Why We Should Not Admire Edmund Burke

The reverence in which Edmund Burke is held is most quarters where politics and writing mingle always registers as odd to an English major, or at least this one. Burke is a multitude, for sure, and there is no gainsaying either his capacity as a rhetorician, nor his courage in taking a stand. But as a thinker, he is several steps below his contemporaries, particularly in how ready he was for modernity.

Burke was a politican, not an intellectual. Contemporaries get confused by him because his literate and even literary, but the tradition of the British writer has little or nothing to do with thinking. Two of the greatest poets of the 18th century, Alexander Pope and William Wordsworth, could be barely said to think. When Wordsworth was disillusioned with the French Revolution and "jacobinical" ideas, he turned to geometry for comfort. It should be clear that by "thinking" I do not simply mean being able to parse and interpret sentences, pictures and situations. I mean rather the capacity to think beyond one's moment. It is not a necessary quality in a writer, but it is something that English are more than a little proud about. (Which is why Russell is about the only English philosopher that people have time for, and that only because he paved the way for Wittgenstein and logical positivism.)

Burke likewise has no new ideas. In fact, his Reflections on Revolution in France is a cri de coeur about the loss of old ideas, emblematized by his image of the passing of the age of chivalry. The whole tilt of that essay is that any change in a society is a change for the worse. All reform is but revolution masquerading as temperate reform. In the same way, he thought the various, "intellectual" elements in England agitating for such things as enfranchising non-comformist Christians, breaking up the rotten borough system of English electoral politics, basic education for all citizens, etc. were no better than than their Jacobin cousins in France. If there was ever an act of mean-spirited broadbrushing quite as comprehensive, I am unaware of it. Demagogues like Burke spurred on church and constitution mobs to burn the house of Joseph Priestley, an important English scientist of the period. He did one of the worst things an intellectual can do: provided cover for vile actions.

Burke then was not a force of change in his time. And this is true economically as well as politically: he hated the merchant class and what incipient capitalism there was in England. This too was killing the age of chivalry.