A Meeting of Minds

 Edmund Burke, by Dennis O’Keeffe; Continuum, 2010, 167 pages, £65.

Continuum’s “Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers” series continues with Dennis O’Keeffe’s excellent volume on Edmund Burke. Clearly, Burke, who insisted that “Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed”, was hardly a libertarian, but he is generally regarded as a major conservative thinker. Thus Robert Grant declared, “In some ways Burke is the greatest of all political thinkers” and ranked him even above Aristotle. Of course, Burke has had his detractors and O’Keeffe examines a number of “cases” against him—yet Burke is acquitted on every count. This book, however, is more than a vindication of Burke; it also offers new interpretation of his significance both as a man and as a thinker. O’Keeffe’s overall conclusion is that Burke is best described as a “Genial Olympian”—praise indeed. 

Although Burke was a prolific writer and famous orator, his best-known work is surely Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). O’Keeffe explains that Burke had formed a favourable view of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, partly because it had placed some limits on authority and partly because it maintained the continuity of English—soon to be British—civilisation. He had also broadly approved of the American Revolution for similar reasons. But, to the surprise of many—not least Thomas Jefferson—he was horrified by the turn of events in France after 1789. For Jefferson, who spoke of “the revolution in Mr Burke”, this selective attitude to revolutions smacked of inconsistency. But O’Keeffe insists that Burke was not inconsistent. The essential test of all political change was whether it preserved what was good in past arrangements. 1688 and 1776 passed this test; 1789 did not. As Burke told a young Frenchman, “You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you.”

Of course, we must ask why the French were so ready to despise their past, a past, which as Burke pointed out, contained many great things, not least a glorious tradition of faith. The answer is that the intellectual and cultural life of France—and to some extent other parts of Europe too—had been hijacked by an unrepresentative minority of conceited and supercilious intellectuals who had little experience of real life and yet thought they had the answers to everything. They came up with impressive-sounding abstractions that, if once attempted, would only result in untold suffering and misery. Burke’s predictions, made at a time when many people in Britain still had high hopes for the Revolution—remember Wordsworth’s “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”—proved remarkably accurate. He said the French revolutionaries would murder the royal family and they did. He said they would rob and murder the nobility and they did. He said they would plunder and despoil the church and they did. He said they would murder each other and make war on their neighbours; he even said that some military adventurer would probably take over at some point.

O’Keeffe is at his best in “extrapolating” Burke into more recent times. He shows that the horrors inflicted by the communists and the Nazis had their ultimate roots in the French Revolution and sprang from essentially the same cause—the abstractions of arrogant “progressive” intellectuals who had no respect for the past. After reading O’Keeffe, we are bound to regard with the utmost suspicion those who wish to “reform” the teaching of history or even to remove it from school curricula altogether.

O’Keeffe’s case for the importance of Reflections is well made. If we accept it—as I do—Burke appears well on the way to the “Olympian” status O’Keeffe claims for him. But O’Keeffe describes Burke not merely as an Olympian but as a Genial Olympian. Dennis’s many friends will know that he is the personification of geniality and is hence uniquely well placed to recognise this quality in others. Burke certainly emerges as a nice and agreeable man—someone we would like to have known. But O’Keeffe may take his generosity a little too far. There are episodes in Burke’s life where geniality seems lacking.

His first book, A Vindication of Natural Society (1756), was ostensibly a satire on Bolingbroke, described by O’Keeffe as “a deist, rationalist philosopher of the first half of the eighteenth century” and regarded by Burke as “an antinomian”. It is true that O’Keeffe believes that the real target of the satire was Voltaire. Even so, in Reflections, nearly forty years later, Burke could still mock Bolingbroke: “Who now reads Bolingbroke? Who ever read him through? Ask the booksellers of London what is become of these lights of the world.” No one may have read Bolingbroke in 1790, but some people read him now. Although of a very different kind from Burke, Bolingbroke was also a major conservative thinker. It was he who—from an essentially conservative perspective—showed that there was a darker side to 1688, the Hanoverian Succession and the triumph of the Whigs so lauded by Burke.

Then there is Burke’s role in the Whig campaign of denigration and derision directed against George III, another great conservative. Can Burke really have believed the absurd fiction that George was trying to undo the work of 1688? The campaign came close to undermining the very foundations of monarchy—horribly similar to what the philosophes were doing in France.

