2. Conservatism.
3. Great Britain—Politics and government—18th century.
I. Kramnick, Isaac. II. Title. III. Series.
JC176.B826 1999
320’.092—dc21 98-41476

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INTRODUCTION

I .

EDMUND BURKE played a central role in the political history of England during the first forty years of George III’s long reign. In the House of Commons he defended the cause of the American colonies, championed the rights of persecuted Catholics in England and Ireland, criticized the parliamentary meddling of the Hanoverian monarchy, and decried the rape of the Indian subcontinent by English adventurers. In that same house he also rejected pleas for the reform of the archaic English Constitution, ridiculed efforts to lift the civil restrictions on Unitarian and other Protestant dissenters, and, most famously, called down the wrath of God and right-thinking Englishmen on the French revolutionaries and their Jacobin sympathizers in England. Burke’s historical and intellectual importance rests, however, on more than this fascinating and controversial career; he stands, after all, as the intellectual source of one of the modern world’s most influential political visions—conservatism. His writings and speeches are the bible, and he the prophet of that ideology, in much the same way that The Second Treatise of Government and The Communist Manifesto and John Locke and Karl Marx are the bibles and prophets of liberalism and communism respectively. In reviewing and assessing the historical person, role, and impact of Burke one must, thus, confront both the statesman of Georgian England and the philosopher of conservatism.

Even had Burke not become the philosopher of conservatism and been only the Whig statesman, his parliamentary role would have itself been worthy of posterity’s notice. His was a great success story: an outsider of no great means rises by dint of his own wits, skills, and energy to the inner circles of power in a closed aristocratic political community. To be sure, he never quite made it to the real pinnacles of power; instead he became the articulate defender of a class that refused to accept him as one of its own. Still, his career is linked closely with much of consequence that transpired in the public life of England in the second half of the eighteenth century.

This prophetic voice of Anglo-American conservatism was Irish, born in Dublin in 1729 to a Protestant father and a Catholic mother. He was raised in the faith of his solicitor father and schooled at Dublin’s famous Trinity College, an Anglican institution. In the 1750s Burke moved to London to study law, though he eventually turned to literary and intellectual pursuits in a circle that included Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith. After writing two well-received essays on society and aesthetics, he turned his attention to politics. He entered public life in the middle 1760s as private secretary to the great Whig magnate the marquis of Rockingham, which led to his election in 1765 to the House of Commons, where he would sit until 1794. In the 1770s, as part of Lord Rockingham’s “political connection,” he defended the American colonies in their developing clash with English commercial and imperial policy.

By 1780 he had also emerged as the principal critic of what was considered George III’s corrupt interference with the independence of the House of Commons. Although Burke saw the power of the Crown as a threat to the ancient English Constitution and its sacred principles of mixed government and the separation of power, in the 1780s he also spoke out strongly against the radical agitation associated with the Yorkshire movement and the reform effort of the Younger Pitt. Democratic enlargement of the suffrage was, he argued, also a threat to the perfectly balanced English Constitution; it would admit the people to too great a share of power.

In the late 1780s Burke turned much of his parliamentary energy to two causes, the impeachment proceedings against Warren Hastings, the former governor-general of the East India Company and legislative efforts to improve the status of Catholics in both England and Ireland. These efforts paled in significance, however, as the French Revolution dominated the last years of his life. More than any other figure in English public life, Burke mobilized sentiment against the Jacobin cause at home and abroad. In the course of this, he split the Whig party, denouncing his former colleagues for their continued sympathy with the French experiment.

Few of his contemporaries had neutral views on this amazing public career.