Several years ago, when writing a book proposal for a fresh look at one of the most contentious figures in modern political thought, I toyed with calling the project “The Last Remake of Edmund Burke.” The title was a playful admission that no single author could ever hope to end the perennial and often passionate debates over Burke’s philosophy—yet still we try.
An endless profusion of volumes on Burke has appeared during the past couple of decades: by my count, some 30 books just since 1992, new analytical commentary in recent editions of Burke’s work, and articles and other miscellaneous writings about him too numerous to keep track of. Now we have a major book by the Yale University professor of English David Bromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence (Harvard University Press), which ties together Burke’s early writings on literature, history, and aesthetics with his more famous work on politics.
Burke is known as “father of modern conservatism.” He is, however, a more complex literary phenomenon.
Why so much attention? Outside academe, Burke is popular as a reactionary critic of the French Revolution and the purported “father of modern conservatism.” Among the intelligentsia, however, he is a more complex literary phenomenon.
In part, his belief that human beings are imperfect and unperfectible resonates with a larger philosophical soul-searching under way in the 21st century, now that the modern age has run its course and its intellectual (and political) underpinnings have begun to crumble. Only yesterday the Age of Reason was in full bloom. Widespread belief in the wonders of science and technology, the social benefits of education and professional expertise, confidence in democratic government and the inevitability of progress all contributed to a collective sense of enlightened human betterment. But late in the 20th century, economic and environmental woes, political polarization and social fragmentation, resurgent religious orthodoxies, and a recognition that reason was often a tool of—or a cover for—assertions of power appeared to confirm Burke’s dark vision.
But Burke is also something of an intellectual chameleon, whose beliefs have been co-opted by various schools of thought and ideologies.
To begin at the beginning, Edmund Burke (c. 1730-1797) was born in Dublin, the son of a Protestant lawyer and his Roman Catholic wife. After graduating from Trinity College, he relocated to London, apparently intent on a career as a man of letters, and he made quite a splash in 1757 with his aesthetic tract A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Then in 1765, Burke switched to the profession that would gain him enduring fame when he entered politics as secretary to the Marquess of Rockingham (briefly prime minister, but mostly the Whig leader of the loyal opposition). That same year, Burke was elected to the House of Commons, where he would serve until 1794.
During the bulk of his career, he focused on Whig reform issues: limiting the king’s power and defending the legitimacy of political parties, resisting Britain’s heavy-handed treatment of American colonists and its harsh governance of India, favoring freedom of the press, opposing general arrest warrants, suggesting humane changes in the criminal code (including restrictions on capital punishment), championing the rights of voters to elect their own representatives, condemning slavery and the slave trade, supporting religious toleration, trying to abolish imprisonment for debt, and arguing against the oppression of Irish Catholics.
Yet after the fall of the Bastille in 1789, Burke became an impassioned enemy of the French Revolution. His Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) became a seminal document not only of antiradicalism but of temperamental conservatism in general: a foe of innovation and a counterweight to Enlightenment thought. Unlike England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, which Burke admired, or the American Revolution of 1776, which he accepted, the revolution in France was in his eyes a futile attempt to abolish history and ignore human nature by radically redesigning society. The philosophes who inspired it were false lights, and the Jacobins who perpetrated it were terrorists (yes, he used that word), and the universal ideas that drove the revolution could easily cross the English Channel and destroy British civilization.
Still, during the 19th century, Burke was read throughout the English-speaking world as a man for all seasons. Not until the ideological passions of the Cold War was he rediscovered as—and in a sense transformed into—an ideologue. Especially in the United States, and roughly contemporaneous with the postwar Red Scare, a dedicated group of “New Conservatives” led by Russell Kirk revived Burke’s reputation by applying his anti-Jacobin arguments of the 1790s to the anti-Stalinist cause of the 1950s.
Burke’s rhetorical genius, transported through time, fit the circumstances; but the ideologically specific appropriation of his legacy resulted in a narrowing of his historical relevance. Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, From Burke to Santayana (1953) helped redirect Burke’s Whig vision—which blended tradition and progress—toward the conservative (and often Roman Catholic) doctrine of Natural Law—which clung to unalterable moral certainties. A handful of liberal writers objected, yet most intellectuals, who basked in the mainstream consensus, were content to let conservatives keep Burke for themselves. Antimoderns like Burke, they blithely assumed, had no future anyway.