Finally there is Burke’s role in the impeachment of Warren Hastings, “the common enemy and oppressor of all”. Much of Burke’s invective was based on a simplistic and ill-informed equation of Indian princes and European nobilities and a serious misunderstanding of actual conditions in India.

In short, while I accept that Burke was genial, I doubt if he was quite so genial as O’Keeffe claims. Of course I could be wrong—after all, Dennis O’Keeffe is far more genial than I am.

But should O’Keeffe be bothered whether Burke was genial or not? Many would say the matter is irrelevant. O’Keeffe flies in the face of most “highbrow” treatments of political philosophy, even in conservative circles. It is seen as positively vulgar to suggest that personal qualities might help to explain or contribute to a thinker’s ideas—whose eternal purity must not be polluted by contact with the temporal or physical. It is testimony to the insidious and pervasive influence of postmodernism—which insists there is no significant link between authors and the things they write—that such nonsense has become so widely accepted. There may, however, be a more innocuous explanation. A distressingly high proportion of all political philosophers—regardless of their ideological stance—appear to have been thoroughly unpleasant characters; perhaps it is better after all to leave their squalid lives alone. Even with my slightly lower view of Burke, I agree that he seems a glorious exception to the nasty and miserable norm.

For O’Keeffe, Burke’s geniality is not just a bonus; it is essential to his “Olympian” status. There is a strong hint that, if Burke had not been genial, he would have been less Olympian, perhaps not Olympian at all. It would be less important if geniality was simply a matter of being cheerful and agreeable, but O’Keeffe sees it as a likely indication—though not a complete proof—of goodness. The essence of his thesis is contained in a quotation from Yeats, printed on the title page: “For the good are always the merry, Save by an evil chance.”

The most striking feature of O’Keeffe’s analysis is that those who have said that Burke was right tell only part of the story. Throughout his writings, Burke seems to use the language of practicality and workability. In other words, it is easy to mistake him for a conservative utilitarian. He has been described in these terms by thinkers like Laski who, though a socialist, still held Burke in high regard. At the risk of slight oversimplification, O’Keeffe believes that Burke was right because he was genial, ultimately because he was good. In the last resort, it was Burke’s Christian faith—not overstated but always present—that pervaded the whole of his political philosophy and gave it an underlying consistency.

This is not perhaps the place to engage in a discussion as to whether it is necessary to be a Christian in order to be a proper conservative. With typical generosity, O’Keeffe says that it is not essential, but I think he believes it helps—and I agree with him. Ultimately, it is all about the Christian understanding of the Human Condition. St Paul writes in his First Epistle to the Corinthians: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” It is important to stress that St Paul does not say “For now we see nothing at all.” If he did, that would have meant that human beings are so stupid and vicious that the only conceivable form of government is Hobbes’s Leviathan. But neither does St Paul say, “We can see everything in the here and now”; that was the mistake of the philosophes—and it led to the French Revolution. It was also the mistake of the Marxists, who thought they could foretell the future. Burke was actually rather better at that than they were—but he would never have been so foolish, or so blasphemous, as to make wild claims on that score.

In other words, human beings can be allowed some freedom, both intellectual and political—but not too much. They need to be guided by faith and above all by what Burke calls “the wisdom of our ancestors”. But what is true of human beings is also true of governments. They need some powers to curb excesses—but not too much because they too are fallible. If they make mistakes, their subjects have a right and duty to protest. There must always be at least a modest scope for reform: “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.” The message stretches into the future because society is really a compact between the dead, the living and the yet unborn. All three elements are linked because: “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”

I am less optimistic about human nature than either Dennis O’Keeffe or Edmund Burke, though I would hesitate to accuse either of Pelagian tendencies. What really comes across though is the extraordinary similarity between subject and author—their Irishness, their geniality, their love for England coupled with indignation at the way it has treated Ireland, their Christianity (O’Keeffe is a Catholic and Burke may have been one) and their very similar concepts of conservatism. This book is all about a meeting of minds and spirits, separated in time but united in fundamentals. That is what makes it such a joy to read. 

Professor John Clarke is currently working on a history of the University of Buckingham, where he teaches History.