Edmund Burke by Jesse Norman

Author:Jesse Norman [Jesse Norman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

Thought

SIX

Reputation, Reason and the Enlightenment Project

IN THE 200-ODD YEARS since his death Burke’s reputation has followed a great arc. It rose steadily throughout the nineteenth century, reaching almost to apotheosis in the late Victorian era, when he was admired on both sides of the Atlantic as much as a master of English prose as a source of political wisdom. It remained high in the first quarter of the twentieth century, when the ‘Speech on Conciliation’ was regularly studied in American schools. Since then, however, it has been in decline, apart from brief rediscoveries during the Cold War and at the fall of the Iron Curtain. Academic interest is greater than it has been for many years. But for the public, with the partial exception of the Reflections, Burke’s writings and speeches lie idle on library shelves. Politics has passed him by. His struggles, his style, his passion have come to seem irrelevant, even quaint, to a world of post-modernist irony and mass culture.

In the chapters that follow, we turn from Burke’s life to his thought. We examine the social, political and intellectual context of his ideas, their shifting impact over time, and his key influences and adversaries. With luck, what will emerge is a sense both of Burke’s power and coherence as a philosopher in action and of his remarkable relevance and importance today.

Two days after his death, however, The Times of London was in no doubt about its verdict: ‘Mr Burke will live as long as strength of imagination and beauty of language shall be respected by the world.’ Inevitably, however, this view was quickly contested, and Burke was denounced by radicals and Foxites alike in a continuation of the pamphlet war he had helped to start. But there followed a series of laudatory or even hagiographic biographies, most notably a Memoir of Burke by James Prior in 1824, which portrayed him as a statesman, free of parti pris, his eye firmly fixed on the national interest and the need to preserve Britain from revolution. This picture was assisted by the rapid if selective publication of his posthumous Works, including various writings, speeches and letters. These went through a number of different editions and achieved a wide circulation.

Politically, Burke cast a long shadow forward. He was followed by a younger generation of brilliant Irishmen entering English politics; these included the future Prime Minister George Canning and the leading minister in the Commons of Lord Liverpool’s administration, Robert Stewart, later to become Lord Castlereagh. Canning had grown up under the influence of Fox and Sheridan, but was deeply impressed by the Reflections and became a follower of Pitt and a vigorous opponent of Jacobinism after 1793. Castlereagh was, characteristically, more equivocal: elected as a young and progressive reformer in County Down in 1790, he came to share Burke’s analysis of the revolution, but was opposed to the idea of a counter-revolutionary war against France. In 1794 he too joined Pitt. As acting Chief Secretary for Ireland he was closely

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