The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate: Savagery, Civilization, and Democracy

2 Burke and the Scottish Enlightenment

When it comes to reading Edmund Burke, there are an astonishing number of preexisting theoretical frameworks in the secondary literature. There is, to be sure, a good deal to be learned from all of these readings. We have had Burke as a liberal of the nineteenth-century utilitarian1 and antiimperial2 variety, Burke as a prophet of modernity’s perils,3 Burke as a republican ,4 Burke as a proto-romantic,5 and Burke as a bourgeois ideologue.6 Burke and the Scottish Enlightenment 2 1. This was the dominant view for the first hundred years after his death, one that stressed Burke’s formative role within the Whig interpretation of history. For examples, see Henry Buckle, A History of Civilization in England, 2 vols. (London: J. W. Parker and Son, 1857–61); John Morley, Edmund Burke: A Historical Study (1867; New York: Knopf, 1924); Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (1876; New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963); and William Lecky, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, 8 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1883–90). In the twentieth century this interpretation waned, but it still persists in Sir Philip Magnus’s Edmund Burke (London: John Murray, 1939). Its best recent expression is J. R. Dinwiddy, “Utility and Natural Law in Burke’s Thought: A Reconsideration,” Studies in Burke and His Time 16, no. 2 (1974–75): 105– 28, which views Burke as a utilitarian in the broadest sense possible, if not exactly as a liberal. 2. See especially Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in NineteenthCentury British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Frederick G. Whelan, Edmund Burke and India: Political Morality and Empire (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), both of which focus on Burke’s pursuit of Warren Hastings and the East India Company. For similar sympathetic views of Burke on the British Empire in the Irish and broader colonial context, see Luke Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Colonial Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Michel Fuchs, Edmund Burke, Ireland, and the Fashioning of the Self (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1996). 3. For examples, see Stephen K. White, Edmund Burke: Modernity, Politics, and Aesthetics (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1994); Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); David Bromwich, A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Michael Mosher, “The Skeptic’s Burke,” Political Theory 19, no. 3 (1991): 391–418. For a good discussion of the Left’s historical fascination with Burke, see Isaac Kramnick, “The Left and Edmund Burke,” Political Theory 11, no. 2 (1983): 189–214. 4. See Bruce James Smith, Politics and Remembrance: Republican Themes in Machiavelli, Burke, and Tocqueville (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 5. See especially Alfred Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt Against the Eighteenth Century (1929; London: Allen & Unwin, 1960). 6. For an influential reading of Burke as a thinker torn between defending the Old Regime aristocracy and embracing the rising bourgeoisie, see Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative (New York: Basic Books, 1977). For the 52 I The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate Some scholars have been interested in extracting from Burke’s work a general theory of political representation,7 political parties and statesmanship ,8 or radicalism and revolution,9 while others have focused more on Burke’s particular relation to standard eighteenth-century Whig politics.10 A still more general approach takes Burke as a repository of timeless wisdom capable of saving us from our own “present discontents.”11 And, finally, there is the dominant school of postwar Burkean interpretation that argues, with a greater or lesser degree of stridency, that Burke should be seen as the father of modern conservatism, a statesman whose political theory is deeply rooted in Thomism and the Scholastic tradition of natural law.12 erasure of all ambivalence, see C. B. Macpherson’s unreconstructed Burke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). Macpherson follows the lead of Marx himself, who categorized Burke as “a vulgar bourgeois through and through”; see Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 926n13. 7. See James Conniff, The Useful Cobbler: Edmund Burke and the Politics of Progress (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). 8. See Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., Statesmanship and Party Government: A Study...