Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1830–1914: An Intellectual History, by Emily Jones

Abstract

Philosophers and economists have long pondered the Adam Smith Problem: how to reconcile the concept of the human nature of his Moral Sentiments (1759) with the individualism of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Likewise, numerous commentators have attached a similar critique to one of Smith’s most ardent contemporary admirers, regarding what we might call the Edmund Burke Problem. How indeed can one accommodate the apparent generosity of the American, Indian and Irish Burke with the reactionary statesman of the French Revolutionary period? Emily Jones, in discussing Burke’s ‘afterlife’ or his ‘reception history’, has tackled this conundrum over almost a century of Burkean commentary, largely though not exclusively British, between the First Reform Bill and the outbreak of the First World War. She has discovered, perhaps not surprisingly, that few identified with the full corpus of Burke’s philosophical and political œuvre. Some privileged, especially in the mid-Victorian period, a utilitarian Burke; others, especially in the early twentieth century, an orthodox Christian Burke; still others emphasised one part of his complicated message, say his call for Protestant/Catholic reconciliation in Ireland, while ignoring or playing down his ferocious attacks on British rule in India or French republicanism and atheism. Some applauded almost uncritically the pre-1789 Burke and thought the Burke of the 1790s almost clinically mad. It was possibly not until the late twentieth century that modern scholars, such as Conor Cruise O’Brien, J.C.D. Clark or David Bromwich, could admire the systematic legacy of Burke without major qualifications.