

Edmund Burke as painted by James Northcote

A Burkean event took place in New Haven not long ago when two distinguished leaders at Yale proposed to the Proprietors of the Grove Street Cemetery, before a standing-room-only crowd of townspeople, that to tear down the cemetery wall would “create an inviting and open atmosphere” for passersby.

The cemetery is the oldest municipally incorporated burial ground in the country, older than Père-Lachaise in Paris. Eli Whitney, Noah Webster, Roger Sherman, and Samuel F. B. Morse lie there along with African-American Civil War veterans. The entrance gate and wall erected in the 1840s is a unique expression of the neo-Egyptian architectural style of the time. A headstone on an empty gravesite salutes the memory of Glenn Miller, the trombonist and band leader whose plane disappeared over the English Channel during World War II; he had formed his 418th Army Air Force band at Yale.

The debate was civil and moderate in tone, but stark. It became a male versus female issue. The women of the town prevailed. Their argument was, in essence: “Who are we to do such a thing as against all those generations in the past, and those yet to be born?” It was a Burkean moment, although no one at the time seemed to recognize it as such.

For Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century Irish statesman who served in the British House of Commons, the hallmark of a sane society is reconciliation of the present and the future to the past. We live our lives in the present, with time always progressing forward in a linear direction, so Burke’s respect for the past makes him conservative. Given the modern world’s appetite for change, Burke’s emphasis on continuity and permanence makes him seem like a strange outsider. Furthermore, Burke’s conservatism is expressed in a fierce and fiery, almost reactionary, style.

This puzzled his detractors, who were constantly suspecting Burke of some ulterior motive, of exerting some nefarious influence in the cause of some hidden agenda. The Duke of Newcastle said, “Burke’s real name is O’Bourke, a wild Irishman, a Jacobite, a papist, a concealed Jesuit.” At best, but equally threatening to the state, Burke was an eighteenth-century Socrates, a dangerous gadfly, challenging the settled assumptions of Britain. The portrayal of Burke in Boswell’s Life of Johnson avoids quoting the statesman directly, and sometimes disguises the identity of the “Burkean” speaker, as if to conceal Burke from the authorities. If this was a conservative, it was a strange conservative indeed. Moreover, Burke took contrarian positions on world issues, positions his critics found difficult to reconcile: religious liberty for Ireland, independence for America, justice and respect for India’s traditions, and to hell with the French Revolution.

Indeed, Burke presented a formidable challenge to friend and foe: a great intellect, a stunning orator, propelled by an intense inner energy that was hard to take. Burke seemed to concentrate all his capabilities in the immediate moment. If you found yourself conversing with Burke, it was said, you felt as if you were being “grazed by a powerful machine.” Samuel Johnson, who yielded to no one in considering himself a great man, repeatedly praised Burke as a great man. If Burke should drop in at a blacksmith’s shop to have his horse shod, Johnson said, the blacksmith would say, “We have had an extraordinary man here.” Even to the domineering Johnson, Burke was an intimidating presence: “His stream of mind is perpetual.” Once, when Johnson was feeling poorly, he said, “That fellow [Burke] calls forth all my powers. Were I to see Burke now, it would kill me.”

N ot since Cicero had a major political thinker been a practicing politician in the center of the arena. So it is refreshingly welcome to have Burke reassessed today by another politician, Jesse Norman, Member of Parliament for Hereford and South Herefordshire who has taught philosophy at University College London.

Edmund Burke: The First Conservative is not a standard biography. Norman has set his book in two parts. Part One, “Life,” is a lively review of Burke’s political career from his “outsider” origins to his entanglement in the causes of Ireland, America, India, and France. How those controversies generated his ideas is largely left to Part Two of the book, “Thought.”

Norman locates Burke in many ways as an Enlightenment figure. By the same token, Burke was presciently aware that Enlightenment ideas could produce deep social pathologies as prescribed by, in Burke’s words, “the perverse and paradoxical genius of Rousseau.” This position enabled Burke, the author argues, to become “the hinge or pivot of political modernity,” the first and greatest critic of the modern age, and the earliest postmodern political thinker. The great paradox is that “Burke the anti-radical becomes a far more radical thinker than Karl Marx himself.”

Norman analyzes Burke’s ideas, although they resist brief summary, through a coherent four-part framework: the social self, the political party, the individual, and human values.

