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SINCE ITS PUBLICATION in 1756, Edmund Burke's A Vindication of Natural Society has been the source of not a little confusion and perplexity. Written in the form of a "Letter" to an unidentified "Lord," and ostensibly composed "by a Late Noble Writer," the Vindication was the anonymous author's first foray into the republic of letters. Some early readers, including Lord Chesterfield and Bishop Warburton, took the author's attack on "artificial" society at face value, and attributed the work to the late philosopher-statesman Lord Bolingbroke.1 Others correctly identified the Vindication as a clever satire on Bolingbroke and, more generally, the deistic rationalism that was then becoming fashionable among the educated classes. One reviewer even opined that the Letter had been written by "an ingenious young gentleman, a student at the Temple."2 (Burke was twentyseven at the time, and had studied law at the Middle Temple.)
Such contrasting views prompted Burke to add a preface to a second edition published in 1757. Without identifying himself as the author, he indicates that the work was meant as a satire, albeit a serious one. Only an ironic reading, he suggests, can square with its actual "design," that is, "to show that, without the exertion of any considerable forces, the same engines which were employed for the destruction of religion might be employed with equal success for the subversion of government."3
For most contemporaries, the preface confirmed the suspicion that the Vindication was indeed a burlesque; an ironical reductio ad absurdum aimed at exploding the "fallacious" principles of Bolingbroke and his "free-thinking" ilk. Burke's clarification did not, however, prevent others from persisting in a literal reading. William Godwin, for example, saw in the Vindication's condemnation of all forms of government an anticipation of his own utopian anarchism. More recently, it has been argued (unpersuasively) that the Vindication is "a sober work by Burke, and not a satire. "4 In a more subtle vein, Isaac Kramnick has found enough seriousness in the Vindication to declare it an early instance of Burke's "ideological ambivalence."5
While the suggestion that Burke "is fighting with himself in its pages" is questionable, there are aspects of the Vindication that are likely to puzzle the readers Such "ambivalence" was probably deliberate, calculated to make the satire all...