Eagleton, Terry. Saving Burke From the Tories

7/31/2019 Eagleton, Terry. Saving Burke From the Tories

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Eagleton, Terry. Saving Burke from the Tories.

New Statesman, 07/04/97, Vol. 126 Issue 4341, p. 32.

Abstract: Focuses on Irish philosopher Edmund Burke. Burke's transformation into an icon of British

conservatism; Burke's fight against the excesses of the British Empire during his time; Burke as a

philosopher who rightfully belongs to the left.; (AN 9707222247)

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Saving Burke from the Tories.

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SAVING BURKE FROM THE TORIES

Edmund Burke, foe of Thomas Paine and the French Revolution, is a Conservative philosophical

icon. It is time for the left to reclaim him

How did an Irish Whig come to be transformed into an English Tory? Edmund Burke has long

been a touchstone of English conservative thought, a revered apologist for tradition and establishment;

but it is unlikely that those who today drop his name in the bar-rooms of Conservative Associations have

read his scorching assault on the Penal Laws that oppressed Irish Roman Catholics in his own day -- a

work so full of fury that Burke wisely left it unpublished in his lifetime. He is remembered largely as

England's most eloquent opponent of the French Revolution; but if he denounced one revolution he

supported another, arguing for the right of the American people to be free of their imperial British

masters.

Burke had an extraordinary veneration for the status quo and the English constitution, one in

which it isn't hard to detect the anxiety of the outsider who needs to demonstrate his loyalty as insiders

often do not. The English cartoonists of his day never let him forget he was an Irishman, and one of his

political enemies claimed to find in his burnished parliamentary rhetoric the smack of "whiskey and

potatoes". Burke belongs to a long lineage of Irish immigrants to Britain who became more English than

the English. But if he idealised his adopted nation, he also hounded its iniquities. The East India Company

was part of the status quo and Burke, in his long campaign to bring its chief, Warren Hastings, to justice,

had no hesitation in clamouring for its abolition. He had known the oppressive effects of British colonialism

at first hand, in his native Ireland.

What most disgusted Burke intellectually was the metaphysical: the belief that politics should beguided by theoretical doctrine, universal principle and appeals to abstract rights. It is this metaphysical
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zeal which he denounced in the French Jacobins, and to which he opposed his own very English insistence

on custom and received practice, local sentiments and circumstances, the texture of a way of life rather

than its philosophical foundations. It is this historical pragmatism that has endeared him to those English

conservatives for whom theories and ideas can be left to sinister foreigners and shaggy-haired

intellectuals. But there is something grotesque about praising one of England's greatest political thinkers

as a man who hadn't an idea in his head. Burke was not a more eloquent version of a philistine Torycouncillor, believing that what matters is what works in practice. The East India Company worked well

enough, but this did not save it in Burke's steely judgment.

Burke was one of our finest political intellectuals, a man who, as Matthew Arnold remarked,

"saturates politics with thought". Far from dismissing universal rights and absolutes as so much left-wing

mythology, he insisted that Hastings' shabby behaviour in India must be judged by the same moral

principles that governed men and women's conduct at home, against those who tried to excuse Hastings'

crimes by appealing sophistically to the different cultural circumstances of the country he governed.

Burke held that the British must rule their colonies with due respect for local customs and beliefs.

If he elevated historical conditions over metaphysical rights, then so did Karl Marx, whose name is notquite so commonly dropped in modem-day Conservative Associations. In any case an appeal to

metaphysical rights can be conservative, and one to cultural circumstance can be radical. If Burke pleaded

the cause of the American colonials, it was because he saw nothing but abstract dogmatism in the claim

that the British had a right to tax a nation so far removed from them. The circumstances made all the

difference, and they turned out to be revolutionary.

It is unwise, then, to see a concern with cultural tradition as automatically conservative, and an

adherence to universal theories as necessarily on the left. Indeed quite a few American commentators on

Burke in the 1960s thought they had discovered just such a universal theory in his writing -- the theory of

natural law; and although this was doubtless part of an attempt by right-wing Americans to turn this 18th-

century Whig into a kind of proto-Cold Warrior, there may well be something in it. Burke's belief in

prescription, in the doctrine that political rights are guaranteed by the passage of time itself, is certainly a

strike against radicals such as Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, who would want to ground such rights

in nothing less than Nature. For Burke, history -- the fact that we have done something in a particular way

for a very long time -- is a kind of rationality in itself, incomparably more persuasive than any abstract

reasoning. But in the hands of Burke's Irish compatriots, this appeal to tradition was in fact politically

subversive: the Irish peasantry also believed in age-old custom, such as their right to own the land the

English had taken from them, whereas the English would have preferred them to forget about this

altogether. In England an appeal to tradition is usually on the political right; in Ireland there was nothing

more politically radical than antiquarian-ism. Remembrance is not always on the side of our rulers.

