Burke, Edmund

views updated

BURKE, EDMUND

early life and writings
political career
the french revolution
bibliography

BURKE, EDMUND (1729–1797), British statesman and writer.

One of Western civilization's masters of the art of rhetoric and in British history among the finest writers ever to have served in Parliament, Edmund Burke has come to be best remembered as the principal spokesman of English conservatism in the late eighteenth century. Yet he was neither a native Englishman nor politically conservative with regard to any of the causes he championed, until his sixties when the outbreak of the French Revolution prompted him to assess its sources and threats in terms that thereafter would come to lie at the heart of the conservative reaction to the excesses, both philosophical and political, of the age of Enlightenment. Thanks to Burke and his followers the perfect union of true knowledge with actual government that in the ancient world had been advocated by Plato, and in the eighteenth century came to be termed "enlightened despotism," would thereafter be associated less with philosophical kingship than with doctrines of revolutionary change, the creation of a new world in the light of first principles, and the leveling of an old order's traditional bonds of community. No one who denied that political life should be steered by abstract ideas has exercised a greater influence on modern conservatism's mistrust of political theory as a guide to the practice of politics. Interpreters of communism have often portrayed its social upheavals as analogous to the achievements of the French revolutionaries decried by Burke, and postmodernist critics of Enlightenment philosophy, seldom conservatives themselves, frequently object in similar terms to its pretensions and the political hazards of implementing its ideals.

early life and writings

Born in 1729 in Dublin, the son of a Protestant father and Catholic mother, and educated first at a Quaker boarding school and then at Trinity College Dublin, Burke arrived in London in 1750 to study law and prepare for a career at the bar, a profession to which he soon felt scant attraction and many of whose most prominent practitioners he would later condemn for their dogmatic zeal and personal ambition. That England had no written constitution but instead a collection of inherited practices and conventions lent political stability to its civic institutions, he thought, in ways that the late eighteenth century's new republics in America and France could not hope to acquire at a stroke through constitutional blueprints couched in purist and specious language that tied the legitimacy of a government to a people's express consent. After abandoning the study of law, he turned his attention, in his chief publications of the late 1750s, to other subjects that had become fashionable in the eighteenth century through the influence of John Locke, George Berkeley, Francis Hutcheson, and David Hume. In his Vindication of Natural Society, published anonymously in 1756, he presented what he later portrayed as a satire of the rationalist critique of revealed religions offered by the first Viscount Bolingbroke, although some modern commentators have suggested that the work should instead be read as a libertarian tract against the manufactured powers of the state. In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), he developed an epistemology of aesthetic wonder, horror, and delight that sought to explain such passions with reference to the diverse objects that excited them.

Both texts display a grasp of the complexities of the human mind and of the social situations in which persons find themselves, as well as a subtle appreciation of religious sentiment, that were to distinguish Burke's later writings from the doctrines of many of his more theologically skeptical contemporaries. These themes can be traced in some measure to his background as an Irishman destined to lead his life abroad and to his Anglican schooling in a predominantly Catholic world, with mixed religious roots but also anxieties about the political influence of clerics and the papacy. "Man is by his constitution a religious animal," he would come to claim in his commentary on the French Revolution. His perception of France's Civil Constitution of the Clergy and of the destruction of monasteries and confiscation of church lands in 1789 were to underpin his charge against what he took to be the French revolutionaries' atheism, which had proceeded hand in hand with their relish of equality. But by contrast with the views of other thinkers of his age who judged all religions to be superstitious idolatry, there was nothing sectarian about Burke's sense of the social cohesion afforded by Christianity.