The rapid political, social, and cultural transformations that began in the 1960s seemed to push the old Burkean sensibility even closer to extinction. Burke appeared to be bound for less rather than more glory in the dawning postmodern era.
That began to change in the 1990s, starting with Conor Cruise O’Brien’s The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (University of Chicago Press, 1992). This impressive, entertaining, and somewhat bloated work has become a classic of Burkean revisionism (even if a standard trope among the initiated is to claim that O’Brien’s take on Burke was too idiosyncratic to swallow whole). Great Melody’s singular value was its harmonizing of Burkean paradoxes; its unifying theme was Burke’s life-long crusade against abuses of power.
Jesse Norman’s Edmund Burke: The First Conservative (Basic Books, 2013) presented Burke as a moderate and practical model for contemporary politics (Norman is a Conservative member of Parliament in Britain). Further signaling Burke’s jump from academe to the wider intellectual world, Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker essay “The Right Man: Who Owns Edmund Burke?” painted him as a sui generis performer: both because his “doctrines are foggy even to his admirers” and because there were several different Burkes. In The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left (Basic Books, 2014), the editor of National Affairs, Yuval Levin, harks back to the Age of Revolution to sample the early exchanges between first-generation conservatives and liberals.
All this set the table for Bromwich’s new intellectual biography. There is no clear consensus about what to do with Edmund Burke. All parties acknowledge his genius and stature, but they diverge over what to emphasize about his thinking or his influence. So while it would be folly to expect additional scholarship to settle such controversies, it is encouraging that there are contemporary scholars who are not daunted by the task of undertaking monumental reconstructions of Burke’s life by returning to the original (voluminous) documentary sources.
Bromwich is the second author to attempt that in recent years. His current volume, the first of two, ends at almost precisely the same point—the death of Burke’s patron, Lord Rockingham, in 1782—as the other grand two-volume biography: F.P. Lock’s Edmund Burke (Oxford University Press, 1998-2006), which breaks at the rise of William Pitt’s Tories in 1784. From that moment forward, the Whigs had no realistic chance of reclaiming power, and the rest of Burke’s career would be consumed by his heroic battles to impeach Warren Hastings, the governor-general of Bengal, for his exploitation of India, and to attack the revolution in France politically, intellectually, and militarily.
A Burke is revealed who does not conform to our present-day conceptions of right or left.
The studies by Lock and Bromwich are both magisterial, but their approaches differ. Lock offers a classic chronological biography that is thickly immersed in the nitty-gritty details of Burke’s life; Bromwich offers a more distilled version. Biographical details are the supporting context for a theme (or at least a quest for one). Readers who are looking for the most meticulously researched biography of Burke ever written will read Lock; those seeking a less-encumbered treatment of Burke’s thought will turn to Bromwich. One other difference worth noting: Lock stresses (and possibly stretches) the religious nature of Burke’s thinking; Bromwich possibly overplays Burke’s views on human psychology as articulated in his Sublime and Beautiful.
As a general rule, English professors and philosophers pay more heed to Sublime and Beautiful than historians and political scientists do. On this matter, Bromwich follows in the footsteps of several previous writers who have probed Burke’s speculations about pleasure and pain (which, as Bromwich explains, manifested themselves in Burke’s motives of sympathy, imitation, and ambition) to discover basic elements of human nature upon which all social activity (including politics) must depend. Such effort is a valid exercise in psychobiography, yet it is not crucial for understanding Burke’s political mind. That is why Bromwich’s political take on Burke is not all that different from other writers who do not anchor their analysis on Burke’s aesthetic theory.
Moreover, readers who have already read a lot about Burke or have read plenty of Burke themselves will find nothing startlingly new in terms of either facts or interpretations. Indeed, so much has been written about Burke that unless a writer resorts to extremely idiosyncratic claims, there is not anything revolutionary left to say (doesn’t this apply to most great names who have been studied for generations?). The value of Bromwich’s book is not that it is pathbreaking, but that it is very good. It is the best in-depth, comprehensive recent analysis of Burke’s thought—plus it is an enjoyable read.
