The 18th-century political philosopher Edmund Burke remains a byword for a certain kind of conservatism: Only last year, British Conservative MP Jesse Norman published a biographical study of him that aligned Burkean conceptions of “moral community” and “social value” with the UK’s prime minister David Cameron’s visions for society. To read Burke, Norman argued, was to recover a noblesse oblige conservatism, rooted in honor, loyalty and duty, beside which the spreadsheet conservatism of the financial markets seemed pale and one-dimensional.
Burke’s enduring prominence derives from his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), a work of prophetic insight which uncannily predicted the descent of an altruistic, high-minded project into the abyss of terror. In contrast to the speculative program he identified on the other side of the Channel, Burke championed the slowly unfolding continuities of English life. A placid acceptance of bucolic stasis was more closely aligned to real human needs than fevered implementation of Utopian blueprints.
Burke’s assault on the idea of revolutionary change marked him out as the founder of modern conservatism; but Burke himself was neither a Tory (Conservative) nor the author of a systematic work of political theory. He was the talented spokesman of the Rockingham Whigs, and his political output took the form of occasional pieces provoked by current events. Some critics have insisted that Burke was no more than a hack pamphleteer and pimp-orator, who deployed high principle as rhetorical cover for base partisan advantage. Nor is it easy to gauge the depth of his conservative commitments. Before a turn to the right in old age, Burke had supported the cause of the American Revolution, championed the rights of minorities and condemned the excesses of British imperialism in India.
David Bromwich shifts the focus of attention to the younger Burke. Although a second volume will follow, which traces Burke’s career from 1783 to his death in 1797, Bromwich here attends to an earlier phase, from Burke’s philosophical debut in the 1750s to the end of the American war of independence. A professor of English, Bromwich pays close attention to the medium as well as the message. For, as he notes, “with Burke, rhythm, sound and meaning are one”; and it is often difficult to disentangle rhetoric from idea or the gifted parodist from the author’s core beliefs.
Nowhere were such tensions more evident than in the “perilously” unbalanced parody that launched Burke’s career, A Vindication of Natural Society (1756). The target of Burke’s satire was Viscount Bolingbroke, the Tory statesman whose posthumous Philosophical Works revealed him as a deist and rationalist. A Vindication pretends to make reason rather than custom the basis for the organization of society: Nature, its purported champion contends, provides a better template for living than the legacy of human contrivance. Such was Burke’s deadpan ventriloquism that A Vindication fooled much of its audience. A year after its first publication, Burke issued a new edition with a preface drawing attention to “an under-plot, of more consequence than the apparent design.”
Not that Burke’s readers were necessarily obtuse. Bromwich himself confesses to finding it difficult to know where to draw the line between absurdity and exaggeration. Is A Vindication, he asks, “the anatomy of an error” or, more subtly, “the exposure of a truth made wrong by fanaticism”? The question matters. The former provides a powerful cord that connects Burke’s early philosophy with the anti-revolutionary sentiments of the Reflections. If the latter, the thread is slighter and more dubious.
Scholars have also questioned how Burke’s politics relate to his cultural commitments. Was he an early pioneer of Romanticism and, as such, estranged from the dominant ethos of the 18th-century enlightenment? Or was he an exponent of a more capaciously defined enlightenment that emphasized feeling as well as reason?
Burke’s Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, published in 1757, marked an unexpected departure from contemporary conceptions of taste and signaled a major turning point in aesthetics. Instead of the conventional 18th-century norms of order and regularity, Burke recommended passion, spectacle and awe. Yet such preferences raise in turn a further question. How are we to explain the discontinuity between the younger Burke — a pre-Romantic apostle of sublimity — and the older conservative who in the Reflections eulogized the reassuring stolidity of the English?
To make sense of these apparent anomalies, Bromwich argues, we need to address the underlying principles of his moral psychology. He was acutely aware of the “premoral instincts” that gave a sparkle to life, namely a love of imitation and a desire for excitement. However, arousal was — necessarily — followed by a return to the quotidian, to a “habit of mind,” the source of the unsung social glues that Burke commended: prudential restraint, mutual respect and the claims of custom. Throughout his career Burke remained sensitive to both the appealing thrill of disruptive “presocial” impulses and the soothing balms of custom and inertia.
Bromwich reminds us that he subscribed to universal standards of right and wrong, most evident in his campaign to impeach Warren Hastings. Nor was Burke a complacent defender of hierarchy and prerogative. In a pamphlet of 1770, he rehabilitated the pejorative concept of party. Far from being cabals of ambitious malcontents, parties constituted a means by which men of honor might act in concert for the public good, not least as a constraint on royal whim.
Bromwich understands Burke as a connoisseur of delusion, of specious ideas whose apparent plausibility wins support for misguided or dangerously sinister causes. But wrongheadedness was not a monopoly of those who espoused radical change. Antiquarianism could be just as culpable in its own way. In the early 1780s the future elegist of the ancien regime played a leading role in the Whig campaign for what was called “economical reform.” By trimming the royal household of its sinecurists, Burke and other reformers hoped to curb the influence of the crown in British politics. An establishment that had outlived its rationale was nothing but a burden, contended Burke. To preserve an outworn institution of this sort was “superstitiously to embalm a carcass not worth an ounce of the gums that are used to preserve it.”
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