Burke’s political skepticism was, however, by no means simply a reaction to the trauma of the French Revolution. His opposition to abstract reasoning in philosophy and social matters appeared as early as his undergraduate years at Trinity College, Dublin, during the late 1740s. It also appeared in the religious and philosophical essays he produced between his graduation and the publication, in 1756, of his attack on Lord Bolingbroke’s religious rationalism as politically extrapolated. We know, for example, that in these years Burke attacked “great subtleties and refinements of reasoning,” which, he felt, produced disorders of the brain. “Custom is to be regarded with great deference” as “a more sure guide than our theories.” ² The conservative thrust of the skepticism found in the Reflections on the Revolution in France is also seen writ large in Burke’s response to radical demands in England for democratic reform of Parliament in the early 1780s. The agitation, he declared, approached the Constitution totally oblivious to the fact that the “House of Commons is a legislative body, corporate by prescription, not made upon any given theory.” The English radicals assumed that legislators could remake governments when all wise men knew that “a prescriptive government never was made upon any foregone theory.” How ridiculous, then, to put governments on procrustean beds and make them fit “the theories which learned and speculative men have made.” ³ Such speculators, with their ideal blueprints, were political magicians cutting up the Constitution into pieces “in order to boil it, with the puddle of their compounds, into youth and vigor.” ⁴

But this is by no means the full measure of Burke’s skepticism. It can be seen even more completely in his conception of the art of governing, and in his views on the limited rational capacity of mankind. The conservative skeptic like Burke is deeply interested in the character and style of those who govern. He is convinced that pursuit of policies, of preconceived speculative plans—in short, of what we might today call ideology—is inappropriate behavior for political leadership. The major function of a magistrate is seen as prudential manager. Stable government must eschew ideology. What matters most is not the pursuit of policy but the quality of leadership. In Burke’s writings, this theme of the importance of wise management is carefully developed.

Government for Burke was not a science with exact and precise methods and conclusions; it was an art, practiced by artists skilled in prudence. Governors had to approach political issues according to their peculiar circumstances, not in light of abstract ideas or general theories of government. In his speeches on America and the taxation issue, Burke repeatedly insisted that “metaphysical distinctions” of abstract right be kept out of the deliberation and that prudence and virtuous discretion rule the day. Good political leadership was informed by principle, not ruled by it; and, more importantly, it was guided by circumstances. The wise magistrate, Burke argued, ought to respect the temper and opinions of a particular people, the spirit of their age; and, particularly, ought to respect and not tamper with the manners of the people, which in many ways formed the basis of their laws.

However distinguished his own public career in Parliament was, Burke knew that the likes of himself were not those rightly destined to be in the front ranks of England’s rulers. No matter how much he might proclaim himself not a friend to aristocracy, the overwhelming thrust of his writings insists that only men of breeding possess this quality of prudence so fundamental to the art of governing. This, after all, was the ultimate sin of the French: their failure to recognize the prescriptive role of aristocracy and its production of qualified governors. Governors ought “to see nothing low and sordid from one’s infancy,” ought to stand upon “elevated ground,” “to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse.” ⁵ Before the great families, Burke humbly denies his capacity to possess the quality of character and skills of learning required to make a prudential magistrate; thus he writes to the duke of Richmond:

Persons in your station of life ought to have long views. You people of great families in hereditary trusts and fortunes, are not like such as I am, who, whatever we may be, by the rapidity of our growth, and even by the fruit we bear, and flatter ourselves that while we creep on the ground, we belly into melons that are exquisite for size and flavor, yet still are but annual plants, that perish without season, and leave no sort of traces behind us. You, if you are what you ought to be, are in my eye the great oaks that shade a country, and perpetuate your benefits from generation to generation. ⁶

No greater threat existed to the likes of the duke of Richmond than the French Revolution and its ideals, in Burke’s estimation. His monumental achievement was in denouncing the Revolution while all about him political and intellectual sentiment in Britain celebrated it.