With Burke it is easy to accelerate and decelerate, to build and recover, but Bromwich has (no doubt intentionally) chosen an almost contra-Burkean method of composition, without the climax and crescendo. His style is nonadversarial, reasoned, lowering resistance among readers who expect vindication of any prepackaged caricature—be it “the father of conservatism” or some other ready alternative—will be disappointed.)
Bromwich says he has relied on Burke’s personal correspondence more than previous scholars have, and the available letters serve to confirm Burke’s sincerity on several issues, refuting accusations that he was merely a cunning opportunist who did not necessarily agree with his own public pronouncements. And it should be no surprise that Bromwich—a professor of English—locates Burke deeply within the literary culture of his milieu, likening the magic of his insightful language to the genius of Shakespeare. Perhaps Bromwich’s ultimate compliment rests in his recognition that “Shakespeare can awaken new thoughts by the force and patience of words; and Burke is the writer of English prose who suggests a similar intuition and command. Read him for an hour or two, and try to disagree. It is harder than it should be.”
True enough. But not impossible. Accepting what Burke has to say—as opposed to admiring how he says it—depends on where in the enormous corpus of his work the reader happens to focus. It also depends on the reader’s political inclinations, since Burke is above all else remembered for his political views. Bromwich seems intent on neutering the ideological cast of Burke’s mind by grounding his thought in a capacity for sympathy, a (historically precocious) reliance on conscience, and a devotion to politics as a moral cause.
That characterization is convincing enough regarding the early half of the statesman’s career, and readers who are open-minded enough to allow that Burke was more than a reactionary firebrand will find this treatment illuminating. The task of teasing out Burke’s timeless (and largely humanitarian) wisdom from the potentially retrograde ideological implications of his later writings awaits Bromwich’s second volume. Burke’s life became much more Shakespearean in language and drama during its finale, and there will lay the interpretive rub.
Bromwich’s place in the overall publication picture is easy to assign. Like all writers who try to mitigate Burke’s stigma as the “father of conservatism,” Bromwich emphasizes the reform-laden nature of his activity prior to 1789. He is surprisingly aggressive at doing that, asserting, for example, that “Burke was not only a consistent critic of state violence, he was an anti-war writer through and through. He sees that war is an evil in itself.” And Bromwich cites Burke’s (not very well-known) outrage over the Royal Navy’s plunder of St. Eustatius Island in 1781 to demonstrate several key points about justice and human rights that played out on a larger scale elsewhere in Burke’s crusades. Ultimately, Bromwich’s work reveals a Burke who is politically principled and (more or less) philosophically consistent, but who does not conform conveniently to our present-day conceptions of right or left.
While Burke was never a liberal—because he rejected individualism—his vision of a corporate society based on mutual obligations and virtuous codes of conduct placed him in a communitarian tradition that liberals later expanded and conservatives later abandoned. If Burke believed in a (mostly hereditary) natural aristocracy, he leavened that belief with an expectation of noblesse oblige; even kings were not immune to censure if they did not practice restraint or display compassion for all ranks of society.
Burke believed that power corrupted, and he was sensitive to the sufferings or indignities of those who were victimized by its abuse. He was skeptical of democracy, yet he felt that legitimate power was maintained in trust and was subject to the will of the people (though he was vague about how that worked in practice). Burke held important individuals personally accountable for bad government or irresponsible or immoral actions—when he feared or faulted the lowly mob (as he often did), he blamed bad leaders (demagogues, radicals, philosophes, or ringleaders) for stirring the vulnerable passions of common people or placing strange ideas in their heads.
Had there been no French Revolution—or had the Revolution taken a different form—Burke’s progressive traditionalism might have survived as a prelude to, rather than a repudiation of, the optimistic egalitarianism of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. Contrary to myth, Burke had nothing against the political application of human reason, so long as it was grounded in experience instead of speculation.
Unfortunately, Anglo-American political thought has been impoverished ever since Burke’s antiradical (and pro-ancien régime) Reflections began to overshadow everything else he wrote or stood for throughout the course of his long career. Readers interested in a more complete and constructive understanding of Edmund Burke will do well to seek out balanced and all-inclusive studies of his thought. David Bromwich’s new book is an excellent place to begin. Additional remakes will surely follow.
Drew Maciag has taught history
at the University
of Rochester, the State University of New York College at Geneseo, and Nazareth College. He is the author of Edmund Burke in America: The Contested Career of the Father of Modern Conservatism (Cornell University Press, 2013).
