Discussion of Chapter Six, ‘Reputation, Reason and the Enlightenment Project’, Second Part on ‘Thought’ of Jesse Norman’s book EDMUND BURKE: PHILOSOPHER, POLITICIAN AND PROPHET
Chapter Six, ‘Reputation, Reason and the Enlightenment Project’ begins the Second Part on ‘Thought’ of Jesse Norman’s book Edmund Burke: Philosopher, Politician And Prophet. Norman surveys the reaction to Burke’s writings and speeches following Burke’s death in 1797. He cites the views of many well-known historical figures in addition to lesser known names in the fields of academia, politics and literature. His conclusion, with which one should readily agree even on a brief reading of the opinions, is that there was much ‘bipartisan esteem’ of Burke’s thought. ‘Amid the ferment of early nineteenth century social, economic and political change,’ he says, ‘many different writers were able over time to find ideas of enduring value within Burke.’ (KL 2320)
‘In the twentieth century,’ he continues, ‘Burke was pressed into service on numerous occasions.’ Those occasions were the fight against communism during the Cold War (the 1950s and 1960s) and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It was Burke’s anti-totalitarian rhetoric that American conservatives drew on to drive forward their fight against communism, which represented all forms of totalitarianism. Norman’s tendentious tone here makes it clear he is not convinced of there being any justification for this service. He ends the survey with the following rather puzzling comment.
There has been a persistent desire by some conservative writers to relocate Burke away from a Lockean framework of natural rights and find in him a specifically Christian, indeed Thomist, doctrine of natural law. (KL 2349)
Norman should know better than most that Burke never was in a Lockean framework of natural rights to be relocated away from. Those that situated Burke ‘in a specifically Christian, indeed, Thomist, doctrine of natural law’ never claimed that anyone thought he was in a Lockean framework of abstract natural rights. How could they? Burke was boisterously scornful of abstract individual subjective rights. The issue for them was how to account for Burke’s frequent and crucial appeals to the eternal laws of God and show how they were consistent with other elements of his philosophy that most agreed about. There is an important question here that’s being missed: what philosophical principles did commentators during the nineteenth century think underwrote Burke’s thought, if any at all? Norman pulls up in front of this question, despite some explicit comments by leading philosophers. At this point I ask you to indulge me while I take some material from a draft of my own book on Burke.[1]
Burke ended his life as the celebrated scourge of the new egalitarian ideas being ‘smuggled’ across the channel to infect British society. His most famous work against the ideas of the French Revolution (Reflections on the Revolution in France) was received then and ever since as a counter-revolutionary manifesto.[2] But in the ensuing years both liberal and conservative British politicians drew on Burke’s writings, each de-emphasizing those parts repugnant to their political vision. The Tories drew on his counter-revolutionary writings and the Liberals sought support in the American speeches and pamphlets.[3] (This is as Norman has depicted it.) If attention was given to the possible philosophical foundations of his speeches and writings, he was considered by the middle of the nineteenth century to be an uncomplicated utilitarian. The idea of his being a liberal or conservative utilitarian was to remain unchallenged until mid-twentieth century when a far from finished debate was set off by those who came to the conclusion that Burke’s political philosophy was founded on classical and scholastic natural law. Natural Law permeated all his speeches and writings, it was claimed.
