Two Quests for Edmund Burke, Continued

Whether as a historical figure or perennial sage, Edmund Burke seems inescapable. Both the Left and the Right depict him as the prophet of counter-revolution. In 2003, Lynn Hunt summarized the dominant verdict on the debate over the French Revolution: “Edmund Burke seems to have won his argument with Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft.”¹ Recent books have explored everything from embodied sublimity in Burke's aesthetics to Sarah Palin's unsuspected ideological debt to his theory. He was not always so marketable. In 1950, Russell Kirk lamented that, in North America, Burke “is recorded, respected, ignored.”²

Since 1945 there have been two occasionally intersecting quests for Burke in the United States. One is present-minded, extracting quotations from Burke either to blend nostalgia, lament, and prescription or to indict him for concocting this blend. Kirk pioneered refashioning the quotable Burke into the timeless icon of Anglo-American conservatism and presided over the birth of the American Cold War conservative traditionalism. Kirk's lightly supervised St. Andrew's Litt. D. thesis became The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, which sold over a million copies before he died, and it remains in print. Kirk was a “Bohemian Tory,” not an academic, seemingly more interested in literature than politics and largely innocent of partisan bile. He disdained Joseph McCarthy at his zenith and condemned George H. W. Bush's Near Eastern policies as adventurist.

The second quest aims to situate Burke in his time. A year before Kirk's lament, Thomas Copeland published Our Eminent Friend, Edmund Burke, essays that built on his Yale doctoral research in English. Copeland practiced the asceticism of critical editing. By carefully reading Burke in context, Copeland sought to recover him as an eminent Georgian: fascinating, complex, and often elusive. Also in 1949, and not coincidentally, Alfred A. Knopf published an anthology of Burke's writings sympathetically introduced by two Fordham historians. With the opening of a vast archive of his manuscripts, a Big Burke Project was gestating. Copeland, who managed the indispensable ten-volume edition of The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, was, in David Bromwich's words, “a great scholar” (p. 93).

While Copeland was helping launch Burke as an academic industry, Kirk modernized him as “the founder of conservative thought . . . [because] most of what genuine conservatism survives among us, in the English-speaking world, is the shadow of Burke's creation.”³ Kirk even detected Burke's influence “striding” through the pages of George Santayana, who, as someone quipped, was what Nietzsche would have become had he grown up.⁴ From the front line of anticommunism, Whittaker Chambers scored The Conservative Mind as mishmash “brewed by slamming into one pot” a medley of writers and “a worthy master's thesis.”⁵

Chambers' snort suggests the conservative movement's intellectual contradictions, which ensured its besetting instability and present fission. The façade of unity depended on the bloated Soviet Empire and its calcifying dogmatic superstructure. There was even disagreement about how to interpret Burke. F. A. Hayek, the major theoretician of neoliberalism, dismissed the National Review, founded by William F. Buckley, Jr., and Kirk in order “to ‘stop’ history[,] as fundamentally reactionary.”⁶ During the 1957 meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society, an annual assembly of free-market economists and business leaders, Hayek refuted The Conservative Mind in Kirk's presence but without naming him. Kirk extemporaneously protested against “Why I Am Not a...