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Edmund Burke: Volume I, 1730-1784
Edmund Burke: Volume I, 1730-1784 by F.P. Lock Oxford Univ. Press /Clarendon press, 1998 565 pp. $135 |
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.
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