WHEN PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL ISN'T AN EPITHET:

Irish politician and journalist Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien dies (Stephen Brook, 12/19/08, guardian.co.uk)

While an Irish cabinet minister, O'Brien, a fierce critic of the IRA, banned members of the terrorist group and its political arm Sinn Fein being interviewed on radio and television.

Born in Dublin on 3 November 1917, O'Brien's career encompassed roles in the Irish civil service and then the UN, where he came to the attention of the secretary general, Dag Hammarskjold, who tasked him with leading the peace keeping operation in the Congo in 1960.

O'Brien became an academic after his stint at the UN and launched his political career in the 1970s.

MORE:
-OBIT: Conor Cruise O'Brien (Daily Telegraph, 12/19/08)
-Irish iconoclast Conor Cruise O'Brien dead at 91 (International Herald Tribune, Dec 19, 2008)
-Conor Cruise O'Brien: Contributor Profile (The Atlantic)
-ARCHIVES: Conor Cruise O'Brien (NY Review of Books)
-ESSAY: Burke on Ireland's Holy War: On the two hundredth anniversary of the death of Edmund Burke, Conor Cruise O'Brien assesses the legacy of his thinking on Ireland. Enlisted by both sides in the great Home Rule controversy, Burke would not be at all surprised by Ireland's continuing conflict (Conor Cruise O'Brien, August 1997, Prospect)
-EXCERPT: Thomas Jefferson and the Impending Schism in the American Civil Religion (An excerpt from The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800, Conor Cruise O'Brien)
-LECTURE: Conor Cruise O'Brien / A World Falling Apart? (This keynote address at ISPA's International Congress was delivered on June 21, 1994 in Sydney, Australia)
-VIDEO: Interview with Conor Cruise O'Brien (Harry Kreisler, Conversations with History: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley )

-PROFILE: No regrets, no surrender: From civil war in the Congo to verbal wars in the Irish parliament, Conor Cruise O'Brien has illuminated and infuriated as writer, politician, historian and academic. Geoffrey Wheatcroft finds that his capacity for controversy is undiminished (Geoffrey Wheatcrof, 7/12/03, The Guardian)

By the time Labour joined a coalition government in 1973, O'Brien had made one more enemy. John Hume, a founder of the Social Democratic and Labour party and founding member of the civil rights movement, was regarded as the oracle of "the North" in Dublin, though not by O'Brien. "I was originally intended to be foreign minister but," he believes largely because of his antipathy for Hume, "I didn't get it," to his considerable resentment. Instead he was made minister of posts and telegraphs, which gave him the opportunity to ban Sinn Fein from Irish airwaves, thus adding further to his growing unpopularity in Dublin.

What also vexed his enemies was his literary eminence, which put him in a quite different class to other politicians. How many members of the present Irish cabinet, or indeed the British or American cabinets, could be imagined writing brilliantly on Michelet, Mauriac and Camus? He is a scholarly rather than an academic critic, who was never likely to have much sympathy for what he once called "deconstructionism, post-structuralism and what-not".

One of his collections of essays was published as Writers and Politics, and this is really his forte, situating and examining writers in their social and political context. He has occasionally done this in a partisan way - he is one of those whom Christopher Hitchens scolds for obtuse unfairness towards Orwell - but is at his most fair-minded and penetrating with his fellow-Irish, from Somerville and Ross to James Joyce. Not that he has ever much cared for Joyce despite the family connection. He recognises Joyce's genius, of course, but says that he has always found the man who depicted himself in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man a tiresome prig. O'Brien's real heroes are Edmund Burke, as both writer and thinker, and WB Yeats. O'Brien's long essay "Passion and Cunning", written to mark Yeats's centenary in 1965, is still widely regarded as one of the best things ever written about the poet and one of the best introductions for anyone who wants to understand 20th-century Ireland.

