Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered by Russell Kirk, 255 pages
Edmund
Burke was an eighteenth century Anglo-Irish statesman given to quixotic
causes. He tried to persuade Parliament to moderate its policies
towards the American colonies. He tried to persuade Parliament to allow
religious freedom to the Irish. He tried to prosecute the leading
representative of the East India Company for corruption and abuses
against the people of India. He failed at all three, but in each case
the consequences he warned against came to pass. Due to his reputation
as a champion of liberty, he was courted by Mirabeau and Paine, but he
rejected the principles of the French Revolution, instead writing what
author Kirk (author of Eliot and His Age and The Roots of American Order) calls "the greatest work of English political philosophy", Reflections on the French Revolution, and its sequel, Letter to a Noble Lord.
Kirk spends little time on Burke's private life, only making a
few mentions of his perpetual financial woes and his frustrated hopes
for a peerage. Instead, the focus is on Burke's career, and Kirk makes
an argument for the ideological consistency of that career - a quest to
maintain the balance between freedom and order, to "conserve instead of
covet", to reform rather than destroy. Burke's role in the genesis of
the modern political party is an extension, not a violation, of that
consistency, following his maxim that the virtues of an organized
minority are sometimes needed to check a vicious majority. The book
also argues for Burke's lasting impact, tracing his influence on the
Romantic movement and twentieth century anti-totalitarianism.
A thorough introduction to the life and works of a seminal thinker.
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