The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke by David Bromwich

The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence

Author: David Bromwich

ISBN-13: 978-0674729704

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Guideline Price: £25

John A Murphy once remarked that it was not “alien ideas” that were suspect traditionally in Irish politics but any ideas at all. Ireland, admittedly, is hardly unique on this count, for Plato’s “philosopher king” has seldom been encouraged to leave the ivory tower for the rough and tumble of political power. There are, however, notable exceptions, among them Cicero, Jefferson, Lenin and, not least from an Irish point of view, Edmund Burke, whose early years were spent in Prof Murphy’s native county of Cork.

The combination of thought and action over a long political career presents David Bromwich, in the brilliant first volume of his Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke, with an invidious task: how to do justice to the unfolding of Burke's complex ideas on the state, the people, representation, political parties, tradition and revolution, against the backdrop of biography and the practical exigencies of decisionmaking in political life. It is ironic, moreover, that Burke's initial reputation in philosophy was established not in political thought but in aesthetic theory, with the publication in his 20s of A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757).

Previous biographers of Burke, such as Conor Cruise O’Brien and FP Lock, have decried the importance of Burke’s “youthful” aesthetic writings, but Bromwich’s intellectual acuity provides key insights into how aesthetics and politics fused to bring about an “unhealthy intersection” (to cite Cruise O’Brien’s description of the later, combustible mix of “beauty and terror” that WB Yeats brought to the Irish cultural revival).

Shift of emphasis

Burke's Sublime and Beautiful helped to shift the emphasis of art and literature from the beautiful, as exemplified by artifice, gardens and classical decorum, to the romanticism of the sublime, found in awe-inspiring scenes of wild nature, the terror of the Gothic genre and (ominously in view of the revolutions that were to occur in Burke's lifetime) violence. Aristotle had raised the conundrum of why we take pleasure in scenes of tragedy or violence, and suggested that fiction provided the safety net: we can behold on the stage what we could not bear in reality. Burke responded that the crowds who flock to a public execution (or, as Bromwich puts it, "the rubbernecks who pass slowly by the scene of a traffic accident") unfortunately testify otherwise, and the sublime thus calls for an alternative explanation. Burke's suggestion is that we are somehow drawn to extreme situations in which the will is suspended, or in which suffering and pain are not of our own making: in Bromwich's formulation, "We would by no means choose to do or suffer what we are eager enough to see." We are carried outside ourselves but may also be carried away by the exhilaration of the moment.

From this it is possible to see that people often act against their own better judgment, and this helps to illuminate Burke’s later controversial views on political representation. As against the populist view that elected representatives receive their mandate solely from their constituents, Burke argued that politicians owe the people their judgment (shades of the philosopher king) and as well as their allegiance. On being elected to the high-profile constituency of Bristol, Burke reserved the right to take up positions against the immediate political and economic interests of his electors, such as their opposition to American independence or their hostility to Irish free trade under Grattan’s parliament.

For all his attachment to the local – the “little platoon we belong to in society” – Bromwich notes that Burke is rightly seen by Jürgen Habermas as one of the founders of the public sphere in civic life, whereby debate, opposition and criticism become central to the renewal of society.

Instead of supporting his local sheriff, Burke's Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777) reminded his constituents that public welfare and the common good should prevail over sectional interests. Although Bromwich is wary of the "presentism" that views the past through a contemporary lens, his sympathies with Burke are clearly evident when he underlines the need of public representatives to break "loose from intimidation by political threats" and "all that two centuries later goes under the American name of lobbying".

Another aspect of Burke's political thought that takes on a contemporary resonance is his emphasis on the centrality of political parties. The late Peter Mair's recent book Ruling the Void (2013) has drawn attention to the hollowing out of European democracy through the drastic decline of political parties, but it is often forgotten that the importance of political leadership, and strength in numbers, was first stressed in Burke's Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), prompted by his critical interventions on the Wilkes crisis in the 1760s. Crucially, Burke emphasised the integral role of oppositional parties, the necessity for other political groupings to be in a position to offer an alternative to monopolies of power (such as the creeping centralisation of rule under George III, undoing the liberties regained by the Glorious Revolution in 1688).

Terror against inertia

In The Sublime and Beautiful Burke asserted that one of the effects of the "terror" of the sublime is to jolt the individual out of ingrained habits and inertia, as if, in the words of the American poet Billy Collins, a near-death experience is sometimes required to appreciate life all the more. It is difficult not to see in this the germ of Burke's later reflections on revolution or imperial violence, the shock of the new delivering a body blow to habits of custom accrued over centuries. As his support of the Glorious Revolution and American independence (and his defence of the mass resistance mobilised by Wilkes) showed, Burke was not against determined opposition to a corrupt prevailing order.

But, as Bromwich notes in a keen observation, one lesson Burke learned from the sublime was that instead of breaking up habit, violence might become a habit in itself, perpetuating a reign of terror, however modified, under the guise of stability. Though shock is the antithesis of habit, they both share one underlying trait: their operation is involuntary, and immune to active consent. Where a state cannot gain (or generate) consent, as in colonial societies, habits of authority are propped up by coercion and “passive obedience”, surface conformity belying an absence of inner allegiance. Bromwich’s first volume brings the reader up to the eve of Burke’s speech on Fox’s India Bill (1783), and we will have to wait for volume two to deal with the impeachment of Warren Hastings, Burke’s recoil from the momentous events of the French Revolution, and his near despair at impending crisis in Ireland. On this showing that volume will be eagerly awaited.

Luke Gibbons is professor of Irish literary and cultural studies at Maynooth University. His Joyce's Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism and Memory is due for publication in 2015