The utilitarian view was understandable because we find Burke constantly disqualifying speculative thinking in political activity in favour of a sober and prudential judgment linked to the concrete circumstances presented to the politician in his actual task of governing. The criteria for this sober judgment were the happiness, benefit, peace or otherwise of the people. In 1978, J.R. Dinwiddy takes up the defence of this position and produces many quotations from Burke in support (e.g. in Fox’s India Bill: ‘all political power which is set over men…ought to be some way or another exercised ultimately for their benefit[4]). Burke’s utilitarianism, however, is not of the Benthamite sort according to Dinwiddy where the balance of pleasure and pain determines the moral quality of actions. Dinwiddy presents Burke’s principle of utility in this way:
Insofar as Burke has been interpreted as a utilitarian, this interpretation has not involved (so far as I am aware) the ascription to him of purely hedonistic values but has rested on the argument that his mode of thought was basically teleological or consequentialist: that he regarded utility in the broad sense or conduciveness to the general well-being as a better criterion of moral and political judgment than any code of absolute rights or laws.[5]
Except perhaps for the claim of a teleological mode of thought (which requires further explanation) most of the 19th century utilitarian critics of Burke saw his principle of utility more or less in this way. Certainly they saw an irresolvable opposition between a principle of utility and a code of abstract inalienable rights, and there was no question that Burke disqualified such abstract rights. Burke’s speeches on the British government’s disputes with the American colonists were frequently cited to support this view. They were superior, for example, to the speeches and pamphlets on the French Revolution as these were alleged to be ‘marred by blemishes from which the pleas for peace with America are free’ [6]. The blemishes evoked an illiberal picture inconsistent with Burke’s role as the defender of the oppressed against the arbitrary use of power by the Crown and its supporters. Burke’s appeals to God, Church, religion, order, hierarchy and the laws of nature gave rise to this unpleasant side. It was all clearly discordant with the principle of utility (allegedly) used so frequently against the speculative arguments supporting either crown prerogative or the supreme authority of parliament. The ‘illiberal’ Burke was sometimes explained away as the imbalance that on occasions afflicts great minds.[7]
This idea of imbalance is taken further in a quotation Norman cites from Thomas Moore’s biography of Sheridan: ‘His mind, indeed, lies parted asunder in his works, like some vast continent severed by a convulsion of nature – each portion peopled by its own giant race of peoples, differing altogether in features and language, and committed in eternal hostility with each other.’ Norman uses quotations such as this to raise the issue of consistency in Burke, to which I will come back. This weak explanation offered by those forced to acknowledge the undeniable frequency of Burke’s invocation of God and His eternal laws could not go unchallenged indefinitely. Was it just possible that the constant appeals to God’s laws were a clue?
In the early post World War II years a new generation of critics claimed that the framework of Burke’s thoughts had its roots in classical and scholastic natural law whose origins could be traced back through the medieval scholastics, the canon lawyers, Church Fathers, Cicero, the Stoics, to aspects of Aristotle’s and Plato’s philosophy – all of whom Burke alluded to in one way or another. Chief among those who developed the natural law view was Peter Stanlis whose book Edmund Burke and the Natural Law remains an important, if deficient, reference.[8] Stanlis evidently felt that he had to stay arguing his case against the utilitarian Burke because more than thirty years later he produced another book that covered much the same ground as the first.[9]
He acknowledged a principle of utility in Burke’s thinking but said this utility must be seen within and subordinate to a classical natural law framework. On this reading, Burke says that man’s reason is compelled to recognise God’s authorship of creation and the order within it. God’s laws govern that order. With the prescriptions of God’s laws always before our mind, we go on to make particular judgments about what actions and policies will be of the greatest benefit to the particular community in which we live. In all human activity, God’s moral law must be presupposed whatever considerations of benefit or otherwise come up for discussion. I think Stanlis is right. Again I offer a passage in support that I have quoted a number times during my presentations:
Circumstances perpetually variable, directing a moral prudence and discretion, the general principles of which never vary, must alone prescribe a conduct fitting on such occasions.
Remarks on the Policy of the Allies (1793)
Stanlis signals the starting point for the utilitarian view of Burke ‘[f]rom at least the appearance of Buckle’s The History of Civilization in England(1857-1861).[10] He calls the opponents of his natural law view ‘Burke’s utilitarian and positivist critics’. He sums up his case against them in this way: ‘The “sophisters, economists, and calculators” who Burke predicted would triumph after his era, garbled his principle of moral prudence, misunderstood his distrust of abstract metaphysical rights, failed to consider his conception of the law of nations, and refused to treat seriously his appeals to normative “nature” even when they were aware of them; yet they claimed him for themselves and imposed their claim on the twentieth century.’[11] This assertive passage suggests that Stanlis had more than the issue of Burke’s utility in mind. He appears concerned with the possibility that Burke’s powerful rhetoric could be used in our present ‘positivist’ godless era to justify political action that Burke would certainly have opposed. This seems legitimate. Demonstrating a political motivation in supporters of utilitarianism would weaken the utilitarian case. He cites some celebrated names of the 19th and 20th centuries to give form to the (positivist) utilitarian views on Burke.[12] John Morley, he says, gave ‘classic expression’ to this view.