First, there is the social self. Unlike Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, Burke does not begin with the state of nature. Rather, he takes as given the reality of human society itself, which is where most of our humanity is derived from. Norman misreads Burke in asserting that “for Burke, there can be no such thing as the state of nature”; in fact, Burke says that we are in the state of nature: the society we have evolved into naturally over time, with liberty as the result of a well-ordered society.

For Burke, the social order is, in the broadest sense, what constitutes a nation. The concept of nationhood as social order is one reason why Burke “is instantly able to see France as a country which has, in effect, forgotten itself.” Burke’s “whole philosophy stands as a reproof,” Norman writes, “to the revolutionary rationalism inspired by Rousseau.”

Second, Norman turns to Burke’s insight that properly functioning political parties are the essence of mature governance. Through them, ideologies clash. Burke never seems to have contemplated the idea of parties as mass-membership organizations campaigning across a nation, but it is Burke who first famously defined the modern conception of a political party as “a body of men united for promoting for their joint endeavors the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.” Parties, in Burke’s view, bring stability to politics, give focus to national purpose, moderate government, give ordinary people a part to play, and provide testing grounds for political ideas. Burke stresses that the responsibility of a Member of Parliament is to exercise mature judgment, not simply carry out the wishes of his constituents. In all this, Burke developed what is, or should be, the fundamental conception of a modern representative political party.

Third, Norman focuses on the Enlightenment idea that the human individual is the basic unit of moral, political, and economic accounting. Thus, individual freedoms are paramount. To Norman, “liberal individualism” is today pervasive across most areas of human life, including education, race, health, religion, human rights, trade, development, and migration. From a Burkean perspective, Norman says, liberal individualism has its own points of weakness. For Burke, there is little meaning in the idea of people as individuals apart from society. If individuals artificially separate themselves from society, liberty becomes license; individualism produces self-indulgence. All this, Norman says, has brought a succession of recent disasters and a kind of moral panic about Western society itself: drug use, loneliness, suicide, divorce, single motherhood and teenage pregnancy, and fears of a loss of local or national identity—all in a spreading belief that basic values of respect, hard work, and public service are being lost in celebrity worship, consumerism, and the money culture—all because of the rise of liberal individualism.

Finally, Norman finds hope in the extent to which the modern world is now rediscovering Burke’s wisdom through research findings in the social sciences. In the conclusion of his book, a chapter titled “The Recovery of Value,” Norman refers to recent research that supports Burke’s central themes: that humans have a distinctive social nature; that emotions guide reason, which itself is limited and fallible; that allegiance and identity are grounded in institutions which are the source of human well-being; that absolute freedom or “license” is disastrous for the person and for society; and that what matters most is for humans to live together according to shared rules and norms in a moral community. Norman concludes, “It is striking how much evidence has emerged in recent years for the basically social nature of humans,” as behavioral economics has, in particular, undermined the long-standing picture of man as “homo economicus.” Equally striking are anthropological studies showing that religions, far from being viruses or parasites, as the New Atheists assert, “are likely to have had evolutionary advantages for their members.”

W hile recognizing that Burke’s persona, like Walt Whitman’s, contains multitudes, Norman boldly summarizes Burke’s thought for our time. Any such effort, however, is fundamentally un-Burkean. There is no catching Leviathan with a hook. Burke’s writing and speaking—style and substance—are all of a piece, coming together organically. His 1790 masterpiece Reflections on the Revolution in France is clear, but stubbornly resistant to summation. There are no chapters or subheadings, no table of contents, no index. When the luminous intellectual historian Frank Turner edited a new edition of Burke in 2003, he was determined to produce an index. It was, Turner told me, “the damndest fool’s errand I ever set myself.” When he had finally completed it, he found that the first item he looked up in the index had not been included. To grasp the full force of Burke’s ideas, one must read through his entire oeuvre, without assistance.

More problematic is Norman’s interpretation of what it takes to bring Burke’s ideas to life in our time. Each of his four main “Burkean” chapters seem to intensify some of the worst aspects of the situation today.

Burke is correct that we humans are social beings, and Norman puts stress on the larger national social order. In the United States, a distinctively American character and order was devastated by the politico-cultural degradations of the Sixties. Since then, the government has happily moved into the role of supreme social-orderer in a way that ignores or spurns the deeply traditional institutions and allegiances Burke championed. Norman’s argument seems to deliver Burke bound and gagged to an overbearing state, which has eagerly moved into the vacuum left by the cultural elite’s eradication of traditional American society.

