The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism by Matthew McManus

Author:Matthew McManus
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030246822
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

This of course does not mean that Burke was an unthinking or uncritical proponent of authority. As with everything in the Burkean outlook, there are qualifications. These stem from the fact that, unlike some of the other figures we will look at in this Chapter, Burke’s scepticism of reason only goes so far. He believes that a society of free and liberal individuals who are capable of deploying their independent reason in the pursuit of self-interest is a very good thing. And indeed, he consistently expresses admiration for British political culture and its role in developing such conceptions, though this does not mean such ideas can or should be universalised. Indeed, in an admirable series of speeches and letters, Burke is highly critical of politicians who are willing to deny such rights to their cultural offspring, the Americans. As individuals of British descent, the Americans are entitled to claim their rights as such.34 Though even here, Burke is careful to point out that these rights develop as a result of interaction with a particular set of traditions and practices. Indeed, he is characteristically appalled by the “abstract” reasoning of those who claim that sovereign authority can supersede the affectively driven believe of those who have been brought up to feel entitled to certain rights and to a degree of self-government. The extent to which the Americans had become men of reason desiring freedom was not due to nature, but rather thanks to history and tradition, which most notably the black slaves of the South seem to lack. One of the reasons the Revolution of Jefferson and Hamilton could be justified is precisely because the Stamp and Tea acts broke from this history and its traditions.35

Considered as a whole, I think we can see how under the right conditions the Burkean outlook might have been conducive to mutation within post-modern culture. At moments in his work Burke moves close to anti-foundationalism and epistemic scepticism. This is of course countered by his unwillingness to extend the scepticism of reason too far. More importantly, it is also countered by an unwillingness to display a weighty scepticism of authority, to extend anti-foundationalism to the foundations of political life itself. Saying that, what makes Burke’s work still of a piece with the Enlightenment is his unwillingness to entirely abandon reason for fiat. Instead he continuously insists that a prudent experiential reason shows us that we are affectively attached to those authorities which care for us and provide us with a sense of greater identity. His distaste for Enlightenment rationalism comes from this different emphasis while the Enlightenment rationalists believed in reason and were sceptical of authority, Burke thought that right reason showcased its own limits and demonstrated the need to respect authority as it was.36 Later conservatives—Oakeshott being the most important—would have fewer qualms about offering even this small olive branch to rationalism,37 perhaps sensing that its fundamental ambiguity belied a deeper vulgarity within the heart of reason itself. This is where the work of Joseph de Maistre comes in.

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