  |
The life and times of Edmund Burke
There are many biographical entries on Edmund Burke to be found on the internet. Unfortunately many of those are hopelessly off track when it comes to commenting on and interpreting his speeches and writing. This is not to be wondered at. Burke sometimes caused embittered opposition during his life time, especially on some of the major issues of the day: revolutionary America, India and Governor Hastings, Ireland, revolutionary France. Rather than responding to his arguments, many of his political detractors (inside and outside the House) resorted to sneer, smear and misrepresentation. Indeed, that was the only resort for many because they could not get a grasp on his arguments.
Many of the charges and insults brought against Burke continue to be peddled today: he was inconsistent, given to nostalgia, a flatterer of the aristocracy, emotional and hysterical, his speeches in the house were mere rhetoric designed to persuade, and so on. The nastiness and misrepresentation is nowhere more evident than in that paradigm of malignant political nastiness, Karl Marx. Marx, whose private life rivalled the character of his philosophy, said of Burke:
The sycophant — who in the pay of the English oligarchy played the romantic laudator temporis acti against the French Revolution just as, in the pay of the North American colonies at the beginning of the American troubles, he had played the liberal against the English oligarchy — was an out-and-out vulgar bourgeois.
This sort of comment levelled at the political and religious conservative is recognisable. It characterises much of the rhetoric of today's politically correct class. In Australia, it has been exemplified brilliantly by the unrelenting vilification of former Prime Minister John Howard, one of the most successful prime ministers in the nation's history, and also one of the most Burkean in his political behaviour and principles. Howard's Burkean influences, which give the clue to his action, are also tragically misunderstood by those mindlessly repeating the mythologies of their class.
Returning to Marx's put-down, anyone who reads Burke attentively will know there was no inconsistency in Burke's support for the American colonies and his ferocious attack on the French revolutionaries. In the first, Burke was against the misuse of parliamentary authority, in the second, against the destruction of political authority of existing societies and governments by the theorists of democracy. It is clear in the tenor of Marx's comment that he understands this. The name calling, misrepresentation, ridicule and smear are well-known political tactics of the left/politically correct class, especially when argument won't work. They have often proven successful. Marx set a standard to which his devotees strive to live up to. And they do.
The account below from the Irish Literature Companion gives accurate biographical information. For an excellent biography on Burke, I recommend Conor Cruise O'Brien's book, The Great Melody. My own book provides biographical information and an interpretation of the causes Burke supported. It is still in preparation.
Irish Literature Companion: Edmund Burke
Burke, Edmund (1729-1797), political philosopher; born at Arran Quay, Dublin, the son of a Protestant lawyer and a Catholic mother, Mary Nagle from Co. Cork. He spent some years in Co. Cork with his mother's people, then joined the Quaker School in Ballitore, Co. Kildare, before going to Trinity College Dublin. He studied law at the Middle Temple in London. A Vindication of Natural Society (1756) was a defence of the established social order. In 1757 he married Jane Nugent, a Catholic, and in the same year published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, his treatise on aesthetics. In 1758 he began to edit the newly-established Annual Register, a yearly digest of politics, history, and the arts. In 1765 Burke became private secretary to Lord Rockingham, the Prime Minister, and was returned as MP for Wendover, throwing himself into Commons activity. Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770) grew out of his anger at the failure of the Rockingham ministry to control George III's interventionist approach to Parliament. In 1773 Burke spent a month in Paris; there he encountered Diderot, one of the French philosophes whom he would later attack in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, and also met Louis XV, the Dauphin, and the Dauphine Marie Antoinette at Versailles. In April 1774, by which time he was the Rockingham spokesman on American affairs, he delivered his Speech on American Taxation in the Commons, arguing vehemently against the imposition of a tea tax. In this year he also became MP for Bristol. Around this time he became a close friend of Charles James Fox. He invested in the East India Company and began to take an interest in Indian affairs. Burke was the driving force behind a Commons select committee on India, whose Ninth Report (1782) gave a detailed account of mismanagement and corruption in the East India Company. He attacked Warren Hastings, Governor-General of Bengal, whose impeachment was to occupy him on and off from 1786 to 1795, when Hastings was finally acquitted. On the centenary of the Glorious Revolution (4 November 1788) Dr Richard Price, a Dissenting minister, gave a speech in London welcoming the events unfolding in France, Burke read the speech in early 1789 and immediately began writing his Reflections. A powerful defence of English constitutional liberty, it developed and expanded the central tenets of his political thought. Burke's Appeal from the Old to the New Whigs (1791) warned against the tyranny of government by democratic majority. Fearful that revolutionary principles would find a ready audience in Ireland, Burke supported the Catholic Committee in Dublin then campaigning for relief measures [see Catholic Emancipation]. His Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792) argued the necessity of representation for Catholics. Letters on a Regicide Peace (1795/6) urged Britain to defend the established order in Europe. In a Letter to a Noble Lord (1796) he defended himself against an insult in the House of Lords regarding his civil-list pension, offering a dignified appraisal of his own career in the service of constitutional freedom. Although dying of stomach cancer, he continued to attack French expansionism and to excoriate the Protestant ascendancy in the Dublin Parliament for their intransigence on the Catholic question. Burke was the architect of modern British conservative thought, the leading principles of which he shaped in his reflections upon the great questions of his time.
Bibliography
Paul Langford (ed.), The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (1981- ); and Conor Cruise O'Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (1992).
From: http://www.answers.com/topic/edmund-burke
Link to a wonderful painting of The Literary Club of which Edmund Burke was a member: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Club_%28Literary_Club%29
Comment:
gerard@gerardcharleswilson.com