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EDMUND BURKE: CONSERVATIVE OR LIBERTARIAN? Scott Hargreaves asks: was Edmund Burke a lover of liberty, a reactionary or just another politician? Empire and Revolution By Richard Bourke Princeton University Press, 2015, pp 1001
Edmund Burke is known as the father of modern conservatism, but some historians portray him as a fighter for liberty. Others paint the Anglo-Irish philosopher and statesman as a dreadful hypocrite.
As a conservative, Burke stood for the established order, including key roles in both religious establishments and the aristocracy in the government. He was suspicious of measures to further extend the electoral franchise, and was an early vehement opponent of the French Revolution. He favoured the established Church of England and was, albeit quietly, sympathetic to the Catholicism of his forebears.
But in his parliamentary career, Burke was also an acknowledged champion of liberty. He supported trade liberalisation, due process and constitutional protections, while being critical of the overbearing state and its influence. In this guise, he was sympathetic to the grievances of the American colonists and acknowledged their right to revolt, while applauding the work of anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce.
The charge of hypocrisy arises from Burke's different stances towards rebellion against the state at various times. Until the 1780s, he backs liberty and the interests of the people in Britain and America, but when faced with the social collapse and terror that arose with the French Revolution, he defended the established order.
Well-meaning defenders reconcile this seeming inconsistency as merely 'growing up' when shocked by revolutionary terror, whereas his detractors see only hypocrisy for not agreeing that the events in France were a new dawn of liberty. The attacks portray Burke as adapting his rhetoric to the changing needs of the titled and wealthy Whig party grandees who had sponsored him into Parliament. Karl Marx amongst others made some cheap shots along these lines.
The charge of inconsistency let alone that of hypocrisy is deeply offensive to Professor Richard Bourke, co-director of the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary University of London, who has taken it upon himself to exhaustively review all of Burke's writings, speeches and political positions in their proper historical and intellectual context in Empire and Revolution: The Political...