The defenders of expediency as the criterion of morals are commonly charged… with holding a doctrine that lowers the moral capabilities, and that would ruin society if it were unfortunately to gain acceptance. The king and the minister in 1774 entertained this view, and scorned to submit their policy to so mean a test as that prescribed by the creed of utility. If they had listened to the voice of the most eloquent and sagacious of the upholders of this test, they would have saved the empire… The actual bearings of the circumstances, so visible to anybody who, like Burke, looked upon them from the point of high practical sense, were hidden from the sight of men who surrounded themselves with a hazy medium of abstract and universally applicable ideas…[13]
Morley clearly thought the king and his ministers were well aware of the general argument from utility but rejected it. Morley goes on to enlarge upon the opposition between Burke’s lofty principle of utility (‘the appeal to public convenience and practical justice’) and the invocation of indemonstrable universal abstract rights. Stanlis shows that the supporters of the utilitarian interpretation generally saw the issue as the opposition between utility and universal abstract rights. The favourable comparison Charles E.Vaughn and George Sabine, two respected 20th century critics, made between Burke and Scottish philosopher David Hume more than justified this view. First, Charles E. Vaughn:
From the beginning, Burke recognises that, in method and principle, the struggle is between expedience and judicial Right… In his view of things, Right is always contrasted with, and opposed to, expediency… In this we shall find the key to the whole discussion…the last appeal is not to Rights but to expediency… He stood side by side with Hume and Bentham in the assault upon abstract ideas of Right, in their constant reference of everything to expediency.[14]
Sabine makes an even closer comparison between Burke and Hume:
Burke made an important contribution to the nineteenth century proposal to replace the system of natural law… In a sense Burke accepted Hume’s negations of reason and the law of nature. Burke showed precisely… the reaction that was to follow upon Hume’s destruction of the eternal verities of reason and natural law… It is true that he never denied the reality of natural rights… However, like Hume, he believed that they were purely conventional… they arise not from anything belonging to nature or to the human species at large, but solely from civil society… Accordingly, Burke not only cleared away, as Hume had done, the pretense that social institutions depend on reason or nature but far more than Hume he reversed the scheme of values implied by the system of natural law.[15]
A view such as this takes us further than the question of a principle of utility in moral and political action. We now enter the more specialised field of metaphysics and epistemology. It is evident that Sabine places Burke in the distinctive empiricist camp of Locke, Hume and company. While Stanlis seems unaware of the significance of this wider context, Francis Canavan SJ takes the placing of Burke in the British Empiricist camp as his lead in the first chapter of his book, The Political Reason of Edmund Burke, where he argues more narrowly for a Thomistic natural law Burke.[16]
Canavan notes the views of Morley and Sir Leslie Stephens but focuses on 20th century views: ‘Laski, like several other writers, traced Burke’s empiricism to what he considered to be its roots in the critical theories of David Hume. “The metaphysics of Burke,” he said, “so far as one may use a term he himself would have repudiated, are largely those of Hume.” An American, Victor Hamm, suggested that Burke, in revolt against the “decadent nominalism” which he studied in Trinity College, Dublin, had turned, not to Hume, but to the similar epistemological theory of David Hartley. More recently Morton Frisch has advanced the thesis that Burke agreed with Aristotle in regard to practice but parted with him, by rejecting the supremacy of theory. Rather, he says, Burke adopted the position taken by Hume in his Treatise of Human Nature…’[17] The consensus of these 20th centuries critics, says Canavan, is that Burke must be placed in the tradition of British empiricism. We shall see in what follows that Morley and his critical companions were right as far as they went, but in not going far enough, that is, in considering how a principle of expedience can be accommodated in a classical realist framework, ended up by horribly distorting Burke’s political principles.
I won’t take the question of Thomistic natural law within the framework of classical realism any further in this essay, but refer the reader to the question of obligation in my essay Edmund Burke on what it means to be a people.