Nor, for that matter, is an attention to local cultural conditions of the kind that Burke so

magnificently urged. In an age of cultural studies, such as our own, it is the idea of culture that is radical,

and the notion of Nature that is very often conservative. The work of Burke stands at the fountainhead of

what Raymond Williams has called the "Culture and Society" tradition in England. For this current of

thought, at least in its later developments, Burke's concern with "organic" relations between human

beings, his scorn for a mean-spirited utilitarianism, becomes a powerful critique of industrial capitalism.

This is not to claim Burke as a closet Marxist. But nothing could be more of an affront to his values than

the neo-liberalism of our own time, in which an abstract, universal drive for profit rides roughshod over

much of what he held most dear: the cultural needs of particular communities, the importance of human

affections and customary bonds, the sense of history as a living presence, the preciousness of that which

cannot be bought or sold. Modern-day market forces represent, in Burkeian terms, a virulent new strain of

Jacobinism, even if the abstract dogmas in question are now those of Brussels bankers rather than French

philosophers. Burke's censure of the political blueprints of the French revolutionaries applies just as much

to the strategies of the global marketplace today:


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"Society is indeed a contract, but the state ought not to be considered nothing better than a

partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern,

to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be

looked on with other reverence; because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross

animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in

all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot beobtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but

between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."

Burke's hatred of the French revolutionaries was not, at root, reactionary. He opposed them not

so much because he disagreed with their political views, though he certainly did, but because he thought

those views spelt the death of political society as such. For Burke, the French revolution was an assault on

the very conditions of possibility of political culture, a kind of transcendental error, because in destroying,

as he saw it, the institutions of civil society, it did away with the very medium by which political power is

tempered and rendered tolerable.

Burke's conservative colleagues were quick enough to endorse this criticism when it came toFrance, but hardly when it concerned the miserable colony on their own doorstep. His animus against

autocrats was indeed in one sense conservative: he feared that they would breed mass disaffection, and

so threaten the status quo. The British, by failing to extend the blessings of the Whig settlement to their

Irish colonials, were obtusely driving this traditionalist religious nation into the arms of an unholy

revolutionism, just as they did with their American dependents. If Burke did not approve of Irish

republicanism, he saw precisely how the British were responsible for creating it. But his case against

oligarchy is not simply self-interested. As a good 18th-century liberal, he holds that political forms are

nothing if they do not reflect the cultural habits and dispositions of a people; and this in its day had been

a radical weapon against political despotism. It is true that he showed an excessive reverence for the

political forms of his own adopted nation; but this may easily blind us to the fact that for him it was not in

the end politics that really mattered. For the Tory pragmatists who claim Burke as their spiritual ancestor,

what matters in the end is power, to be exercised as the circumstances dictate; for Burke, political

institutions were to be judged by how far they nurtured the interests and well-being of the people as a

whole.

On this point, he and political radicals are entirely at one; they disagree over whether the

institutions Burke so zealously defended were indeed the best ones for promoting this end. His appeal to

the historical rather than metaphysical nature of these political arrangements was intended to underpin

the status quo: what had taken so long to evolve could not lightly be set aside. But by the same token,

this can be seen as emphasising the humanly created nature of political institutions, which can therefore

have only a relative, temporary authority, and which, since they have been created, can be changed.

Modern-day conservatives, then, should think twice before they light their candles at the shrine of

Edmund Burke. If they share his respect for tradition, they hardly reflect his passion for social justice. If

they are at one with his distaste for abstract rights, they should recall that for Burke that meant, among

other things, throwing his support behind a colonial revolution. His reverence for the variety and

complexity of human cultures, his sense of their tenacious roots and right to their own autonomy, is hardly

in fashion with those contemporary Conservatives for whom people must either support the England

cricket team or get back on the boat.

Burke, to be sure, was no radical and no democrat; this disciple of liberty, MP for a rotten

borough, ended up as an obsessional hawk who urged the military crushing of the French regime, and

died with the sounds of a gathering revolution in his native country ringing in his horrified ears. But he

never ceased to campaign against sleaze-ridden elites, out of touch with the sentiments of the common


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people; and it is thus not wholly out of the question that he would have rejoiced to see the recent

downfall of the Conservative government.

At the shrine of the Ancien Regime: Burke is lampooned in 1790 for his praise of Marie Antoinette. But the

Irishman's reverence for history and establishment is not simplistic conservatism

~~~~~~~~

By TERRY EAGLETON

The author is Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford. This article is based on his talk on Radio 3

on Monday 7 July, the first of five talks next week on Edmund Burke

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Eagleton, Terry. Saving Burke From the Tories