Engaging Nature by Barry John; Cannavo Peter F.; Lane Joseph H. & Lane Jr. Joseph H

Author:Barry, John; Cannavo, Peter F.; Lane, Joseph H. & Lane, Jr., Joseph H. [Cannavò, Peter F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: environment, Political Science, Philosophy
ISBN: 9780262526562
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2014-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

8

Edmund Burke: The Nature of Politics

Harlan Wilson

The thought of Edmund Burke (1729–1797) provides a distinctive way of looking at the relationship between nature and politics and, by extension, at environmental issues today. This is the case even though Burke can hardly be considered an “environmentalist” or even a thinker for whom the relations between humans and nonhuman nature were of paramount importance.

One way to approach Burke’s thought is to consider his explicit utterances about the relations between humans and nonhuman “nature,” or, more generally, to ask what his conceptions of “nature” look like and how they inform human affairs. Another way, more abstract, is to ask what ideas about order and change, authority and power, community and freedom—ideas that can shape or affect conceptions of human relations with the rest of nature—are embedded in his political thought. In this chapter, I will try to show several dimensions of his political and economic thought as they relate both to his conception of nature and to his ideas about order, authority, power, freedom, and the like. I will also try to show tensions in and limitations of his political thought, specifically in his treatment of the relationship among nature, politics, and political economy.

Burke is widely considered the father of modern conservative thought. His ideas invite us to see whether, and how, conservatism and conservation can be linked other than etymologically. He was a British statesman of Irish origin who served in the House of Commons from 1765 to 1795. Despite his reputation as a founder of conservatism, his own reputation during his political life was as a reform-minded Whig, not a Tory. Evidence that he was indeed reform-minded included his attempts to rein in royal authority, his support for conciliation of (if not independence for) the American colonies, his defense of protest over continuing British oppression of Irish Catholics, his prosecution of the impeachment of Warren Hastings of the East India Company for willful destruction of Indian traditions and ways of life, and his advocacy of a gradual end to slavery and the West Indies slave trade. Initially, he wasn’t even as hostile to the French uprisings of 1789 as he later would be. But as the French Revolution proceeded through its moderate Girondist stage and on to its Jacobin episode, Burke developed an animosity toward the revolution and the new French state that amounted to rage.1 In his best-known work, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke enunciated most clearly the conservative principles for which he became famous, thus obscuring and, according to some of his contemporaries, betraying the reformism for which he was known in his own time.

Burke himself declared that theory must follow, rather than direct or transform, practice (1987, 151).2 Still, this formulation obscures the sense in which Burke’s political thought has a strong aesthetic element that is especially evident in his 1757 work A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Although Burke usually didn’t invoke aesthetic conceptions of sublimity and beauty directly in his political writings, many of these works contain subtle aesthetic evaluations.

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