The different interpretations of Burke’s thought and the cherry-picking according to one’s political orientation raised, says Norman, not only the question of inconsistency in reasoning but also of motive. Norman takes the question of Burke’s motivations (that is, the impugning of Burke’s motivations) more seriously than I do. The charge was that cynical self-interest, or even treachery, are a better account of Burke’s clashing views than a simple failure of reason. Chief among those who tackled Burke from this angle was former friend and freedom colleague Thomas Paine. Paine famously claimed in The Rights of Man that Burke was ‘accustomed to kiss the aristocratical hand that hath purloined him from himself’ and that ‘He [wa]s not affected by the reality of distress touching the heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.’ In other words, Burke was motivated by snobbery – an abject subservience to a superior social class for advancement.
The impact of these comments is nothing more than their slickness or glibness. They are empty of argument. Without the backing of demonstration and meeting Burke’s argument about human nature and all that flows from that conception, they have no argumentative force. Paine does not take the trouble to do any such thing. It is clear he does not understand Burke’s reasoning and, second, his primary objective is to score politically – manipulate the prejudices of his audience. Comments of this sort are a naked political tactic and work best with uncritical minds or those in sympathy with the speaker’s political position. As in Burke’s day, so it is today. Paine’s comments are a paradigm example of the sorts of barbs and sneers (though most less striking) that are levelled at Prime Minister Abbott who plays a demonic role in the fantasies of Australia’s Left and needs to be put down in whatever verbal manner is effective.
So it also the case with that world class political nasty Karl Marx. Indeed, it’s possible that Marx set the modern template for the political sneer. He said this about Burke:
This sycophant – who in the pay of the English oligarchy played the romantic laudator temporis acti [one who praises past times] 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. “The laws of commerce are the laws of Nature, and therefore the laws of God.” …No wonder that, true to the laws of God and Nature, he always sold himself in the best market.’
The lazy sneer and mockery of this passage no doubt will be enough for members of Marx’s twenty-first century adherents, but for the rest it is empty of argument, and a cowardly side-stepping of Burke’s position on human nature and what reasoning in the human person entails. It is probable that being ‘an out-and-out vulgar bourgeois’ was Burke’s most grievous fault in Marx’s eyes.
A third important source of the charge that Burke was merely a hireling came from an approach to historical inquiry established by historian Sir Lewis Namier who asserted that self-interest operating in factions was the prime motivation in 18th century politics. To Namier and his followers, says Norman, ‘what mattered was the generality, the mean and the median, not the exception.’ The standard histories of great men, divided into Tories and Whigs, became outmoded as did the personalities they dealt with. Although Burke was rarely the subject of the Namierite examination, the dismissive, sometimes sneering asides, riled Burke’s admirers. Conor Cruise O’Brien was ferocious in his criticism of Namier and his school, equating them with those who haven’t the courage confront their opponents openly, but resort to sneering about them behind their backs. Again, it is the ad hominem fallacy that is employed to undermine Burke.
Taking the charges more seriously than me, Norman says if these people are right, that Burke is a paid propagandist, then his moral authority is completely undermined no matter the technical brilliance of his arguments. I reply, as I have outlined, that they don’t give any evidence that they are right. Thus there is no argument to answer. There is only the grubby political tactic to counter, and unfortunately the Left have proven far more slippery and ingenious in this respect than their opponents whose manners often stand in the way of the refinement required.
Norman, however, has set all this up to knock down. He takes the charges in their most serious aspect to show there is not a skerrick of truth in them. He does this by providing irrefutable written evidence that Burke entertained the same consistent ideas about government before entering the service of William Hamilton in 1761 and then of the Marquess of Rockingham in 1765. The evidence in the form of an essay on political parties dated 1757 surfaced as late as 2012. In it Burke discusses parties and factions in the same terms as in his major pamphlet, Thoughts on the Present Discontents, thirteen years later. The essay, says Norman, shows that Burke ‘had already mastered a large body of historical thought and political reflection on factions and party… and was already arguing the case, not merely against factional politics but, what was far more novel, in favour of parties as a source of good government – and doing so in terms that strikingly anticipated the Thoughts.’ (KL 2418) Two quotations are cited as evidence.
