The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke

From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence

David Bromwich

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780674729704
• eBook ISBN: 9780674416147
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

David Bromwich's portrait of statesman Edmund Burke (1730–1797) is the first biography to attend to the complexity of Burke's thought as it emerges in both the major writings and private correspondence. The public and private writings cannot be easily dissociated, nor should they be. For Burke—a thinker, writer, and politician—the principles of politics were merely those of morality enlarged. Bromwich reads Burke's career as an imperfect attempt to organize an honorable life in the dense medium he knew politics to be.

This intellectual biography examines the first three decades of Burke's professional life. His protest against the cruelties of English society and his criticism of all unchecked power laid the groundwork for his later attacks on abuses of government in India, Ireland, and France. Bromwich allows us to see the youthful skeptic, wary of a social contract based on "nature"; the theorist of love and fear in relation to "the sublime and beautiful"; the advocate of civil liberty, even in the face of civil disorder; the architect of economic reform; and the agitator for peace with America. However multiple and various Burke's campaigns, a single-mindedness of commitment always drove him.

Burke is commonly seen as the father of modern conservatism. Bromwich reveals the matter to be far more subtle and interesting. Burke was a defender of the rights of disfranchised minorities and an opponent of militarism. His politics diverge from those of any modern party, but all parties would be wiser for acquaintance with his writing and thoughts.

Notes

Introduction

1. “Letter to a Member of the National Assembly,” in Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 9 vols. (Oxford, 1981–), vol. 8, ed. L. G. Mitchell, p. 326.

2. The affinity between Burke and Rousseau—perceived by many in the eighteenth century and few in the twentieth—emerges from Alfred Cobban’s early books, Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century (London, 1929) and Rousseau and the Modern State (London, 1934).

3. Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” in Essays in Criticism (London, 1906), p. 17.

4. G. O. Trevelyan, The Early History of Charles James Fox, 3rd ed. (London, 1881), p. 132.

5. William Blake, “Annotations to An Apology for the Bible,” in The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York, 1970), pp. 606–607.

6. The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, 10 vols. (Cambridge, 1958–1978), vol. 5, ed. Holden Furber with the assistance of P. J. Marshall, p. 10.

7. Many students of Burke will recognize the truth of a remark by Thomas Copeland in a letter to James Osborn: “The great problem with Burke is always to get the interest in him, and from my own slight experience in writing about him I know how difficult it is (I think he had a kind of natural impulse to throw difficulties in the way of people who wanted to know what he was like; I think he did it all his life).” In a related stricture, Copeland wrote: “One thing you always have to worry about with Burke. People who make statements about him are almost always supplied with insufficient facts. They are trying to pump up some small hint or inference into an assertion that will win attention.” Letters of 19 June 1960 and 14 October 1973, Beinecke Library, Yale University.

8. “With Burke,” wrote W. E. H. Lecky, “an extreme dread of organic change co-existed with a great disposition to administrative reform. The Tory party, which prevailed after the French Revolution, adopted one side of his teaching, but wholly discarded the other, and they made the indiscriminate defence of every abuse, and the repression of every kind of political liberty, the great end of government.” See W. E. H. Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, 8 vols. (London, 1888), 3:225.

9. L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism (London, 1911), pp. 104–105.

10. There is a kind of intelligence in politics, which comes from the belief that ideas make a difference to politics. This is true of certain historical periods, as it is of individual writers and statesmen.

11. Correspondence, vol. 6, ed. Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith, p. 90.

12. Correspondence, vol. 2, ed. Lucy S. Sutherland, p. 282.

13. Correspondence, vol. 7, ed. P. J. Marshall and John A. Woods, pp. 83–84.

14. Correspondence, 5:255.

I. Early Ambition and the Theory of Society

1. The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, 10 vols. (Cambridge, 1958–1978), vol. 1, ed. Thomas Copeland, p. 274.

2. R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London, 1988), p. 154.

3. See Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody (Chicago and London, 1992), pp. 3–10. To support the hypothesis, O’Brien notes that in 1722, a Richard Burke appears on the Convert Rolls. O’Brien also detects, in the tone of certain descriptions and omissions in Burke’s mature writings, veiled references to the same hidden fact about his father. I hear more often in Burke (and in other members of his family) a pretty solid self-assurance: the tone of people who think themselves below privilege but above deference.

4. H. N. Brailsford, Shelley, Godwin, and Their Circle (London, 1913), p. 20.

5. O’Brien, The Great Melody, pp. 20–23.

6. For example, William Burke, Edmund Burke as an Irishman (Dublin, 1924), pp. 7–22.

7. W. E. H. Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, 8 vols. (New York, 1888), 3:226.

8. F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke: 1730–1784 (Oxford, 1998), counts four visits after 1750, none of them long.

9. Copeland elaborates: “Abraham Shackleton would have been less stunned by the four horses of the family coach if he had known that once at Beaconsfield they would be unhitched and put to use around the farm, and that Burke himself would walk behind them as he did his own plowing” (Copeland Papers, Libraries of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, FS 150, box 18, folder 151).

10. Quoted in Arthur P. I. Samuels, The Early Life Correspondence and Writings of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke LL.D (Cambridge, 1923), p. 14.

11. On the debt Burke owed to Pope, more generally, see Frans De Bruyn, The Literary Genres of Edmund Burke (Oxford, 1996).

12. Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 9 vols. (Oxford, 1981–), vol. 1, ed. T. O. McLoughlin and James T. Boulton, p. 66.

13. Writings and Speeches, 1:80. The parallel formulation a decade later, in the Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, is more judicious but not fundamentally different in its intuition: “We do not sufficiently distinguish what we would by no means chuse to do, from what we should be eager enough to see if it was once done” (part I, section xv).

14. Writings and Speeches, 1:79, 81. Burke’s objection to the portrayal of vicious actions on stage would carry into his maturity. “Even the Beggar’s Opera [he] could not endure to hear praised for its wit or its music, because his mind was filled by thought of its misplaced levity, and he only saw the mischief which such a performance could do to society.” John Morley, Burke (English Men of Letters, London, 1902), p. 109.

15. Marianne Elliott, Wolfe Tone (New Haven, Conn., 1989), p. 31.

16. Quoted by James Prior, Life of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (London, 1854), p. 17.

17. Samuels, Early Life, prints the Minute Book and the notes of the club; see p. 244. This anti-Jacobite statement by Burke should be regarded as “public,” a performance within the decorum of the small group; his private sentiment in a letter to Richard Shackleton (26 April 1746) softens the emphasis: “I am sure I share in the general compassion. ’Tis indeed melancholy to consider the state of those unhappy gentlemen who engaged in this affair (as for the rest they lose but their lives) who have thrown away their lives and fortunes, and destroyed their families for ever, in what I believe they thought a just cause” (Samuels, Early Life, p. 244n1). This expression of fellow feeling does not amount to a ple...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• I. Early Ambition and the Theory of Society
• II. The Sublime and Beautiful
• III. The Wilkes Crisis and Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents
• IV. The American War
• V. The Loss of the Empire in the West
• VI. Democracy, Representation, and the Gordon Riots
• VII. In Defense of Politics
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Speech at Bristol on Declining the Poll
• Notes
• Chronology
• Index