Edmund Burke

BURKE, EDMUND

Edmund Burke was an orator, philosophical writer, political theorist, and member of Parliament who helped shape political thought in England and the United States during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Burke was born January 12, 1729, in Dublin, Ireland, to a Protestant father and a Roman Catholic mother. His father, a prosperous
Dublin attorney, was cold and authoritarian, and the two did not enjoy a close relationship. After graduating from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1750, Burke traveled to England to study law in accord with his father’s wishes. However, he did not progress in his legal studies, and he eventually abandoned the law in favor of a literary career.

In 1756 Burke published two philosophical
treatises, A Vindication of Natural Society and A
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our
Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. These and
other works launched Burke’s career as a critic of
social and political issues. Burke became a member
of the literary circle headed by Samuel Johnson,
the English author, scholar, and critic. In
1759, Burke founded the Annual Register, a
yearly survey of world affairs to which he contributed
until 1788.
Realizing that the literary life would not pay
enough to support a family, Burke entered politics.
In 1765, he was appointed private secretary
to the Marquis of Rockingham, England’s prime
minister and a member of the WHIG PARTY,
marking the beginning of a lifelong alliance
between Burke and Rockingham and the Whigs.
Burke was also elected to Parliament in 1765. In
1766, Rockingham lost the premiership. Burke
was offered employment with the new administration,
but chose to remain with the Whig
opposition. “I believe in any body of men in
England I should have been in the minority,” he
said. “I have always been in the minority.”
Burke believed strongly in opposition politics.
Having a party that acts as a watchdog for
the incumbent party is the best way, he felt, to
avoid corruption and abuse of power. As a
member of the opposition, Burke could do what
he did best: criticize the government for what he
considered unjust or unwise policies. He disagreed
with England’s policies in North America
and urged the government to abolish the tea duty imposed on the colonies. “All government—
indeed every human benefit and enjoyment,
every virtue and every prudent act—is
founded on compromise and barter,” he said in
1775, in his Speech on Conciliation with America.
However, despite his dissatisfaction with English
policy, he did not support the American revolutionaries.
Although he believed that the British
had been overly harsh and tyrannical, he also
believed in the legislative superiority of the
British Parliament over the colonies. In August,
1776, he expressed his despair over the conflict
between England and its North American
colonies: “I do not know how to wish success to
those whose victory is to separate us from a large
and noble part of our empire,” he wrote. “Still
less do I wish success to injustice, oppression,
and absurdity. . . . No good can come of any
event in this war to any virtuous interest.”
Burke vociferously criticized the British government’s
policies in Ireland as well, and decried
the poverty and persecution of Catholics there.
Yet, although his sympathies were clearly with
the oppressed and powerless in Ireland, he again
opposed revolution and urged moderation on
both sides. “I believe there are very few cases
which will justify a revolt against the established
government of a country, let its constitution be
what it will, ” he said.
Burke’s support for established order, even
where it meant support for inequalities, was
most evident in his harsh criticism of the French
Revolution. “[T]he age of chivalry is gone,” he
wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France.
“That of sophisters, economists and calculators
has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is gone
forever.” According to Burke, the French revolutionaries’
only purpose was to destroy all traditional
authority and property rights. The result,
he predicted, would be ANARCHY and the emergence
of an autocratic ruler whose reign would
be worse than any the revolutionaries had seen
before. Burke’s prediction proved accurate: the
revolution in France led to the Reign of Terror
and the regime of Napoleon.
In his condemnation of the French Revolution,
Burke presaged American thought on the
importance of private property to the preservation
of societal harmony. Stephen B. Presser,
associate dean and professor at Northwestern
University School of Law, wrote that
Burke’s attacks on the French, and his spirited
defense of private property as a guarantee
of order, stability, and prosperity have
echoed through the arguments of American
judges and statesmen.
Burke’s strongest criticism of British policy
came in the 1780s when he instigated IMPEACHMENT
proceedings against Warren Hastings,
governor-general of India. Burke attacked the British East India Company as unjust and
oppressive in its treatment of the Indian people.
In his Speech on Opening the Articles of Impeachment
of Warren Hastings (1788), Burke asserted
his belief that the exercise of ARBITRARY political
power is never justified. “My Lords . . . the
King has no arbitrary power to give him [Hastings],
your Lordships have not, nor the commons,
nor the whole Legislature. We have no
arbitrary power to give, because arbitrary power
is a thing, which neither any man can hold nor
any man can give.” Burke’s view that political
power is held in trust for the benefit of the people
is reflected in the basic tenets of U.S. democracy
and is at the core of the United States’
republican form of government.
Burke has been claimed as a champion of
both liberals and conservatives. His denunciation
of oppression in India, Ireland, and North
America and his staunch opposition to the exercise
of arbitrary power endeared him to libertarians
and proponents of individual rights.
However, his strong faith in established political,
religious, and social institutions, and his fear of
reform beyond limitations on sovereign power,
reverberate in contemporary conservatism.
Likewise, his support for CIVIL RIGHTS was tempered
with a strong belief in the necessity of
individual responsibility. In 1791, he wrote, in A
Letter to a Member of the National Assembly,
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact
proportion to their disposition to put moral
chains upon their own appetites; in proportion
as their love to justice is above their
rapacity; in proportion as their soundness
and sobriety of understanding is above their
vanity and presumption; in proportion as
they are more disposed to listen to the counsels
of the wise and good, in preference to the
flattery of knaves.
Burke was firmly opposed to the substitution
of government assistance for individual initiative.
In Thoughts and Details on Scarcity
(1795), he cautioned against “attempts to feed
the people out of the hands of the magistrates.”
He seemed to predict the modern quagmire of
WELFARE dependency when he wrote, “and having
looked to government for bread, on the very
first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand
that fed them. To avoid that evil, government
will redouble the causes of it; and then it will
become inveterate and incurable.”
The last few years of Burke’s life were marred
by the death of his only son, Richard Burke, in
1794. With his wife, Jane Nugent Burke, whom
he had married in 1757, Burke had established
the harmonious family life he had never known
as a child. The premature loss of his son, and the
concomitant demise of Burke’s dreams and
plans for the young man’s future, left Burke disconsolate.
Although he continued his activities
in politics, particularly in the formation of the
Irish government, his personal life was clouded
with disappointment and bitterness. Burke died
three years after his son, on July 9, 1797; yet two
hundred years after his death, his philosophies
continued to resonate on both sides of the
Atlantic.

FURTHER READINGS
Crowe, Ian, ed. 1997. Edmund Burke: His Life and Legacy
Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts Press.
Kirk, Russell. 1987. The Conservative Mind from Burke to
Eliot. Chicago: Regnery Books.
—. 1967. Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered. New
Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House.
Kramnick, Isaac, ed. 1974. Edmund Burke. Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
Lambert, Elizabeth R. 2003. Edmund Burke of Beaconsfield.
Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press.
O’Brien, Conor C. 1992. The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography
of Edmund Burke. Chicago:Univ. of Chicago Press.