Burke denounced factions as ‘cabals fomented by ambition swelled up by popular madness and nothing more. Hence it is that party is always useful, factions always pernicious, which has hardly been enough considered.’ (KL 2403)
A more detailed description of faction follows:
…we have at the present no party properly so called among us… but… mere factions: without any design, without any principle, but only a junction of people intriguing for their own interest… there can be no body of people united by a bond strong enough to hold them together, or animated by a principle vigorous enough to give them activity… when they have not some general scheme and some fixed object.’ (KL 2410)
Norman claims ‘this essay is a decisive rebuttal to Paine, Marx and Namier.’ I agree, but would add that Paine, Marx and Namier have an intellectual case so weak as to be only useful for political manipulation – which is often the primary purpose. Acquisition of political power is the aim, not intellectual demonstration.
The final point I would like to discuss briefly is the way Norman understands and employs that historical period known as the Enlightenment. His brief discussion of the Enlightenment provides a background to a detailed comparison of Burke’s thought with that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘It is’ he says, ‘against Rousseau that Burke most sharply defines himself.’
Norman adopts the meaning of the Enlightenment that is assumed in most academic discussions and classrooms. It is that period where individual reason, riding on the back of the fantastic development in mathematics and discoveries in science, became the final arbiter in human decision making. All traditional authorities, whether political, religious, philosophical or customary fell before the might of individual reason. Perhaps this is a caricature of the ‘Enlightenment’ generally understood, but it serves my purpose.
My first contact with a different understanding of the Enlightenment came with my research on natural law in Burke’s writings. I discovered a great deal of literature on the Scottish Enlightenment in which a paradigm of natural law differed from that of Thomistic natural law. The question arose about whether Burke’s natural law views were in line with the Protestant Natural Law of the Scottish Enlightenment or that of Thomistic philosophy. I decided for the second.
Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb took that split much further in her book published in 2004, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments.[18] This is the most important book relating to the study of Burke that I have read in recent years and has modified my ideas on natural law in Burke’s thinking.
Himmelfarb distinguishes between three Enlightenments that show marked differences. An understanding of the Enlightenment in which individual reason reigns supreme, she calls the French Enlightenment. An ‘ideology of reason’ drives the French Enlightenment. The American Enlightenment is driven by a ‘politics of freedom’. In the French and American Enlightenments concepts such as reason, rights, nature, liberty, equality, tolerance, science, progress predominate. In the case of the French Enlightenment, ‘reason’ heads the list. Our reading so far of Burke’s thoughts on the American and French conflicts would confirm this interpretation. The Americans’ conflict with the British government was all about freedom for the American colonies. Burke vigorously attacked the French Revolutionaries’ idea of reason.
What is missing from the above list of concepts is ‘virtue’. Himmelfarb claims that a ‘sociology of virtue’ was the driving force in the British Enlightenment. There was no clash between reason and virtue. Reason took a secondary place to virtue in the functioning of a society of people. Virtue in this context was not personal virtue but referred to the social virtues – compassion, benevolence, sympathy. It is important to understand this, says Himmelfarb, because the movement in England and Scotland – the British Enlightenment – was the ‘progenitor’ of the two other Enlightenments.
Human nature was the first study of the moral philosophers who took the lead in the British Enlightenment. A study of human nature revealed a moral sense to be central to the human person. Reason served this moral sense. We can think here of David Hume’s famous dictum. Hume was one of the leading moral philosophers of the British Enlightenment,: ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.’ Similar but in some respect crucially different thoughts about reason are to be found in Burke under the heading of ‘natural feeling’.
Though they admired Locke’s political writings, the British moral philosophers reacted to a large extent to his metaphysics. For Locke there were no innate speculative principles (epistemological principles) and no innate practical principles (moral principles). Virtue was approved because of its utility – profitable and conducive to one’s self-interest and happiness, the promotion of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Virtue did not proceed from an innate idea. Things could be judged good and evil only by reference to pleasure or pain, which were themselves the product of sensation.