For Burke’s contemporaries the Revolution was testimony to the imminence of the millennium. It was, as Shelley saw it, “the master theme of the epoch in which we live.” ⁷ On this master theme Blake, the young Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey wrote poems of revolution. Looking back on those years, Southey, by then respectable and Tory, wrote that “few persons but those who have lived [through the 1790s] can conceive or comprehend ... what a visionary world seemed to open upon those who were just entering it. Old things seemed passing away and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race.” ⁸ All the poets echoed these sentiments. For Wordsworth, “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.” For Blake, the friend of Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine, “the times are ended ... the morning ‘gins to break.” ⁹ For William Hazlitt it was “that glad dawn of the day-star of liberty; that spring-time of the world, in which the hopes and expectations of the human race seemed. opening in the same gay career with our own.” ¹⁰

The radical Protestant minister Richard Price preached sermons on the imminent arrival of the kingdom of heaven. He informed his prosperous bourgeois audience that a heavenly city would be realized in this world. They were witness to “a progressive improvement in human affairs which will terminate in greater degrees of light and virtue and happiness than have yet been known.” There was no doubt, he noted, that the “present day world is unspeakably different from what it was.” Superstition was giving ground, “the world outgrowing its evils ... anti-Christ falling and the millennium hastening.” ¹¹ Price echoed what Hazlitt called “the spirit of the age.” “We live in happier times than our forefathers.” The “shades of night are departing,” Price noted characteristically; “the day dawns.” ¹²

Joseph Priestley, the great scientist and also radical Protestant minister, was ecstatic about the prospects for millennial regeneration. The French and American Revolutions were, according to Priestley, “unparalleled in all history.” They opened a new and wonderful era in the history of mankind. They moved the world “from darkness to light, from superstition to sound knowledge and from a most debasing servitude to a state of the most exalted freedom.” ¹³

It was against this vision of secular perfection, of the absolute elimination of evil and misery that Burke reacted in the late eighteenth century. It is because he rejected this optimism and, in turn, insisted on the inevitability of sin, suffering, and imperfection, and did it in a prose style of compelling grandeur, that he has attracted to his name the legions of disciples who spread his teachings to this day.

The principal source of these teachings is Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. In it his basic tactic is to contrast the virtuous English and the radical French, which at the same time is to contrast virtuous English and radical millenarian English. Priestley and Price had abandoned the English past, and this disrespect led ultimately to the crimes of the Jacobins. The English in 1688 had no “idea of the fabrication of a new government.” Even in 1790, Burke suggests, such thoughts “fill us with disgust and horror.”

Inferior men governed France and pushed their claims in England. “Are all orders, ranks, and distinctions to be confounded?” Burke asks. This would “pervert” the natural order of things, would “set up on high in the air what is required to be on the ground.” The radicals (French and English) are guilty of “selfish and mischievous ambition,” an ambition that is undermining the age of chivalry and its corporate-feudal worldview. Ambitious man would not find his self-fulfillment outside himself in guild, church, city, or in the secure knowledge that he kept to God’s assigned place. Ambitious man is the individualist of liberal ideology who would experience his individual dignity not as an expression of some ascribed role but as a personal achievement reflecting his own intrinsic talent and merit. Before such ambitious men the corporate medieval world would fall, and from it would grow the individualism of the new age. Burke sees all of this, and he rejects the ideology of these sinful radicals. To be virtuous for Burke is “to be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society.” ¹⁴ As the old order crumbles, the acceptance of one’s place in it is transformed by Burke into the love for the particular link in the chain of being that one occupies.

Burke takes the very vocabulary of the radicals and translates it back into the preliberal ethos of chivalry. Equality and happiness are transposed. They exist only in the old order where each one knows his place. Many twentieth-century disciples of Burke have drunk deep at this particular Burkean fountain.

You would have had a protected, satisfied, laborious, and obedient people, taught to seek and to recognise the happiness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions; in which consists the true moral equality of mankind, and not in that monstrous fiction, which by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and embitter that real inequality which it never can remove; and which the order of civil life establishes as much for the benefit of those whom it must leave in an humble state, as those whom it is able to exalt to a condition more splendid but not more happy. ¹⁵

Having rejected the Lockean liberal ideal of equality, the elimination of ascribed distinctions, Burke moves on to Locke’s theory of government. In the liberal scheme of things government is a neutral arbiter, an umpire over the race for wealth. It is a necessary evil because autonomous self-directed individuals occasionally bump into each other. Usually well-meaning and rational, individuals sometimes forget themselves and interfere with one another’s natural rights. On these occasions government is called in to protect the right of the aggrieved party. But liberal government is out to do no more, neither to dictate beliefs nor to lead citizens to a just or virtuous life. Government for Burke, however, has much more to do than this passive policing function. It is a positive tool of repressing, in the real sense of the term. Burke rejects, as have generations of conservatives after him, the optimism and rationalism of the liberal theory of human nature. Deep reservoirs of evil and sin lurk in human nature, according to Burke, and government is necessary not as an occasional umpire but as an indispensable external authority to thwart and repress the antisocial inclinations of individuals. To govern is to restrain man.

