The Portable Edmund Burke (Portable Library)

by Edmund Burke

  What I have never been able to find, is the man [George III] arrogating power to himself, the ambitious schemer out to dominate, the intriguer dealing in an underhand fashion with his ministers; in short, any evidence for the stories circulated about him by very clever and eloquent contemporaries.48

  Namier had one particular clever contemporary in mind, Edmund Burke, as the author of the legend that George III was out to destroy the Constitution. Burke’s vision of George’s double cabinet was a fiction, according to Namier. Equally misguided was his notion of the “king’s friends” and the “ascendency” of the earl of Bute. These were the products solely of Burke’s “fertile, disordered, and malignant imagination,” Namier argued.49 But the Namierite attack on Burke is even more fundamental than this, for at bottom it insists that he was guilty of hypocrisy and cant. Namierism is itself a profoundly positivist indictment of the role of ideas and ideals in eighteenth-century politics. To understand the structure of politics, one looks not at what Bolingbroke or Burke wrote, not at party pamphlets and manifestos, but at connections and configurations of interests. Men were not moved by ideas or ideals but by interests. Politics was a game played by shifting connections of “ins” and “outs” who wove idea structures around this basic fact of political life. The ideas were meaningless, mere rationalizations for the position then held. What the Namierites are saying, then, is that Burke’s writings and ideas are mere cant, high-sounding principles that were laid over the base opposition of the “outs.”

  It is this much broader and more basic assumption about politics that informs the Namierite indictment of Burke as a weaver of legends. His ideals are seen as hypocritical cloaks thrown over the material and personal interests of faction and connection. According to Namier, then, Burke was consumed with “blatant egocentricity.” He was “self-righteous,” “hardly a reliable witness,” and a “party politician with a minority mind.” His political writings are filled with “arrant nonsense written with much self-assurance,” informed and distorted by a “blinding rage.”50 The Namierites cavalierly brush aside the writings of Burke, so treasured by the generations.

  Burke’s writings, admired beyond measure and most copiously quoted for nearly two hundred years, stand as a magnificent facade between the man and his readers.... When the trend of his perceptions is examined, he is frequently found to be a poor observer, only in distant touch with reality, and apt to substitute for it figments of his own imagination, which grow and harden and finish by dominating both him and widening rings of men whom he influenced.51

  One might think Burke would never recover from the viciousness of the Namierite attack. But just when he seemed to be down and out, Burke was rescued by American friends, who revived his reputation to heights never before experienced. The history of Burke since the Second World War is thus of two Burkes, an English version and an American version. In neither case is he regarded with scholarly detachment. His name evokes passion and polemics; one is for him or against him. He is despised by one school in England, and beatified by another in America.

  The tremendous renewal of interest in Burke in America is wrapped up with the here-and-now dynamics of American politics. As one American Burkean aptly put it in 1967:

  As everyone knows, an enormous revival of interest in Edmund Burke has taken place during the past twenty years or so, the period roughly, since the end of the Second World War. Scholars, to be sure, have always been interested in him, and he was widely admired for his style, and by some for his “practical wisdom,” during the nineteenth century. But the point is that in our time he has come to be read not merely as one among a large number of other important figures in the history of political thought, but as a thinker of intense, of special, contemporary relevance. Burke is our contemporary, he is an issue, in a way that Locke is not, and Leibniz is not, and even Mill is not.52

  This evolution of Burke as himself an issue, the defining of one’s own politics through coming to terms with his ideas, occurred in two separate stages in postwar America: the “cold war conservatism” of the 1950s and 1960s, and the more recent neoconservatism of the 1970s and 1980s.

  Nothing less than the defense of Christian civilization is the mission that American conservatives gave to Burke in the first blush of their love affair with him. The wooers, who included Russell Kirk, Ross J. S. Hoffman, Francis Canavan, Louis Bredvold, Peter J. Stanlis, and C. P. Ives, had uppermost in their minds the threat of world communism. “The rise of the doctrines of Karl Marx and Communism” is comparable in scale only “to the ascending movement of the doctrines of Rousseau and the kind of democracy that was called Jacobinism.” As Burke saved Christendom then, so his words could do it now. “He had become relevant again.”53 For Russell Kirk the impact of The Communist Manifesto was to efface “in much of the world ... that order governed by what Burke described as the spirit of religion and the spirit of a gentleman.” For Kirk, Burke is our mentor in puncturing “the overweening self-confidence of modern man.” His wisdom and his example are a mighty bulwark “against the fanatic ideologue and the armed doctrine, the great plagues of our time.” Because we are attacked by the same enemy, fanaticism, “the resonance of Burke’s voice still is heard amidst the howl of our winds of abstract doctrine.” Burke was the inspiration America needed in the cold war, according to Kirk.

