Edmund Burke: The Visionary Who Invented Modern Politics. Jesse Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ to be’. So it was brave in the extreme for Burke at the age of twenty-seven to venture into print on this topic. Still more so when one reflects that the work had apparently been completed four years earlier, at the tender age of twenty-three. The Enquiry is not a deeply philosophical work. But it had great influence at the time, has been widely read ever since, and develops themes that last long in Burke’s own thought.

      In tone, the work is quite unlike the Vindication. Gone is the mock-ironic, the hint of sneer. Instead we have Burke speaking directly to us, in a measured, engaging and sometimes intimate way. He proceeds from common experience, offering conclusions in a semi-scientific spirit, diffidently or confidently as evidence and intuition demand. He offers, not a rehash of previous work, but a positive theory of his own. And there is the occasional moment of (possibly inadvertent) humour: one of the book’s many sections is magnificently entitled ‘Proportion not the Cause of Beauty in Vegetables’.

      Overall, the tone is quietly assured. It is evident to Burke that humans have a certain nature of their own, for they are commonly struck in the same circumstances by the same pains or pleasures, the same ‘passions’, feelings and emotions. They take pleasure alike in the smell of a rose, or feel pain from a violent blow, for example. Central to aesthetic judgements and the feelings that accompany them, for Burke as for Addison, is the recreative imagination: the imagination that allows its owner to re-experience all the feelings of a moment, or to extend experience into an understanding of new things and places and people. But Burke does not restrict the imagination to visible objects, and so sidesteps the earlier objection to Addison’s account: on the contrary, he is keenly aware of the functioning of the different senses, of touch and smell and taste as well as sight and hearing, and deliberately goes beyond the visual arts to discuss poetry and music, for example.

      Burke also improves on Addison by focusing on just two great types of passion: the sublime and the beautiful. These are grounded respectively for him in two basic human instincts, given by God through the workings of providence: the instinct for self-preservation, and the instinct for love. The sublime is what elicits awe or terror or fear. Its marks include enormity, infinity and indistinctness, but also power and the capacity to inflict pain. When humans encounter the sublime directly, be it in an earthquake or a snake, they naturally turn away and seek refuge. But when they encounter it indirectly or at a distance, as in a work of art or in imagination, they can be amazed and delighted. They can be astonished, or aroused to action, by language, poetry and rhetoric.

      If the sublime intimidates, the beautiful attracts. Beauty is described by Burke as ‘a social quality’; it is not simply what elicits lust between the sexes, but the expression of a social preference for a relationship with a particular mate. More widely, it includes the emotions and instincts that bring people together in general society: these are sympathy, imitation and ambition, again implanted by providence in order to bring human capacities to their fullest expression.

      Much of this is speculative and tendentious, to say the least. But through it we can clearly glimpse the writer himself. It would be hard to miss a young man’s yearning in passages like this: ‘Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness … the deceitful maze through which the eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried.’ Or later, in considering how the body is physically affected by love:

      The head reclines something on one side; the eyelids are more closed than usual, and the eyes roll gently with an inclination to the object, the mouth is a little opened, and the breath drawn slowly, with now and then a little sigh: the whole body is composed, and the hands fall idly to the sides. All this is accompanied with an inward sense of melting and languor.

      This reads more like an erotic novel than a work of philosophy. It is little surprise that the book was later attacked by Mary Wollstonecraft, the great eighteenth-century feminist, for perpetuating a weak and feeble stereotype of women.

      The Enquiry was published anonymously in 1757, and sold well enough in the right circles for Burke to become quickly and widely known as its author. It became something of a text on the sublime, in succession to the ancient critic Longinus. As a work of aesthetics it impressed one of the great intellectuals and critics of the eighteenth-century, Gotthold Lessing, and two of the greatest thinkers of all time, Immanuel Kant and Adam Smith. It may also have partly provoked William Gilpin into developing his own notion of the picturesque, which combined the sublime and the beautiful in art and nature, an idea which became wildly fashionable later in the century.

      But what is perhaps still more striking is that even at this very early stage the Enquiry again lays out in embryo an array of themes always later to be identified with Burke. Humans have a distinctive nature, which is not purely subjective but governed by certain general laws; indeed, they are social animals heavily driven by instinct and emotion. The testimony of ordinary people is often of greater value than that of experts. Human passions are guided by empathy and imagination. Human well-being is grounded in a social order whose values are given by divine providence. Human reason is limited in scope, and insufficient as a basis for public morality. There may also be a hint here that, in the words of the American thinker Leo Strauss, ‘good order or the rational is the result of forces which do not lend themselves to good order or the rational’. People cannot reason themselves into a good society, for a good society is rooted not merely in reason but in the sentiments and the emotions; this was to prove a crucial precursor to Burke’s critique of the French revolution in the 1790s. Overall, then, a coherent, persuasive and strikingly modern set of ideas is already taking shape.

      The years 1756–9 were a time in which Burke poured forth a profusion of different writings, mostly unfinished, under his developing relationship with Robert Dodsley. Despite some missed deadlines, these mark his transition from a writer from inspiration to a writer from demand, from something of an intellectual dilettante to a seasoned professional able to master a body of knowledge and set down his views quickly and cogently. They also required prodigious amounts of reading and reflection, deepening an already capacious personal reservoir of knowledge which was to serve Burke well in future years. It has been rightly said that political parties are elected when they are full of ideas, and turned out of office when those ideas run out. In Burke’s case, though he was only twice briefly in office, the ideas never did run out.

      The next of his early works was An Account of the European Settlements in America (1757), in collaboration with his friend Will Burke. This was history and polemic, with a highly topical purpose. British foreign policy since time immemorial could be summarized as the desire to inhibit the emergence and restrain the actions of successive superpowers in mainland Europe, in particular Spain and latterly France under Louis XIV and his successors. Throughout the century the French and British had repeatedly clashed in their colonial expansions, from India to the West Indies to North America. In 1755 the uneasy peace of Aix-la-Chapelle broke down entirely, with the disastrous failure of an expedition by the British commander-in-chief General Braddock to capture Fort Duquesne, in modern-day Pittsburgh. In May of the following year war was formally declared between France and Britain. It would shortly spread across the globe, in what became known as the Seven Years War.

      The Account summarized the prevailing state of knowledge about the European colonies in North America, covering their history, ethnography, geography, differing cultures and economic conditions. Inevitably, it was a compendium. But it also made an argument: well-regulated colonies mattered to Britain, and by implication were worth fighting for. Not only that: the fading Spanish Empire was less to be feared than French ambition and expansionism. Indeed the fate of the Dutch and Spanish empires gave, the authors held, an object lesson in what not to do. Having taken control of vast swathes of South America, the Dutch and Spanish had largely milked their territories for cash, extracting their immediate mineral resources rather than building sustainable colonies with proper infrastructure and orderly relations with local people. Their leaders had grossly abused their powers through self-enrichment. The result was colossal short-term wealth, followed СКАЧАТЬ