The source of Burke’s ideal is, of course, religion. As the liberal optimism of the Enlightenment had been premised on the denial of original sin (about the only thing all the philosophes, including Rousseau, agreed upon), so Burke revives the staple of the chivalric worldview. Government’s function, he writes, is not to protect natural rights but to provide authority, constraint, and domination.

Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individual, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will be controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can only be done by a power out of themselves. ¹⁶

That power is government. The focus has shifted away from the liberal’s preoccupation with freedom from government and his voluntaristic manipulation, based on the power within him, of his social environment and institutions.

Since government is not a mechanical umpire merely called upon when rights need protection, but a positive agency constraining the evil tendencies inherent in human nature, it follows that government is much more than the simple, efficient, and cheap policeman envisioned by radical theorists. Its proper functioning requires a deep understanding of human nature, rare skills acquired only with long experience. Governing, according to Burke, is “a matter of the most delicate and complicated skill.” One can’t simply renovate it, or reform it from some preconceived idea. To govern requires “more experience than any person can gain in his whole life.” Cheap, simple, limited government is illusory, as is the notion of simple, swift, and radical social surgery.

The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest complexity: and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suited either to man’s nature or to the quality of his affairs. When I hear the simplicity of contrivance aimed at and boasted of in any new political constitutions, I am at no loss to decide that the artificers are grossly ignorant of their trade or totally negligent of their duty. The simple governments are fundamentally defective, to say no worse of them. ¹⁷

Radical man knows no limits, no boundaries to his excesses, which is well illustrated by the Jacobin attack on, and humiliation of, the queen of France on October 6, 1789. Burke’s Reflections reach their literary, emotional, and theoretical crescendo in the passages he devotes to the queen. All his literary genius, all the frenzy of his fury, is in the service of his consummate artistry as he manipulates the reader with this poignant and unforgettable tale of radical savagery. Roused from her peaceful sleep, this gentle soul, “glittering like the morning-star, full of life and splendor and joy,” is forced to flee her palace “almost naked.” Her guards are butchered, and her rooms in that “most splendid palace in the world” are left “swimming in blood, polluted by massacre, and strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated carcasses.” The queen and her husband flee Versailles, and have their subjects avenged this humiliation? They have not. It is this which prompts Burke to lament the demise of the ancien régime, its institutions and its values.

Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor, and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. ¹⁸

Burke moves immediately from this condemnation of the failure to respect the exalted rank of the queen to a basic repudiation of the liberal notion of freedom. What he had begun by giving government a positive role in repressing the evil inclinations of unbridled individualism, he completes now by a redefinition of freedom. In liberal theory, freedom is the simple and empirical experience of the lack of constraint. It consists in the independence and autonomy of the self-willing ego. Burke sees this very freedom as the death blow to the old order, and rightly so. It is this new notion of freedom that accounts for no one rising to champion the queen. What it has replaced is what freedom means for Burke, whose definition differs profoundly

Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom! ¹⁹

The corporate-feudal world of hierarchy where everyone knows and loves his “little platoon” is thus revived in Burke’s assault on the new age of sophistry, economists, and calculators. Burke’s notion of freedom denies the very basis of the new liberal ideal. The exalted freedom of a hierarchical social structure is in reality the absence of “selfish and mischievous ambition.” Man is free in his little platoon, .subordinate and obedient to those above him, in the sense that he is free of striving, free from ambition, free from the restless anxiety associated with ambition. Man is free from competition. His exalted freedom is the serenity and peace of mind that comes from knowing and loving his place. Man is free who has ambition neither to lift himself above his platoon nor to topple and replace those set above him like the queen.

What has passed is a social order characterized by what Burke calls “a noble equality”—a far cry from liberal notions of equality. Noble equality recognizes rank and “the gradations of social life.” It is the principle of “love, veneration, admiration, or attachment” to persons. It is the “old feudal and chivalrous spirit of fealty.” The mechanistic and abstract philosophy of the rights of man, of individual freedom, has no respect for this nobler equality that unites in personal bonds people who are fundamentally unequal. Radical man levels all such noble distinctions; he dissolves all that softened private society with “the new conquering empire of light and reason.”

