholar.

2 The recovery of a British conservative Enlightenment owes inestimable debts to Pocock, J. G. A., whose work at the Centre for British Studies in Washington generated (amongst much else) The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar, which he edited and contributed to, and which resurrected and highlighted the issues of sovereignty and empire which we now recognize as central preoccupations of Burke and his contemporaries.

3 O'Brien, C. C., The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke (Chicago, 1992)Google Scholar. O'Brien had been both an Irish representative at the UN and a controversial UN envoy in the Congo, and during the composition of the Great Melody was a Member of the Irish Dail, held Cabinet office, was editor of The Observer and was professor of humanities at NYU.

4 Norman, Jesse, Edmund Burke the first Conservative (New York, 2013)Google Scholar.

5 On the complex problem of Tories identifying with a Whig see my “Edmund Burke in the Tory World,” in Black, Jeremy, ed. The Tory World: Deep History and the Tory Theme in British Foreign Policy, 1679–2014 (Farnham, 2015), 83–102Google Scholar.

6 Namier, Notably Sir Lewis, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, (London, 1929)Google Scholar.

7 The crucial issue being the extent to which the actor can establish an epistemic position outside the “language” he is manipulating. See, e.g., Skinner, Quentin, “The Principles and Practice of Opposition: The Case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole,” in McKendrick, Neil, ed., Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J. H. Plumb (London 1974), 93–128Google Scholar. However, to the extent that an agent manages to achieve this, it is this “deeper” epistemic position that becomes the object of investigation. There is no political position outside a political language, for the simple reason that without a language, the relationship could not be a political one.

8 Brewer, John, “Rockingham, Burke and Whig Political Argument,” Historical Journal 17/1 (1975), 185–201, at 201.Google Scholar

9 O'Brien, Great Melody, xxviii, xxv.

10 These themes are discussed extensively in many of the essays in J. G. A. Pocock's Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge, 1985); and by Hont, Istvan, “The Rhapsody of Public Debt: David Hume and Voluntary State Bankruptcy,” in Phillipson, Nicholas and Skinner, Quentin, eds., Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1993), 321–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and J. G. A. Pocock, “A Discourse of Sovereignty: Observations on the Work in Progress,” in ibid., 377–428; and in “Commerce, Empire and History,” Part 3 of Pocock, Varieties of British Political Thought, comprising Nicholas Phillipson: “Politics and Politeness in the Reigns of Anne and the Early Hanoverians,” 211–45; J. G. A. Pocock, “Political Thought in the English-Speaking Atlantic, 1760–1790: (i) The Imperial Crisis,” 246–82; and Pocock, “Political Thought in the English-Speaking Atlantic, 1760–1790: (ii) Empire, Revolution and an End of Early Modernity,” 283–317.

11 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in Edmund Burke, Revolutionary Writings, Reflections on the Revolution in France and the First Letter on a Regicide Peace, ed. Iain Hampsher-Monk (Cambridge, 2014), 81, 79.

12 O'Brien, Great Melody; and Kramnick, Isaac, The Rage of Edmund Burke (New York, 1977).Google Scholar

13 Palmer, R. R., Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1960, 1970)Google Scholar.