  Burke’s ideas did more than establish islands in the sea of radical thought; they provided the defenses of conservatism, on a grand scale, that still stand and are not liable to fall in our time. ... Our age ... seems to be groping for certain of the ideas which Burke’s inspiration formed into a system of social preservation. 54

  At the hands of Burke’s cold war disciples the French Revolution becomes a totalitarian forerunner of the modern bolshevist state. As then, so now, free men must choose, as Burke put it, between “the fanatics of popular arbitrary power” and “a manly, moral regulated liberty.” In this struggle men “will have their faith in liberty renewed by turning to the political writings of Edmund Burke.”55 What Americans had to combat, according to P. J. Stanlis, was what Burke had opposed throughout his life, the pride and self—confidence of the Enlightenment. Nothing short, then, of repudiating the basic American mentality is what Burke requires of America in the cold war. “Unbounded confidence in logical reason, science, and progress pointed toward the reign of Terror and political despotism.” Naive optimism and scheming social projects are equally dangerous. America must repudiate her twentieth-century sophists, economists, and calculators and acknowledge the dual constraints of sin and history. When all is said and done, however, there is one reason above all for mass conversion to Burke:

  His reply to the totalitarian challenge of the French Revolution has a special significance to twentieth century man. We, too, are confronted with Jacobin types of popular collectivism which would make society and the State everything and the individual nothing. We have witnessed the rise of impersonal leviathan states, claiming the sanction of the popular will, in which every local corporate interest and every personal human right is extinguished or exists solely at the discretion of a centralized Sovereign power. If the Commonwealth of Christian Europe is to survive and form the ethical norms of civilization throughout the world, all men, but particularly Americans, will have to learn the great lessons in Burke’s philosophy.56

  Historically, then, American cold war conservatism was based on the reaction against the threat of international communism. Intellectually, the Burke revival was also a reaction against the nineteenth-century liberal and utilitarian reading of Burke. The two are, of course, related. Burke had to be rescued from Morley, Buckle, and others because the very expediency, relativism, and prudential quest for utility which they attributed to and praised in him is part of the modern menace of bolshevism, whose most grievous barbarity is its renunciation of absolute moral values, at least those of the Christian, now capitalist, West. Enter Burke the theorist of natural law. Based upon the meager evidence of Burke’s Indian speech
es and the towering intellectual influence in the conservative intellectual community of Leo Strauss, who was much more cautious in seeing Burke as classical natural-law thinker than they were, the cold war conservatives packaged a Burke foursquare in the tradition of Aristotle, Cicero, and Aquinas. Kirk, Canavan, and especially Stanlis see Burke as turning upon the apostasy of the liberal Hobbes and Locke, who had betrayed the true classical and Christian concept of natural law in their philosophies of egocentric natural and individual rights. Far from the philosopher of expediency, Burke emerges now as the philosopher of fixed eternal principles, of the moral laws of God that enjoin certain actions and require others.

  Another intellectual movement for which Burke is of central importance is neoconservatism. He is of use to it not in a crusade against world revolution but in a more pragmatic response to the politics of domestic American liberalism. Whereas the cold war Burkeans were by nature or creed conservatives to the core, many neoconservatives were formerly liberals or radicals who have moved to the right in reaction to the militancy of blacks, students, women, and war protestors in the 1960s, or those who have come to conservatism after disillusionment with the Great Society’s efforts to eliminate poverty and prejudice from the American scene. From their ivy-covered campuses, their prestigious think tanks, and the pages of Commentary and The Public Interest, the neoconservatives may not always refer to Burke or invoke his name and principles, but their reflexes are Burkean, and as the new conservative mood spreads and deepens, conscious credit is increasingly being given to Burke as the inspirational source of what is basically a politics of skepticism.

  Echoes of Burke are clearly discernible in the new conservatism’s cult of complexity, for example. Nathan Glazer writes that what he learned from a stint of government service was that there were no simple solutions and that society was complex:

  It was a big country and it contained more kinds of people than were dreamed of on the shores of the Hudson. I learned in quite strictly conservative fashion, to develop a certain respect for what was; in a world of infinite complexity some things had emerged and survived.

  Radical social programs, he writes, are misguided because their naive authors have no sense of “the lineaments of modern society.” In the face of this impenetrable complexity their simplistic solutions are the heights of presumption and arrogance. They assume that they “understand the causes of our ills,” and that they know “how to get them right.”57 It may well be that we know neither, replies the deradicalized realist Glazer.

  Burkean wisdom lives on in the writings of Irving Kristol as well. Burke had argued that radicals often cause more harm by efforts to remake society than existed in the evil they were reacting against. Kristol agrees. “I have observed over the years that the unanticipated consequences of social action are always more important, and usually less agreeable, than the intended consequences.” Behind radicalism, Kristol, like Burke, sees both a conspiracy of critical, naysaying “men of letters” and the decline of religious faith, fueled in part by a self-proclaimed cultural and intellectual elite. Like Burke, Kristol faults these “men of letters” for their naive utopianism, their simplistic conviction that the world can be made right:

  I also regard the exaggerated hopes we attach to politics as the curse of our age.... To think we have it in our power to change people so as to make the human estate wonderfully better than it is, remarkably different from what it is, and in very short order, is to assume that this generation of Americans can do what no other generation in all of human history could accomplish.58

  Kristol acknowledges his agreement with Burke on how fortunate it is that most people refuse to question their society and merely accept it as given.