All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded, as ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion. ²⁰

The theme of man’s inadequacy, his basic limitation, is here reintroduced. In his essence man is defective and imperfect. He requires “the pleasing illusions,” the myths and superstitions that make life livable and tolerable. The radical who seeks to free man from the past, from tradition, myth, and religion, and who sets him to live by his own light and reason, is unaware of man’s intrinsic weakness and fallibility. The rationalism and utopianism of the radicals is rejected here, as is the basic Enlightenment assumption of the unbounded horizons of the empire of reason. It is the eighteenth century itself that Burke repudiates in his proud admission that

we are generally men of untaught feelings: that, instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree; and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, (and they seldom fail,) they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason. ²¹

It is all here, the cornerstone of Burke’s counterrevolution, and with it a great deal of the future conservative creed. The most basic Enlightenment assumptions are written off with the stroke of a pen. Man is not only ruled by evil passions; but his rational capacity is severely limited as well. Without the warm cloak of custom, tradition, experience, history, religion, and social hierarchy—all of which radical man would rip off—man is shivering and naked. Free man from all mystery, demystify his institutions and his intellectual world, and you leave him alone in a universe of insignificance, incapacity, and inadequacy. But he is free, as the radicals construe freedom. This is indeed where their freedom leads, and why virtuous men pull about them their cloaks of unfreedom. In this wardrobe there are, according to Burke, two basic outfits: the “spirit of a gentleman” and the “spirit of religion,” of “nobility and the clergy.” ²² It is the prescription of aristocracy—the ancient and received institutions of hierarchy—and the prejudice of religion—the ancient and received ideas of God and his mercy—that rescue man from his shivering fearful self. They ennoble life; they rescue the individual by submerging his individuality in the “general bank and capital of nations and of ages.” Who is man, then, to question his social institutions, to envy his betters, to seek perfection in this world? He is puny and ineffectual, Burke answers, meaningless and irrelevant on his own. He is someone only when guided by “ancient opinions and rules of life.” Freed from the wisdom and experience of the ages, ungoverned by prescription and prejudice, men are no more than a “swinish multitude,” or “little, shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.” ²³

The liberal sees the state as a mere contractual arrangement, a voluntaristic creation of self-seeking and autonomous individuals concerned primarily with the secure enjoyment of their property rights. But the state is more to Burke, much more than the joint stock company arrangement of liberal theory, which he ridicules as the paltry vision of “sophisters, economists, and calculators.” The state is, he wrote, “better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties,” ²⁴ Men ought to look to the state with more reverence than to the East India Company. Political and social life involves more than the scramble of mortal individuals for wealth and profit, for self-fulfillment, oblivious to those who have lived before or who will live hereafter. Whatever the liberal touches becomes, in Burke’s mind, a matter of economics and commercial calculation. “Let us not,” he pleaded in the House of Commons, “turn our everything, the love of our country, our honour, our virtue, our religion, and our security to traffic—and estimate them by the scale of pecuniary or commercial reckoning. The nation that goes to that calculation destroys itself.” ²⁵

Calculating and reckoning man is irrevocably and misguidedly mired in the present. Focused on the individual and his rights, he has no sense of continuity, of roots in the past, or of obligations to the future. Burke and conservatives after him turned to a partnership of generations that transcended individual egos. The state involves a contract serving nobler ends. It is a partnership between the living, the dead, and the yet unborn in all of life’s dimensions: art, sciences, virtue, and perfection. Individuals, then, can never be free and autonomous for yet another reason. They always bear with them the constraints of the past. They have duties and responsibilities to the past as well as to the future.

Rationalists, the skeptic Burke holds, have too exalted a view of man and of his rational capacities. The restlessness of mind that has produced the tumult of ideological politics is seen as symptomatic of a general malady that besets modern man: his prideful belief in his own superiority. Burke’s is the most developed and articulate of all indictments of ideology and of what the skeptic perceives as the prideful quest for perfect schemes and ideal politics. Burke saw the stock of reason in man as small. Despite this, men still fled their basic limitations in flights of ideological fancy. They recognized no barrier to their powers and sought in politics to make reality match their speculative visions. Burke devotedly wished that men would appreciate the weakness of their own minds, what he called in the Vindication of Natural Society their “subordinate rank in the creation.” The cosmology embodied in the medieval concept of the chain of being was revived in all its glory by Burke to remind man of his lowly place in God’s divine scheme; for Burke “assumes that the awful Author of our being is the Author of our place in the order of existence.” In doing this, God has “subjected us to act the part which belongs to the place assigned to us.” And that place is to know the limits of one’s rational and speculative faculties. ²⁶

III.

Woodrow Wilson, writing just before the centenary of Burke’s death, noted that Burke’s every sentence was “stamped in the colors of his extraordinary imagination. The movement takes your breath and quickens your pulses. The glow and power of the matter rejuvenates your faculties.” ²⁷ Wilson was right. For generations, pulses have been quickened and breath taken away by Burke’s words; more often than not, the pulses and breath belonged to conservatives.