Burke’s advocacy for the political party may well be, as Norman argues, “the hinge of Anglo-American, and indeed the world’s political modernity,” with the two “big tent” political parties serving the cause of consolidating power in the United States within a political system otherwise designed by the Founders to disaggregate political sources of leverage. But this Burkean contribution, bundled inside Norman’s summation, suggests that one’s political party can be Burke’s “little platoon,” deserving deep allegiance as the foundation of social order—and this in the new twenty-first century, when the primary feature of representative government is, contrary to Burke’s precept, the politician’s fear of exercising mature judgment, slavishly following his constituency’s shifting moods.

This reality is moving our current politics ever more toward the direct democracy that brought down Athens and which led Burke to howl that “a perfect democracy where popular authority is absolute and unrestrained is therefore the most shameless thing in the world.” The same insight led the American Founders to protect their country, in its design, from the dangers of direct democracy.

In gathering Burke’s thoughts, Norman sets the statesman in opposition to the modern creed of individualism. To Norman, individualism cannot but produce self-indulgence; there is no possibility for George Washington’s view that a free society requires individuals capable of exercising the virtues of self-restraint, or Emerson’s declaration of the importance of self-reliance. Indeed, individual liberties are an inextricable part of the American national character. That tradition, in this telling, could be interpreted as impossibly wrong from the start, and now out of control. Most bizarrely, this view could link Burke to governmental policies aimed at entrenching a collective, anti-individualistic culture.

N orman’s summation of Burke’s thought, useful as it is for providing some core Burkean insights in an accessible manner, is too beholden to current governmental proclivities. How, then, do we approach Burke’s thought unless we go at it as did Gladstone, reading Burke’s writings every day? Some have said that within the central pages of Reflections on the Revolution in France, there is a logic chain, but no one yet has found it. To attempt to do so is also somewhat un-Burkean; the best readers of Burke simply absorb the meanings organically. Doing so reveals that Burke was a man of the Enlightenment in his attempt to retell the course of human history somewhat in the manner, if not the substance, of such attempts by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. These are the key points of Burke’s thought:

Burke argues governance requires more than one lifetime to comprehend. This is what Immanuel Kant thought too, but Kant was thinking about history yet to come whereas Burke is referring to the past, present, and future.

Burke, like other Enlightenment thinkers, refers to human nature as basic, but unlike them, he says it is too complex for any theory, policy, or ideology. Language is at the heart of it all; and in the French Revolution, Burke sees what Thucydides saw in the course of the collapse of Athens: words losing their meaning.

Burke’s most memorable passage is even more significant than its controversial fame.

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like the morning star full of life and splendor and joy.

Oh, what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream, when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor, and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.

But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom! The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone. It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.

Here, he speaks of the Queen not only as herself, but also as an “artificial person” in the Enlightenment sense. Yet, she also embodies the nation’s heritage in an anti-Enlightenment way.

The key to love of country, Burke then argues, is in “the spirit” of a gentleman and in religion, in which our “passions” instruct our “reason.” This calls to mind Plato’s idea of the soul as a tripartite of reason, desire, and spirit. Burke is here challenging the Enlightenment’s conceit that men were living in an Age of Reason.

The theater, Burke says, is “a school of moral sentiments.” This echoes Adam Smith’s idea of “the impartial spectator” we imagine observing and passing judgment on our doings. Here is a wholly different approach to the cult of entertainment that inundates us today. This leads to an image not unlike that in our time of “the moral—or silent—majority.” Just because “half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.” Shall we not think, here, of the media?

Burke then points to our advantages—that which we cherish and express in our “prejudices,” a word that, for Burke, unites the best instincts, character, and conduct of the self and society—and that upon which we base our civil society.

Then come the threats we must guard against: the idea that legitimacy requires a perfect (direct) democracy and the temptation to change the state whenever we choose, making us nothing more than “the flies of a summer.”

All this means that while there is no such thing as a “social contract,” society now is a contract, a partnership of the living, the dead, and those yet to be born. When we recognize and act on this we are in the state of nature.

Liberty comes from this, whereas theories or declarations of rights do not. Actual circumstances, not abstract proclamations, make a people free. When Hannah Arendt, in her contemplation of the Holocaust, recognized this in Burke, an unusual bond between liberal and conservative took place.

And if Burke had appeared in New Haven that evening, he would have added that for understanding society as a partnership, “Every college should have a graveyard in its midst.”