Booknotes

Abstract

A few years ago a posthumous collection of essays by F. R. Leavis appeared with the title The Critic as Anti-Philosopher. The idea seemed to be that because in his approach to literature Leavis rejected theory and the deduction of conclusions from principles, there was something un- or anti-philosophical about him. If so, Edmund Burke is also an anti-philosopher.

It would, though, be a shame if it was thought that, as a result, Burke's works are unworthy of philosophical attention, particularly these days when what is called particularism is an emerging trend in ethics and politics. Jim McCue's Edmund Burke and Our Present Discontents (Claridge Press, 1997), nicely coinciding with the bi-centenary of Burke's death, might be a good place to start a philosophical exhumation of Burke's political thought.

Not everyone will agree with McCue's judgements related to our present discontents or even with his extrapolation to them of Burkean themes. Nonetheless, there is plenty of philosophical meat in what he draws out of Burke. How, for example, is it possible for Burke consistently to oppose the French Revolution, while having argued strongly in favour of the American Revolution (and incidentally against Warren Hastings' adventures in India)? Was Burke not just an opportunist, a career Whig who jumped ship at an opportune moment, and thereby securing for himself a posthumous reputation as a seminal Tory thinker? McCue convincingly shows that on the key issue of sovereignty, Burke's apparent shifting of position conceals a deeper consistency. Burke's underlying insight is that in matters of sovereignty the consent of the governed is far more important than democracy in any formal sense or, indeed, any abstract notion of authority, such as the divine right of kings. In working out this thought in an actual case far more weight would be accorded local facts, manners and attitudes than abstract principle. The danger with constitutional arrangements based on abstractions, however good they sound to philosophical analysis, is that by wiping away the very traditions and balances which have in practice restrained rulers and executives they will be ‘powerful to usurp, impotent to restore’.

Against their professed aims top-down constitutions are likely to be ‘strong only to destroy the rights of men’, by, for example, handing power over to an elected but unrepresentative assembly or, even worse, to an unelected and unrepresentative bureaucracy. Burke would clearly have hated the European Commission. He would have defended the hereditary principle in the House of Lords (because of what it does, not because of any abstract justification). What, though, would he have said of Scottish devolution, if, as we have to believe, the Scots just do not want to be treated as a branch of a London-based executive? Is there any analogy here with the ‘habits of soreness, jealousy and distrust’ Burke discerned in the American colonists subjected to a Parliamentary tax they found both burdensome and unjustified?