People have even learned to write good English by reading Burke. In the late nineteenth century his Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies was made a part of the basic school English curriculum. Generations of Americans deep into the twentieth century learned how to construct topic sentences and write extended outlines of prose on the model of Edmund Burke’s works. It was no accident, of course, that of the master’s works this particular piece was chosen. Until the cold war of the 1950s it was as an opponent of the “American War” that Burke was primarily known in America.And this older identification still lingers. The week of March 22, 1975, found the Christian Science Monitor and the Philadelphia Bulletin using Burke in their editorials on the bicentenary of his great speech. On the twenty-second itself the CBS television network chose Ronald Reagan (a subtle and all too clever choice) to read Burke’s words on its nightly “200 Years Ago Today.”

Burke’s contemporaries on the left were generally enraged by the Reflections on the Revolution in France. Their reactions capture what would be the dominant response from liberals and radicals to this day. The radical novelist Robert Bage mocked the very passage in the Reflections that so moved Burke and many of his readers. The knight-errant becomes modern man striking blows at the chains of chivalry and at such as Burke who glory in that servitude:

Ten thousand pens must start from their inkstands, to punish the man who dares attempt to restore the empire of prejudice and passion. The age of chivalry, heaven be praised, is gone. The age of truth and reason is commenced, and will advance to maturity in spite of cant and bishops. Law—active, invincible, avenging law, is here the knight-errant that redresses wrongs, protects damsels, and punishes the base miscreants who oppress them....All this is happily changed. Philosophy and commerce have transformed that generous loyalty to rank, into attachment to peace, to law, to the general happiness of mankind; that proud submission and dignified obedience into an unassuming consciousness of natural equality; and that subordination of the heart into an honest veneration of superior talents, conjoined with superior benevolence. ²⁸

Joseph Priestley, in responding to the Reflections, dealt metaphor for metaphor. His concern was Burke’s discussion of the clothes and the drapery of life that cover naked, shivering man. Priestley replied with the characteristic radical metaphor of a new day dawning:

Cherish them [prejudices], then, sir, as much as you please. Prejudice and error is only a mist, which the sun, which has now risen; will effectively disperse. Keep them about you as tight as the countryman in the fable did his cloak; the same sun without any more violence than the warmth of his beams, will compel you to throw it aside, unless you chose to sweat under it, and bear the ridicule of all your cooler and less encumbered companions. ²⁹

Among the radicals who had self-consciously put aside all cloaks of mist and mystery was Jeremy Bentham, who was not above using, against the Reflections, the same exaggerated near-hysterical rhetoric that was Burke’s trademark. Bentham described Burke as “blinded by his rage, in this his frantic exclamation, wrung from him by the unquenched thirst for lucre—this mad man, than whom none perhaps was ever more mischievous—this incendiary.” ³⁰

Two of the most famous radical replies to Burke’s Reflections emphasized the same theme—Burke’s disregard for the age-old suffering of the common people in his preoccupation with the brutality of revolutionary justice. Thomas Paine, in his Rights of Man, saw Burke venerating power and “all the governments in the world, while the victims who suffer under them, whether sold into slavery, or tortured out of existence, are wholly forgotten.” ³¹ But it was the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft who best captured this common radical response to Burke.

Misery to reach your heart I perceive, must have its caps and bells; your tears are reserved, very naturally considering your character, for the declamation of the theater, or for the downfall of queens, whose rank throws a graceful veil over vices that degrade humanity; but the distress of many industrious mothers whose helpmates have been torn from them, and the hungry cry of the helpless babes, were vulgar sorrows that could not move your commiseration, though they might extort an alms. ³²

Burke was, of course, soundly praised by members of the belleslettres circles in which he moved after his literary and political debut in London. He was feted by the likes of Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, and Oliver Goldsmith, on the one hand, and by bluestockings like Mrs. Montagu, Mrs. Carter, and Mrs. Veysey, on the other. James Boswell, Horace Walpole, Arthur Young, and Fanny Burney sang his praises. They all were dazzled primarily by his reputation for spellbinding oratory in the Commons. It would be the French Revolution, however, and his response to it that made him a legendary figure. In seventeen days after its publication on November 1, 1790, 5,500 copies of his Reflections were sold. By November 29 the sales had reached twelve thousand, according to Burke’s account. Within a year some nineteen thousand copies had been sold in England.