  In the context of American politics, the neoconservative rejects the role of government as problem solver or perfection planner because he knows that in a complex world some problems cannot be solved and in a sinful world perfection is an illusory goal. The political scientist Edward Banfield cautions against governmental intervention, suggesting that if you do not know what you are doing, do not do it at all. The problems of the inner city cannot be solved, so leave them be.59 Daniel Patrick Moynihan argues, similarly, to get government out of race relations. By raising expectations unrealistically more evil is done than good. The problem is unsolvable, or will conceivably fix itself; what is needed is benign neglect.

  But there is one area in which neoconservatives plead for more government action—crime control—and this is because of their very sense of man’s inherent baseness. It is evident in the writings of James Q. Wilson, for example, and his insistence on a stronger governmental role in curbing crime. Such a view revives the classic conservative model of the state as represser of evil passions. The liberal is naive in his belief that good men are rendered criminal solely by environment and society. The modern conservative appreciates that some men are by nature evil or sinful and that the law-and-order state must actively punish them, less as a deterrent than as external just deserts for their internal failure to curb themselves.60

  But even today Burke’s most enduring legacy is his skepticism. His conservative disciples envision government as primarily an act of management and administration. Burke’s theory of “prudential management” as the true art of government has been stated most succinctly in the contemporary age by Michael Oakeshott, the late English political philosopher. Oakeshott calls upon political leaders to take the ship of state to no particular port of call, no abstract or ideological ideal. Their task is to manage wisely the crises that arise out of day-to-day developments—to keep the ship afloat: “in political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbor for shelter, nor floor for anchorage, neither starting place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel.”61 Such skills, of course, require men of a high quality and character not found among the democratic citizenry.

  Skepticism also involves a specific orientation to change. Change and development are inevitable in any body, and the body politic is no exception. What the Burkean skeptic fears today, however, is planned change, change that is informed by some ideal, some abstract a priori blueprint. Self-consciously tampering and tinkering with the given structure out of a concern for efficiency, justice, or economy is fraught with danger. Better to suffer apparent inequity and imperfection than tempt the possible disorder and unpredictability of planned change. Any attempt to rationalize social or political life raises this specter of chaos for the conservative skeptic. The social order is complex and fragile; who knows what hell will break loose should people set about to structure it according to their abstract notions. This seemed tragically borne out for Burke when he reflected on the French having unleashed a monstrous nightmare on all Europe in their misguided zeal to change the apparently few defects and corruptions of their constitution. The skeptic Burke, then, cautions against zealous efforts to remedy evil, lest these very efforts create even greater unintended evil. The position is echoed once again by the American conservative skeptic Edward Banfield. In an essay criticizing plans to rationalize and reorganize the American party system, he argues with pure Burkean skepticism:

  A political system is an accident. It is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices and principles that have survived a long process of trial and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstance. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident—the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society. ... To meddle with the structure and operation of a successful political system is therefore the greatest foolishness that men are capable of. Because the system is intricate beyond comprehension, the chance of improving it in the ways intended is slight, whereas the danger of disturbing its working and of setting off a succession of unwanted effects that will extend throughout the whole society is great.62

  It is the same plea heard from some American liberal skeptics. There is, for example, the law school professor Alex Bickel, who suggested in the 1970s in t
he widely read New Republic that

  Our problem, as much as Burke’s, is that we cannot govern, and should not, in submission to the dictates of abstract theories, and that we cannot live, much less govern, without some “uniform rule and scheme of life,” without principles, however provisionally and skeptically held. Burke’s conservatism, if that is what it was, which at any rate belongs to the liberal tradition properly understood and translated to our time, is the way.63

  It was his skepticism, so praised in our day, that drove the Whig Burke from his alliance with liberals like Charles James Fox and that defined his unique vision of conservatism. So is it this same skepticism that appeals to neoconservatives and chastened liberals today and drives them in conservative flight from the reformer’s zeal. The legitimacy and ethical justification of such skeptical naysaying is not our concern here. All that needs be insisted upon here is the remarkable legacy of Burke’s ideas.64

  NOTES

  1 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France. See below, pp. 417, 443, 451.

  2 H. W. F. Somerset, ed., A Notebook of Edmund Burke (Cambridge, England, 1957), pp. 90-91.

  3 Edmund Burke, Speech on the State of Representation of the Commons in Parliament. See below, p. 178.

  4 Ibid. See below, p. 182.

  5 Edmund Burke, An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs. See below, p. 495.

  6 Edmund Burke, Letter to the duke of Richmond. See below, p. 533.