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HOW TO WRITE ABOUT INFLUENCE: ASSESSING EDMUND BURKE'S CONSERVATIVE LEGACIES
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Edmund Burke and the conservative logic of empire. By Daniel I.O'Neill. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2016. Pp. xii + 251. ISBN 9780520287839. £27.00 pbk.
Pragmatic conservatism: Edmund Burke and his American heirs. By Robert J.Lacey. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. xi + 255. ISBN 9781349949038. £99.99 (£24.99 pbk).
Edmund Burke and the invention of modern conservatism, 1830–1914. By EmilyJones. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. viii + 273. ISBN 9780198799429. £60.00 (£22.99 pbk).
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 October 2019
Extract
Edmund Burke is difficult to classify. Born in Ireland in 1730, he entered parliament in 1765 having already achieved literary distinction for several philosophical works, including On the origins of the sublime and beautiful (1757). His subsequent career as a Whig statesman, politician, and reformer spanned the tumultuous decades of the late eighteenth century and culminated, less than a decade before his death, in his famous polemic against the French Revolution, Reflections on the revolution in France (1790). Over the course of his life, Burke opined with such frequency on so many topics that the nature of his ‘philosophy’ remains an open question, and scholars continue to offer strikingly different interpretations of his life and legacies. ‘Burke's legacy to history’, historian Richard Bourke summarized, ‘has been a complicated affair’.
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Footnotes
The completion of this article was made possible by support from the National Academy of Education and a National Academy of Education/Spencer Fellowship. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for the Historical Journal for their suggestions.
References
1 Bourke, Richard, Empire and revolution: the political life of Edmund Burke (Princeton, NJ, 2015), p. 16Google Scholar.
2 Bourke, Richard, ‘What is conservatism? History, ideology and party’, European Journal of Political Theory, 17 (2018), pp. 449–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It pays to note that scholars have certainly not focused exclusively on Burke vis-à-vis conservatism. Three examples of important work along these lines include Mehta, Uday Singh, Liberalism and empire: a study in nineteenth-century British liberal thought (Chicago, IL, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pitts, Jennifer, A turn to empire: the rise of imperial liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sartori, Andrew, Liberalism in empire: an alternative history (Berkeley, CA, 2014)Google Scholar. As discussed below, O'Neill engages seriously with this literature on Burke, liberalism, and empire.
3 Bourke argues that Burke ‘saw himself as a partisan of a progressive strand of Whiggism’. Bourke, ‘What is conservatism?’, p. 461.
4 Bromwich, David, The intellectual life of Edmund Burke: from the sublime and beautiful to American independence (Cambridge, MA, 2014), p. 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Bromwich depicts a dynamic, complex figure showing how Burke's thought evolved over – and in response to and as a result of – his decades of public service and writing. He situates Burke's ‘fast paced’ thought within a richly told narrative of politics – portrayed by Bromwich as a ‘mesh of hints, arranged signals, tacit acknowledgements, and compromises’ (pp. 58, 147).
5 Robin, Corey, The reactionary mind: conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, (2nd edn, New York, NY, 2018), p. 39Google Scholar. Robin here held firm to this assessment originally given in 2011. Scruton, Roger, Conservatism: an invitation to the great tradition (New York, NY, 2018), p. 26Google Scholar. Additional recent examples include Norman, Jesse, Edmund Burke: the first conservative (New York, NY, 2013)Google Scholar, and Levin, Yuval, The great debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the birth of right and left (New York, NY, 2013)Google Scholar.
6 Portraying Burke as a scholastic natural law theorist was especially popular among his mid-twentieth-century interpreters. Two notable examples include Strauss, Leo, Natural right and history (Chicago, IL, 1953)Google Scholar, and Stanlis, Peter J., Edmund Burke and the natural law (Ann Arbor, MI, 1958)Google Scholar. For an overview of such interpretations, see Maciag, Drew, Edmund Burke in America: the contested career of the father of modern conservatism (Ithaca, NY, 2013), ch. 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Bourke, Empire and revolution, p. 17, passim.
8 O'Neill himself draws attention to Bourke's work, which appeared during the final stages of his project. O'Neill's emphasis on the relationship between conservatism and empire provides an important addition to studies on liberalism and empire, which include three books mentioned above: Mehta, Liberalism and empire; Pitts, A turn to empire; and Sartori, Liberalism in empire.
9 Cannadine, David, Ornamentalism: how the British saw their empire (Oxford, 2001)Google Scholar, and Said, Edward W., Orientalism (1978; repr. New York, NY, 2003)Google Scholar.
10 Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the revolution in France, ed. Mitchell, L. G. (1790; repr. Oxford, 2009), p. 21Google Scholar.
11 For an early account of the limitations of ‘abstracting leading ideas’ to find interconnectedness between them, see Skinner, Quentin, ‘The limits of historical explanations’, Philosophy, 41 (1966), pp. 199–215, at p. 213CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Lacey acknowledges that Burke did not label himself ‘conservative’.
13 Maciag, Edmund Burke in America, passim.
14 For a discussion of such historically minded approaches to the study of political thought, see Skinner, Quentin, Meaning and context: Quentin Skinner and his critics, ed. Tully, James (Princeton, NJ, 1988), pp. 29–67, 231–88Google Scholar.
15 In the following discussion, I adopt Jones's model of combining the two as ‘C/conservatism’.
16 See, in particular, Maciag, Edmund Burke in America, passim.
17 Regarding her chronological demarcation, Jones notes that while the proposal for Irish Home Rule was defeated in the summer of 1886, ‘the issue was established as the most bitterly contested feature of British politics in the years down to Gladstone's retirement in 1894’ (p. 115).
18 Jones provides a more extensive discussion of party and other political reconfigurations of the 1880s, namely the important split among Liberals, with Liberal Unionists ‘gradually merg[ing] into close political cohabitation’ with the Conservative party (p. 151).
19 Skinner, ‘The limits of historical explanations’, p. 208. See also Bourke, ‘What is conservatism?’, pp. 449–52.