He is despised by one school in England, and beatified by another in America.

The tremendous renewal of interest in Burke in America is wrapped up with the here-and-now dynamics of American politics. As one American Burkean aptly put it in 1967:

As everyone knows, an enormous revival of interest in Edmund Burke has taken place during the past twenty years or so, the period roughly, since the end of the Second World War. Scholars, to be sure, have always been interested in him, and he was widely admired for his style, and by some for his “practical wisdom,” during the nineteenth century. But the point is that in our time he has come to be read not merely as one among a large number of other important figures in the history of political thought, but as a thinker of intense, of special, contemporary relevance. Burke is our contemporary, he is an issue, in a way that Locke is not, and Leibniz is not, and even Mill is not.52

This evolution of Burke as himself an issue, the defining of one’s own politics through coming to terms with his ideas, occurred in two separate stages in postwar America: the “cold war conservatism” of the 1950s and 1960s, and the more recent neoconservatism of the 1970s and 1980s.

Nothing less than the defense of Christian civilization is the mission that American conservatives gave to Burke in the first blush of their love affair with him. The wooers, who included Russell Kirk, Ross J. S. Hoffman, Francis Canavan, Louis Bredvold, Peter J. Stanlis, and C. P. Ives, had uppermost in their minds the threat of world communism. “The rise of the doctrines of Karl Marx and Communism” is comparable in scale only “to the ascending movement of the doctrines of Rousseau and the kind of democracy that was called Jacobinism.” As Burke saved Christendom then, so his words could do it now. “He had become relevant again.”53 For Russell Kirk the impact of The Communist Manifesto was to efface “in much of the world ... that order governed by what Burke described as the spirit of religion and the spirit of a gentleman.” For Kirk, Burke is our mentor in puncturing “the overweening self-confidence of modern man.” His wisdom and his example are a mighty bulwark “against the fanatic ideologue and the armed doctrine, the great plagues of our time.” Because we are attacked by the same enemy, fanaticism, “the resonance of Burke’s voice still is heard amidst the howl of our winds of abstract doctrine.” Burke was the inspiration America needed in the cold war, according to Kirk.

Burke’s ideas did more than establish islands in the sea of radical thought; they provided the defenses of conservatism, on a grand scale, that still stand and are not liable to fall in our time. ... Our age ... seems to be groping for certain of the ideas which Burke’s inspiration formed into a system of social preservation. 54

At the hands of Burke’s cold war disciples the French Revolution becomes a totalitarian forerunner of the modern bolshevist state. As then, so now, free men must choose, as Burke put it, between “the fanatics of popular arbitrary power” and “a manly, moral regulated liberty.” In this struggle men “will have their faith in liberty renewed by turning to the political writings of Edmund Burke.”55 What Americans had to combat, according to P. J. Stanlis, was what Burke had opposed throughout his life, the pride and self—confidence of the Enlightenment. Nothing short, then, of repudiating the basic American mentality is what Burke requires of America in the cold war. “Unbounded confidence in logical reason, science, and progress pointed toward the reign of Terror and political despotism.” Naive optimism and scheming social projects are equally dangerous. America must repudiate her twentieth-century sophists, economists, and calculators and acknowledge the dual constraints of sin and history. When all is said and done, however, there is one reason above all for mass conversion to Burke:

His reply to the totalitarian challenge of the French Revolution has a special significance to twentieth century man. We, too, are confronted with Jacobin types of popular collectivism which would make society and the State everything and the individual nothing. We have witnessed the rise of impersonal leviathan states, claiming the sanction of the popular will, in which every local corporate interest and every personal human right is extinguished or exists solely at the discretion of a centralized Sovereign power. If the Commonwealth of Christian Europe is to survive and form the ethical norms of civilization throughout the world, all men, but particularly Americans, will have to learn the great lessons in Burke’s philosophy.56

Historically, then, American cold war conservatism was based on the reaction against the threat of international communism. Intellectually, the Burke revival was also a reaction against the nineteenth-century liberal and utilitarian reading of Burke. The two are, of course, related.