The Earl of Shaftesbury, whom Himmelfarb names as the leader of the British Enlightenment, did not mince words in his attack on Locke:
‘Twas Mr Locke that struck at all fundamentals, threw all order and virtue out of the world… Virtue, according to Mr Locke, has no other measure, law, or rule, than fashion and custom: morality, justice, equity, depend only on law and will… And thus neither right nor wrong, virtue nor vice are anything in themselves; nor is there any trace or idea of them naturally imprinted on human minds. Experience and our catechism teach us all!’[19]
Himmelfarb says of Shaftesbury’s contrary views on morality, quoting from his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times:
Virtue, according to Shaftesbury, derived not from religion, self-interest, sensation or reason. All of these were instrumental in supporting virtue, but were not the immediate or primary source of it. What was antecedent to these was the ‘moral sense’, the ‘sense of right and wrong’. It was this sense that was ‘predominant… inwardly joined to us, and implanted in our nature,’ ‘a first principle in our constitution and make,’ as natural as ‘natural affection itself.’ This ‘natural affection,’…was social affection’, an affection for society and the people, which, so far from being at odds with self-affection, actually contributed to one’s personal pleasure and happiness. A person whose actions were motivated entirely or even largely by self-affection – by self-love, self-interest, or self-good – was not virtuous. Indeed, he was ‘in himself vicious,’ for the virtuous man was motivated by ‘a natural affection for his kind.’[20]
It was the task of the British philosophers to enhance that moral sense and by it steer state and society.
With those few words on the British Enlightenment, making a crucial distinction between the French and British Enlightenments – an understanding which is necessary for an understanding of Burke’s thoughts on morality and politics – I will end this essay.
[1] Edmund Burke: Knowing and Reasoning in Politics. This will be a rewrite and updating of my Master’s thesis.
[2] ‘It is the manifesto of a counter-revolution…,’ Vindiciae Gallicae (1791) by James Mackintosh, quoted in Connor Cruise O’Brien’s introduction to the Penguin edition of theReflections, p. 51.
[3] The Conservative-Liberal division does not equate exactly with the division of Tory-Whig. The story is far more complicated. For the different strands of Whiggism one should refer to: J.G.A. Pocock. ‘The Varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform’. In J.G.A. Pocock. Virtue Commerce And History, pp. 215-310. For an idea of the historiographical differences in Burkean interpretation one can refer to; Conor Cruise O’Brien. The Great Melody. London, Mandarin Paperbacks (Reed Consumer Books Ltd), 1993, pp. xxxi-lxxv.
[4] J.R. Dinwiddy, ‘Burke and the Utilitarians: A Rejoinder’. Studies in Burke and his Time, 19 (1978) 119-126.
[5] J. R. Dinwiddy. Utililty and Natural Law in Burke’s Thought: A Reconsideration. Studies in Burke and His Time, 16 (1974-75) 105-06.
[6] F.J.C. Hearnshaw. ‘Introduction’. In Edmund Burke. Burke Speeches on America. A.J.F. Collins ed., Introduction by F.J.C. Hearnshaw. London, University tutorial Press Ltd., 1924. p. v
[7] C.B. Macpherson. Burke. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1980, pp. 4/5. ‘The historian Henry Thomas Buckle was more forthright, holding that in his French period Burke had gone out of his mind, that “the balance tottered”, and “the proportions of that gigantic intellect were disturbed”.’
[8] Peter Stanlis. Edmund Burke and the Natural Law. Ann Arbor, Michigan University, 1958.
[9] Peter Stanlis. Edmund Burke: The Enlightenment and Revolution. New Brunswick, Transaction Publishers, 1991.
[10] Stanlis, Edmund Burke: The Enlightenment and Revolution, p. 3.
[11] Stanlis, Edmund Burke: The Enlightenment and Revolution, p. 8.
[12] In addition to John Morley and Charles E. Vaughn mentioned below, Stanlis cites the following: ‘Among Morley’s contempories, Lecky and Sir Leslie Stephen shared his view that Burke was a utilitarian (p. 5).’ ‘Most twentieth century scholars on Burke such as Halevy, Whitney, Osborn, and Lester, have simply repeated with variations the false contentions of Morley and his successors (p. 7).’
[13] Stanlis, Edmund Burke: The Enlightenment and Revolution, p. 4.
[14] Stanlis, Edmund Burke: The Enlightenment and Revolution, p. 6.
[15] Stanlis, Edmund Burke: The Enlightenment and Revolution, pp. 7/8.
[16] Francis P. Canavan SJ. The Political Reason of Edmund Burke. Durham, Duke University Press, 1960.
[17] Canavan, The Political Reason of Edmund Burke, p. 3.
[18] I am drawing on the first 30 pages of Himmelfarb’s book.
[19] Himmelfarb, p. 29
[20] Himmelfarb, pp. 27/28