Burke: Conservative at heart

In the wake of Barack Obama’s re-election last autumn, conservatives in the United States began a post-mortem on their defeat with predictable calls for a return to the first principles and basic tenets of their political faith. High on the rhetorical list was a demand to revisit (or as some pointed out, to visit) the ideas of the man whom some call the father, others the patron saint, of conservatism: Edmund Burke.

What makes this 18th century Irishman, a Whig sympathetic to American independence, the patron saint of conservatism? Was he a political conservative before the French Revolution and its excesses? How does one square his tender sympathy for the Queen of France with his support for rebellion against the King of England?

Some of the answers to these questions are found in Edmund Burke: Philosopher, Politician, Prophet (William Collins, £20), a lively new biography by the Conservative MP Jesse Norman, policy advisor to David Cameron. The book is not a comprehensive academic work, but rather an affectionate account of the life and thought of one of Norman’s heroes. “Edmund Burke is both the greatest and most underrated political thinker of the past 300 years,” says Norman in the book’s opening sentence, setting the tone for what follows. Norman seeks to defend Burke from the familiar charges that he is inconsistent, irrelevant and reactionary. His Burke is the man who “forged modern politics” by establishing the principles of the party system and setting out the case for representative democracy. He highlights Burke’s arguments in favour of religious tolerance, his criticisms of liberal individualism, and his hatred of the injustices perpetrated by the British in America, Ireland and India.

In his bid to claim this 18th century figure as a light for our own century, Norman sometimes overstretches, as when he describes Burke as “the earliest postmodern political thinker.” But Norman’s biography is an engaging attempt to show how the intellectual debates of the 18th century can be deployed in today’s politics.

Burke was a conservative in his bones, and this means that it was not the sanguinary aspects of the revolution in France that made him one. Both of the great revolutions that occurred in his time prompted conservative responses in him, and similar ones. To see how, consider his outlook.

For Burke, the great opposition in political attitudes is that between respect for tradition and espousal of metaphysical abstractions. He was in favour of the first and emphatically opposed to the second. His thinking went as follows. Revolutionaries are motivated by the thought that reason can change and improve both people and institutions. But the problems generated by abstracting and idealising uses of reason are such that it would be better for people to rely on tradition, in which is deposited the accumulated experience of the past—“the general bank and capital of nations and of ages” as Burke put it.

Reason leads people to postulate principles of morality and politics which, because they are a priori idealisations, are disconnected from historical realities and their particularities. Principles only have their life and meaning in context, in relation to each other and the facts on the ground—and any attempt to thwart the course of history and its traditions by means of fancy new notions is “sophistical” and “delusive” and will lead to disaster.

On these grounds Burke dismissed the idea of equality between people, urged the importance of belief in a god, argued that the meaning to be found in life comes from such belief together with tradition and folklore, and committed himself to the somewhat Jungian idea of a collective mind, which is marinated in the old wisdom, beliefs and ways of living that traditions bring down to us.

He was, therefore, a Counter-Enlightenment figure, and in invoking the geist that informs tradition he was a political Romantic before the letter. The Enlightenment saw reason—in the form of scientific method applied to society and morality—as the liberator of humanity from the hegemonies alike of crowns and churches, those profiteers from beliefs about how sacrosanct we must think tradition to be. This is why Burke rejected that core Enlightenment thought. For him the nation is to be modelled on the family: social relations are or should be as close as blood relationships, and the forms and principles of political life should be like the “little platoons” of family, church and community, which pass down the traditions which alone, he claimed, give us meaning. One therefore sees why Burke attracts not only moderate British Conservatives such as Jesse Norman, but also the modern American right: God, family, tradition, and—in line with Burke’s “little platoon” notion (could it be stretched to cover gun possession?)—“little government,” too.

Too many people today know so little history and have such little awareness of the influence of ideas on its realities that they fail to gather the full implications of invoking names and theories given heroic status by the passage of time. Burke opposed the tendencies of political thought that gave us democracy, regimes of human rights, collective provision of such fundamental social goods as education and healthcare, which together help to promote social justice and to protect the weak against the strong; that is the respect in which he was a conservative.