The Portable Edmund Burke (Portable Library) (5 page)

All would not be praise of Burke in the twentieth century, however. To be sure,Arthur Bauman could sing his praises in 1929 as the “founder of Conservatism,” and in 1931 the Reverend Robert Murray could write that Soviet Russia needed a strong dose of Burkean wisdom to cure it of its miseries.
⁴⁶
And those years also saw Alfred Cobban’s brilliant and sympathetic characterization of Burke as gravedigger for the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.
⁴⁷
But in those very same years a marked departure in the history of Edmund Burke occurred. Beginning in 1929 and 1930, Burke’s reputation was subjected to the most serious assault on it since the radical crew of Wollstonecraft, Priestley, Paine, William Godwin, and others had finished with it one hundred and thirty-five years earlier. His principal critic was the distinguished historian Sir Lewis Namier.

The burden of Namierite scholarship has been “to correct” the Whig conception of eighteenth-century history, with its scenario of the villain George III set against the virtuous House of Commons. Standing very much in the way, then, of Namierite revisionism is Burke and the picture of George III he had circulated from the late 1760s in the Wilkes crisis, through the American crisis in the 1770s, into the 1780s with his economic reforms, and finally with his outspoken views on the king’s insanity during the Regency crisis. Wrote Namier:

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.

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:

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.

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:

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 speeches 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:

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:

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.