Edmund Burke for Our Time: Moral Imagination, Meaning, and Politics

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Burke’s biographers disagree as to his date of birth; it has been placed at 1728, 1729, and 1730. Conor Cruise O’Brien argues for 1 January 1729; see The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commentated Anthology of Edmund Burke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 3. F. P. Lock maintains that Burke was born in 1730; see Edmund Burke, vol. 1: 1730–1784 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 16–17. 2. Peter Augustine Lawler, “Conservative Postmodernism, Postmodern Conservatism .” Intercollegiate Review, v. 38 no. 1, Fall 2002. See also Lawler’s Postmodernism Rightly Understood (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). 3. Gerald Russello, The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007). 4. See, for example, Michael Thompson, Richard Ellis, and Aaron Wildavsky, Cultural Theory (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990). Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky use a relatively narrow definition of “political culture,” but also emphasize the important role played by broader “cultural biases” or “worldviews” in shaping political life. 5. A classic study discussing some particular cultural requirements for a liberal democratic society is Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963). See also Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, eds., The Civic Culture Revisited (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980). 6. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 113. 7. See, for example, Immanuel Kant, “A Response to the Question: What is Enlightenment ?,” in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 11–22. 8. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 3. 9. See, for example, David Walsh, The Growth of the Liberal Soul (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997). 10. Irving Babbitt titled a chapter “Burke and the Moral Imagination” in Democracy and Leadership (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, Inc., 1979 [1924]). Russell Kirk makes only 200 Notes to Pages 7–17 brief mention of the concept in his biography Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1967), but it appears more prominently in his later writings and speeches. 11. One work with “imagination” in its title is Gerald W. Chapman, Edmund Burke, the Practical Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). Chapman does not appear to be using the term “practical imagination” in a philosophical sense, but merely to convey the sense that Burke was both imaginative and practical. A collection of essays edited by Ian Crowe, An Imaginative Whig: Reassessing the Life and Thought of Edmund Burke (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005) does not really address the concept of the moral imagination as it is treated here, and devotes relatively little attention to serious study of the idea of the imagination in Burke. A recent collection of essays by Gertrude Himmelfarb, Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling (Chicago : Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 2007) devotes only one short essay to Burke and, like the vast majority of works with “moral imagination” in their titles, never incorporates a systematic treatment of the subject, or seriously explores its importance to Burke. 12. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974). 13. See for example Rorty, Contingency. 14. The works most important in establishing this “school” are probably the following : Peter J. Stanlis, Edmund Burke and the Natural Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958), and Francis P. Canavan, The Political Reason of Edmund Burke (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1960). The most important of the more recent works in this tradition is Joseph L. Pappin, III, The Metaphysics of Edmund Burke (New York: Fordham University Press, 1993). Other writers in this and other traditions will be discussed in the course of this study. 15. Some works with this perspective are identified and discussed in the Conclusion. 1—The “Burkean” Outlook and the Problem of Reality 1. Harold J. Laski, Political Thought in England: Locke to Bentham (London: Oxford University Press, 1950 [1920]), 181. 2. See Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind from Burke to Eliot (South Bend, IN: Gateway Editions, 1978 [1953]). 3. One of the more prominent examples of post-1960s nonconservative American interest in Burke is Stephen K. White, Edmund Burke: Modernity, Politics, and Aesthetics (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994). 4. A great many of the classic writers on Burke—with varying interpretations of him—have invoked this phrase, ranging from Kirk to Alfred Cobban in his Edmund Burke...