The establishment loved Reflections, and with its response began the myth of Burke as heroic Tory defender of the faith. Conservatives rallied to what they had long sought—a resounding defense of their privileges and a clarion call for resistance to Jacobinism, to democracy and leveling in both France and England. William Windham, fast becoming a leader in the House of Commons, wrote that “never was there, I suppose, a work so valuable in its kind, or that displayed powers of so extraordinary a nature.” It was a work, he wrote, quite “capable of ... turning the stream of opinion throughout Europe.” ³³ George III is quoted as having said, “Burke’s Reflections is a good book, a very good book; every gentleman ought to read it.” ³⁴ At Oxford there was talk of awarding Burke an LL.D. “in consideration of his very able Representation of the True Principles of our Constitution Ecclesiastical and Civil.” ³⁵ The Times of London saw it as a welcome antidote to “all those dark insidious minds who would wish to level it in a similar manner with the French for the sake of their own selfish purposes.” ³⁶ The great historian Edward Gibbon agreed. Reflections was “a most admirable medicine against the French disease,” which was making too much headway in England. He admired Burke’s eloquence and “adored his chivalry.” He even forgave him his superstition. ³⁷

The mythic figure of Burke was fast taking form even in the last years of the eighteenth century. Two people crucial in helping to give Burke to history were poets who came to Burke guilt-ridden over their own early enthusiasm for Jacobinism. The young Coleridge, for example, had attacked in an ode of 1794 Burke’s “wizard spell” in rallying Europe against Jacobinism. Years later he wrote of Burke as “a great man,” a man of “transcendent greatness” and “of measureless superiority to those about him.” He could not conceive “of a time or a state of things in which the writings of Burke will not have the highest value.” He saw in Burke’s writings “the germs of almost all political truths.” ³⁸ Wordsworth in 1799 wrote of “that great stage, where Senators, tongue-favoured men, perform.” One senator he remembers above all. And so the legend of Burke who said “no” took shape.

Genius of Burke! forgive the pen reduced
By specious wonders, and too slow to tell
Of what the ingenuous, what bewildered men,
Beginning to mistrust their boastful guides,
And wise men, willing to grow wiser, caught
Rapt auditors! from they most eloquent tongue—
Now mute, for ever mute in the cold grave
I see him,—old, but vigorous in age,—
Stand like an oak whose stag-horn branches start
Out of its leafy brow, the more to awe
The younger brethren of the grove. But some—
While he forewarns, denounces, launches forth,
Against all systems built on abstract rights,
Keen ridicule; the majesty proclaims
Of Institutes and Laws, hallowed by time;
Declares the vital power of social ties
Endeared by custom; and with high disdain,
Exploding against Theory, insists
Upon the allegiance to which men are born. ³⁹

In the nineteenth century, however, Burke the heroic and legendary figure, the conservative prophet, lay dormant. He was remembered more as the model of the prudent statesman whose teaching contained the essence of political wisdom. Even more than this, he was eulogized as a great master of the English language. William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, and Matthew Arnold praised Burke’s prose. According to Macaulay he was the greatest Englishman of letters since Milton. Nineteenth-century biographers MacKnight and Prior went even further, the latter noting, for example, that it took “two thousand years to produce one Cicero and one Burke.” ⁴⁰

One nineteenth-century biographer, however, did keep alive the myth of heroic Tory Burke, and in doing so was an early example of a tendency in Burkeana that would flower in the twentieth century—the latter-day partisan use of Burke. George Croly was an Anglican minister actively opposed to the Chartist movement. It was a time, he felt, much like the last decade of the eighteenth century. His purpose in writing on and editing Burke in 1840, he informed his readers, was to compile “an anti-revolutionary manual of the wisdom of the wisest of men.” Burke had been the genius behind “the forces that preserved society as it was,” and his words could do that again against the new menace. Croly may well have been the first to refer to Burke’s “renown as a prophet,” as well as to use him as a weapon in counterrevolutionary politics. Until our own day few have written of Burke as the Reverend Croly did.

The politician was elevated into the philosopher, and in that loftier atmosphere from which he looked down on the cloudy and turbulent contests of the time, he soared upward calmly in the light of truth and became more splendid at every wave of his wing. ⁴¹

Croly was an exception, however. The nineteenth century in general had little of Burke as prophet of reaction. He was percieved, on the contrary, as an exemplar of the school that dominated Victorian thought, utilitarian liberalism. This was in no small part due to the efforts of Burke’s great nineteenth-century biographer, John Morley. Morley was a liberal and a positivist, schooled like John Stuart Mill in the writings of Auguste Comte. His two biographies of Burke rooted him in the liberal cause, emphasizing his years of opposition to the Crown and especially his role in the American Revolution, “that part of his history about the majestic and noble wisdom of which there can be least dispute.” On the French Revolution there was indeed dispute. Morley avoided the problem by leaving the verdict to history, “to our grandchildren.” ⁴² What attracted Morley to Burke was his conviction that Burke’s political philosophy was at bottom Benthamite utilitarianism. It seemed this way to Morley because Burke had rejected natural rights and other abstract and absolute principles. His every utterance praised expediency and prudence at the expense of rigid adherence to ultimate values. Henry Buckle, Leslie Stephen, and William Lecky agreed; Burke was a utilitarian liberal.