political career

By the late 1750s he had formed friendships with Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, David Garrick, and other luminaries of London society, introduced to such circles in part by his physician's daughter, Jane Nugent, whom he married in 1757. In the following year he began to edit the Annual Register, chronicling the most notable cultural achievements of Britain's capital. In 1759 he became the assistant of William Gerard Hamilton, who was two years later appointed to chief secretary of Ireland. This political apprenticeship prepared Burke well for similar service in 1765 to the Marquess of Rockingham, when he became prime minister. Elected to Parliament himself in December 1765, Burke was for the next two decades much concerned with Britain's need to free its governments of royal patronage and, abroad, with the American colonists' mounting opposition to British rule. One of the most eloquent of the Rockingham Whigs, the Liberal Party's progenitors, he was throughout this period an advocate of liberal ideals, proclaiming in his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770) the need for party governments to be formed from shared convictions rather than at the behest of the king, and in his "Conciliation with the Colonies" (1775) the duty of the crown to respect the civil rights and privileges of British subjects in America. The latter, a speech delivered in Parliament, may be regarded as a manifesto of the associated rights and obligations of a free people subject to the rule of law, while his "Speech to the Electors of Bristol" of the previous year is perhaps the foremost statement of a political representative's obligation to his constituents to form independent judgments. Having in 1773 lost his original seat, in Wendover, Burke won the election in Bristol in 1774 but was subsequently defeated when he stood again in 1780. Thereafter he continued his political career, until 1794, as the designated member of Parliament (MP) for the pocket borough of Malton.

One of the reasons for Burke's unpopularity in England in this period was his advocacy of the interests of the Catholic population of Ireland, a cause that in the early 1760s had prompted the composition of his Tracts on the Popery Laws and for which he continued to campaign at least until 1783, when penal restrictions against Catholics were eased by Ireland's temporarily independent parliament established by Henry Grattan (1746–1820). Throughout the 1770s and 1780s he was vexed even more by the affairs of the East India Company and the abuse of the rights of that subcontinent's inhabitants under the administration of Warren Hastings, India's first governor-general. In 1788 Burke orchestrated the ultimately failed impeachment of Hastings by the House of Commons. It was because Burke had so enthusiastically embraced such principles that his readers could not initially comprehend his hostility to the events that informed his Reflections on the Revolution in France, which he drafted in the winter and spring of 1790. How could an admirer of England's Glorious Revolution and its Declaration of Right of the previous century fail to welcome the French people's subjection of their own king to the rule of law, likewise hallowed and sanctioned by their Declaration of the Rights of Man?

the french revolution

Burke set himself the task of distinguishing the French Revolution, "the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world," he contended, not only from its alleged English precedent but also from all the other movements he had championed. The revolutionists of France did not seek the restoration of their traditional rights such as had been regained by Englishmen, he claimed, through both the monarchy's and Parliament's reaffirmation of a Protestant succession. They sought instead to realize the whole of mankind's abstract rights in general in defiance of the particular customs of their nation. Those metaphysical rights, invented, he believed, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, and other philosophers of the age of Enlightenment, and implemented not by French statesmen or bishops but by the republic of letters' hack journalists, petty lawyers, dissident priests, and an associated "monied interest," had brought down rather than reformed the French state. Their authors and promoters had attempted to create a new order by destroying all that should have been nurtured and preserved. They had failed to recognize that a society's true contract is an entailed inheritance that binds the living to the dead and the yet to be born. Instead of valuing the real wealth of France's soil they had placed their faith in paper currency, as specious as their arguments. Their speculations of ideas and in the stock market had together bankrupted the nation. They had not grasped that populations are held together by deep convictions, prejudice, and "untaught feelings" rather than by philosophical abstractions. Following the advent of the Jacobin Terror in the autumn of 1793 many commentators came to agree with Burke's assessment, which by then struck them as all the more powerful for having apparently predicted the French Revolution's trajectory. After pursuing themes similar to those of his Reflections in his Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791), he completed the last of his Letters on a Regicide Peace in 1797 and died soon afterward, on 9 July of that year, in Beacons-field, bequeathing his lament for an age of chivalry whose "decent drapery of life" had been rudely stripped away to post–French Revolutionary Europe and modern conservatism.

See alsoConservatism; French Revolution.