A problematic monograph studying Edmund Burke’s establishment as founder of British conservatism. Burke’s supple yet vociferous politics left the Georgian / early Victorians to decide whether he was a great statesman and who were his heirs: neither the Whigs nor the Tories could claim the whole of him, Peel and Disraeli making no overt appeals to his legacy. So too were they unsure of his Irish heritage. By mid century, however, in part because his contrasting the English constitution with French tumult, he was seen as a conservative genius — the author ignores Blackstone or Bagehot! — while Matthew Arnold and others acclaimed him a literary prodigy. Later, he became generally fashionable as an aphorist, a kind of Mark Twain. Amid constitutional reform of the 1860s, Liberals couldn’t accept his prior opposition; however, revisionist appraisals by Leslie Stephens and especially John Morley helped bring him into the Irish Home Rule debate of the 1880s. Gladstone was his foremost Liberal supporter, the Liberal Unionists used him the most. The author asserts Irish conflict, in combination with the Unionists transition to the Tories, was the turning point. When it became evident the Liberals would not reconcile, the question of who truly succeeded Burke reached its final phase, ironically echoing the split between Fox and Burke over the French Revolution. Yet there were two additional dynamics at work. Burke’s oeuvre was reduced to body of political theory, notably by Hugh Cecil, son of Lord Salisbury, in which he was recognized as a pioneer of applying historical method in deriving just politics. Separately, he was widely studied in schools as a paradigm of English rhetoric as well as the English state (in contradistinction to the French Revolution). Sensibly organized but poorly written and occasionally conceptually muddy, the work is irredeemably undermined by both a rushed ‘epilogue’ citing a David Bromwich quote as evidence Burke is not in fact at conservative at all, and more importantly failing to deliver on the title’s promise, British political conservatism being nowhere treated in the whole.
Conservative Party
22. Jones, Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism (22 Oct 2017)
A problematic monograph studying Edmund Burke’s establishment as founder of British conservatism. Burke’s supple yet vociferous politics left the Georgian / early Victorians to decide whether he was a great statesman and who were his heirs: neither the Whigs nor the Tories could claim the whole of him, Peel and Disraeli making no overt appeals to his legacy. So too were they unsure of his Irish heritage. By mid century, however, in part because his contrasting the English constitution with French tumult, he was seen as a conservative genius — the author ignores Blackstone or Bagehot! — while Matthew Arnold and others acclaimed him a literary prodigy. Later, he became generally fashionable as an aphorist, a kind of Mark Twain. Amid constitutional reform of the 1860s, Liberals couldn’t accept his prior opposition; however, revisionist appraisals by Leslie Stephens and especially John Morley helped bring him into the Irish Home Rule debate of the 1880s. Gladstone was his foremost Liberal supporter, but the Liberal Unionists used him the most. The author asserts Irish conflict, in combination with the Unionists transition to the Tories, was the turning point. When it became evident the Liberals would not reconcile, the question of who truly succeeded Burke reach its final phase, ironically echoing the split between Fox and Burke over the French Revolution. Yet there were two additional dynamics at work. Burke’s oeuvre was reduced to body of political theory, notably by Hugh Cecil, son of Lord Salisbury, in which he was recognized as a pioneer of applying historical method in deriving just politics. Separately, he was widely studied in schools as a paradigm of English rhetoric as well as the English state (in contradistinction to the French Revolution). Sensibly organized but poorly written and occasionally conceptually muddy, the work is irredeemably undermined by both a rushed ‘epilogue’ citing a David Bromwich quote as evidence Burke is not in fact at conservative at all, and more importantly failing to deliver on the title’s promise, British political conservatism being nowhere treated in the whole.