These Victorian liberals who wrote of Burke as in their camp were no less outspoken in their praise for him. It was in fact partly because of his alleged utilitarian affinities that they were so effusive. They considered utility, expediency, and prudential calculation to be the heart of politics, and so it was that they saw in Burke a kindred spirit. While they had little taste for the gorgeous excesses of his prose, he was for them the theorist par excellence of political wisdom. Lecky wrote of Burke’s writings that “the time may come when they will no longer be read. The time will never come in which men would not grow wiser by reading them.” ⁴³ Buckle described Burke as “one of the greatest men, and, Bacon alone excepted, the greatest thinker who ever devoted himself to English politics.” ⁴⁴

What happened to Burke at the hands of the Victorian liberals is of crucial importance. It represents the first and most important step in his capture by the middle class and his enlistment to save their cause and their interests. His aristocratic biases as displayed in his writings on France and India were pushed to the side, and his writings on America are pushed front and center. More important than this, however, was the realization that his empiricism—and his skepticism, when severed from his “unfortunate” predilection for aristocracy—could serve the new status quo in which the middle class dominates. The age of chivalry was indeed dead and buried. The powers that be were now the triumphant middle class, which had already turned its back on the French Revolution and the politics of upheaval. The romance of Jacobinism was appropriate only for the assertive and struggling bourgeoisie seeking to find its place in the sun. It might not even be necessary then to overlook Burke’s writings on the Revolution. For it would come to pass that middle-class liberals could find wisdom in this very tirade against their earlier struggle. It was after all, a plea for order, for stability, for submissive obedience to the powers that be.

One sees this deep conservative strain in the nineteenth-century liberal embrace of Burke at work in Woodrow Wilson. It is not surprising that Wilson, the professor of government enamored of English parliamentary politics, would gravitate so naturally to the pull of this House of Commons man. But it is the passion of Wilson’s attraction that is so striking, and which seems to bespeak some deeper response that Burke struck in the repressed conservative Presbyterian within the liberal Wilson. For the soon-to-be president, Burke was the embodiment of racial wisdom, the instinctive common sense and practical soul of the Anglo-Saxon. An interaction with Burke was emotionally and physically stimulating. To read him was to hasten the pulse, quicken the breath. “Does not your blood stir at these passages?” Wilson asks the reader. Like his contemporaries, the liberal scholars who were writing on Burke in England, Wilson was struck by Burke’s “concrete mind.” Burke’s disdain for “abstract speculation” and for “system” appealed to him, as did his “practical” approach and his preference for “expediency.” Wilson, however, unlike his contemporaries, was not afraid to meet the French Revolution head on, and to shout amen to Burke’s crusade against Jacobinism. “The things he hated are truly hateful,” Wilson wrote of Burke. “He hated the French Revolutionary philosophy and deemed it unfit for free men, and that philosophy is in fact radically evil and corrupting.” ⁴⁵ That this liberal president could be so taken by Burke is additional evidence of the general historical process by which Burke was possessed and used by the middle class, a process of course intensified in the United States, where that class lacked even an aristocratic enemy to overthrow. They were no longer frightened off by Burke; indeed, some of their spokesmen were quite taken by his conservatism and how it could now serve their interests.

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:

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 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:

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 the 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.

7 Quoted in M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York, 1971), p. 328.

8 Edward Dowdeen, ed., The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles (Dublin, 1881), p. 52.

9 William Blake, “The French Revolution,” in The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, David Erdman, ed. (New York, 1970), pp. 11-12.

10 Quoted in Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 331.

11 Richard Price, Evidence for a Future Period of Improvement in the State of Mankind with the Means and Duty of Promoting It: An Address to Supporters of New Academical Institutions Among Protestant Dissenters (London, 1787), pp. 5, 22, 25.

