The Right Man Who owns Edmund Burke? by Adam Gopnik July 29, 2013 39 Print More Subscribers can read the full version of this story by logging into our digital archive. You can also subscribe now or find out about other ways to read The New Yorker digitally. July 29, 2013 Issue Keywords Edmund Burke; Politics; History; Eighteenth Century; Conservatism; Liberalism; Ireland It may be the nicest compliment ever paid by one great writer to another. Dr. Johnson, talking to Boswell in 1784, said of Edmund Burke, writer, Parliamentarian, and fellow club member, “If a man were to go by chance at the same time with Burke under a shed, to shun a shower, he would say—‘this is an extraordinary man.’ If Burke should go into a stable to see his horse drest, the ostler would say—‘We have had an extraordinary man here.’ ” Burke retains his reputation for extraordinariness, even though what, exactly, made his thought so extraordinary may be hard to define. A “Burkean conservative” is the kind liberals pretend to want, just as conservatives like to say, in seeming praise of an opponent, “He’s a true Jeffersonian liberal.” Both mean, really, that the other guy is so pessimistic about government action that, in power, he won’t actually do anything. Burke’s doctrines are foggy even to his admirers. Let’s see, something about “the little platoons” of civil society, and then hating the French Revolution (though, wait, he liked the American one), and wasn’t there something about how mountains and storms are fun, in a scary kind of way? Burke is more a badge to be worn than a book to be read. In “Edmund Burke in America” (Cornell), the historian Drew Maciag inventories the many contradictory roles that Burke has played in our local imagination, where, as he notes, “homage to Burke was more a profession of faith than an explanation of policy.” There’s Russell Kirk’s mystical Burke, of the early nineteen-fifties, a theological conservative whose thought was rooted in faith in a “natural law” derived from the Almighty (although Burke’s own direct statements of this faith when it comes to politics were, as Maciag says, “vague to the point of meaninglessness”); William F. Buckley’s Cold War Burke, who believed in gentlemen and hated Bolsheviks; and, finally, a staunchly pro-war, national-greatness Burke, conjured by the neoconservatives of the past couple of decades. (The book starts with the Bush Administration über-hawk Douglas Feith invoking Burke to defend the Iraq war.) Meanwhile, a new biography by the British Conservative M.P. Jesse Norman, “Edmund Burke: The First Conservative” (Basic), emphasizes a Burke who believed in stable communities, “civic virtue,” and free markets as the foundation of free nations—Burke as a mildly anti-Thatcherian figure for this new Conservative age. Unlike Thatcher, Burke certainly believed that there was such a thing as society, Norman insists, though he always thought it something other than the state. . . .
Posted on: Thu, 01 Aug 2013 17:14:07 +0000
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