12 Ibid., p. 53.

13 Joseph Priestley, Letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (Birmingham, 1791), letter 14, p. 25.

14 Burke, Reflections. See below, p. 437.

15 Ibid. See below, p. 431, and Burke’s Works (London, 1882), p. 310.

16 Ibid. See below, p. 442.

17 Ibid. See below, p. 443.

18 Ibid. See below, p. 446.

19 Ibid. See below, p. 446.

20 Ibid. See below, p. 447.

21 Ibid. See below, pp. 451-52.

22 Ibid. See below, p. 448.

23 Ibid. See below, p. 448, 450.

24 Ibid. See below, pp. 457-58.

25 Parliamentary History 30 (1792-94), p. 646.

26 Burke, An Appeal. See below, p. 491.

27 Woodrow Wilson, Mere Literature and Other Essays (Boston, 1896), p. 160.

28 Robert Bage, Man As He Is (London, 1792), vol. 4, pp. 72-73.

29 Priestley, Letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, p. 112.

30 Cited in Mary Mack, Jeremy Bentham (London, 1962), p. 347.

31 Tom Paine, The Rights of Man, H. Collins, ed. (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1969), p. 71.

32 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Reply to Mr. Burke’s Invective (London, 1792), pp. 98-99.

33 Mrs. Henry Baring, ed., The Diary of the Right Honourable William Windham 1784-1810 (London: 1866), pp. 212-13.

34 Quoted in Sir Philip Magnus, Edmund Burke (London, 1939), p. 195.

35 Quoted in Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (London, 1963), p. 80.

36 The Times (London) November 30, 1790.

37 R. E. Prothero, ed., The Private Letters of Edward Gibbon (London, 1897), vol. 2, pp. 237, 251.

38 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Religious Musings (1794), Table Talk (London, 1835), vol. 5, p. 18; vol. 2, p. 147.

39 William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book 7, lines 512-30.

40 James Prior, Memoirs of the Life and Character of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (London, 1824), vol. 1, pp. 364, 564.

41 George Croly, A Memoir of the Political Life of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke: With Extracts From His Writings (London, 1840), vol. 1, pp. 145-46, viii, 24, 3.

42 John Morley, A Historical Study (London, 1867), p. 123; Burke (London, 1888), p. 210.

43 William Lecky, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1891), vol. 5, p. 476; vol. 3, p. 197.

44 Cited in T. W. Copeland, “The Reputation of Edmund Burke,” Journal of British Studies (no. 2, 1962), p. 83.

45 Woodrow Wilson, Mere Literature, pp. 107, 128, 141, 158, 155.

46 Arthur Baumann, Burke the Founder of Conservatism (London, 1929), pp. 37, 46; Robert Murray, Edmund Burke:A Biography (London, 1931), p. 407.

47 Alfred Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt Against the Eighteenth Century (New York: 1929), p. 12.

48 Sir Lewis Namier, “King George III: A Study of Personality” in Crossroads of Power (New York, 1962), p. 140. The major works of Namier were The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London, 1929) and England in the Age of the American Revolution (London, 1930).

49 Namier, “Monarchy and the Party System” in Personalities and Powers (London, 1955), p. 143.

50 Namier, “The Character of Burke,” The Spectator, December 19, 1958.

51 Namier, “King George III,” p. 140.

52 Jeffrey Hart, “Burke and Radical Freedom,” The Review of Politics 29 (April 1967), p. 221.

53 R. J. S. Hoffman and P. Levack, eds., Burke’s Politics (New York, 1959), pp. xiii, xii.

54 Russell Kirk, “Edmund Burke and National Rights,” The Review of Politics 13, no. 4 (October 1951), pp. 16, 21, 209, 211; The Conservative Mind (New York, 1953), p. 123.

55 P J. Stanlis, “Edmund Burke in the Twentieth Century,” in The Relevance of Edmund Burke, ed. P. J. Stanlis (New York, 1964), p. 53.

56 Stanlis, Edmund Burke and the Natural Law (Ann Arbor, 1958), pp. 247-49.

57 Nathan Glazer, “On Being Deradicalized,” Commentary 50, no. 4 (October 1970), p. 75.

58 Irving Kristol, On the Democratic Idea in America (New York, 1972), pp. ix, 69, 149, 144.

59 See E. C. Banfield, The Unheavenly City (Boston, 1970).

60 See, for example, James Q. Wilson, Thinking About Crime (New York, 1975), as well as his numerous articles in The New York Times Magazine and Commentary.

Philosophy Paper

I .

II.

III.

NOTES

NO. 4

NO. 6

NO. 7

NO. II

A Notebook of Edmund Burke

THE CHARACTER OF A WISE MAN

THE CHARACTER OF—[MRS EDMUND BURKE]

RELIGION OF NO EFFICACY

RELIGION

SPEECH ON THE ACTS OF UNIFORMITY

SPEECH ON THE RELIEF OF PROTESTANT DISSENTERS

SPEECH ON THE PETITION OF THE UNITARIAN SOCIETY