-PROFILE: Conor Cruise O'Brien-The Voice of Reason? (Terry Golway, July 26, 1998, NY Observer)
-REVIEW: of Conor: A Biography of Conor Cruise O'Brien. Volume One, Narrative (Contemporary Review, Sept, 1995, Richard Mullen)
-REVIEW: Was Burke a Conservative?: a review of The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke. By Conor Cruise O'Brien (Mark C. Henrie, First Things)

Given the prospect of (at least) "two Burkes," most sympathetic commentators have sought to find a unifying thread by which he can be made consistent. It may be observed, for example, that Whiggery is not identical to liberalism, nor is the American Revolution identical to the French. Burke was a great friend of that arch-Tory, Samuel Johnson, and he never had a good thing to say about democracy nor, with some notable and stinging exceptions, a bad thing to say about hereditary aristocracy. Burke is thus "really" a conservative. On the other hand, the popular and magnanimous sentiments of Burke's early career can be brought to the fore while his response to the Revolution is contextualized into a pragmatic anti-utopianism. In such a perspective, Burke is seen as a critic, not of the French aspiration to achieve such modern political goals as liberty, equality, and fraternity, but only of the Revolution's violence and radical instability. The rest is rhetoric, and Burke is thus "really" a liberal. In his much-praised thick new book, Conor Cruise O'Brien holds an extreme form of this latter view.

The title of O'Brien's "thematic biography" is taken from a line in Yeats' poem "The Seven Sages":

American colonies, Ireland, France and India Harried, and Burke's great melody against it.

O'Brien variously defines the "it" mentioned in this couplet as "oppression," "unjust authority," "authoritarianism," and "the arrogance of power." In O'Brien's view, opposition to "it" is the central moral motivation of Burke's politics, and if we understand this, we can find the deep consistency in Burke's words and actions.

Key to making this interpretation plausible is O'Brien's ingenious and well-constructed argument that Burke identified much more closely with Irish Catholicism than has previously been acknowledged. Burke's own father had conformed to the Established Church in order to practice law in an Ireland where Catholics suffered under the Penal Laws; Burke's mother remained a Catholic, though she conformed sporadically; Burke married a Catholic. O'Brien further conjectures that as a child Burke was probably educated by a priest and may even have been secretly baptized a Catholic. His cousins, members of the Irish Catholic gentry, were often in jeopardy during the periods of vindictive anti-Catholic agitation that for centuries were a recurring experience in the English- speaking world. And there are some indications that in his twenties, in London, Burke found himself strongly attracted to the faith of his fathers.

Thus O'Brien suggests that Burke may be understood rather like a Marrano Jew: he is not fully converted to his new faith and he feels great sympathy for those he has left behind, but under the restrictive laws of his time and as a public figure, he must cover this sympathy with loud declarations of conventional views. Far from being a convinced defender of the Establishments of the British Constitution, Burke secretly harbors a sense of fundamental injustice in the status quo.

This account allows O'Brien to explain (away) Burke's illiberal defense of civil and ecclesial Establishments as a mere rhetorical means by which Burke could pass as a good Englishman. For O'Brien, the "real" Burke was the consistent advocate of Irish Catholic emancipation-and American freedom, and the rights of the natives of India. He even goes so far as to suggest that Burke's antagonism to the French Revolution arose because of the close connection Dr. Richard Price-against whom Burke polemicized in the Reflections-drew between the 1688 Revolution, the French Revolution, and Anti-Popery: the rise of Jacobin sympathies in the British Isles could thus ultimately affect the lives of Burke's Irish cousins. Here the plausibility of O'Brien's hermeneutic stretches very thin, and we are driven to reconsider the evidence for the traditional "conservative" interpretation of Burke.

O'Brien's reconstruction of Burke's Catholicism is surely a masterful work of historical speculation, and it is true that we can always detect a spirit of liberality in Burke's writings and speeches. But this does not suffice to demonstrate that Burke is a liberal in any meaningful sense. In fact, the opposite may be true. Having offered us a Catholic Burke, O'Brien remains strangely silent about what this would imply about Burke's relationship with the natural law tradition-that tradition in contradiction to which modern rights theories emerged. Of course much of what we understand to be virtuous in politics and morals was already present in natural law teaching, but on no Catholic theory of the eighteenth century was even so mild a liberalism as Locke's tenable.

-REVIEW: of The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (Forrest McDonald, National Review)

On a more substantive level, although he does not appear to notice it, O'Brien offers quotations that seem to indicate that Burke was not quite so consistent as O'Brien's interpretive schema would have him be. Thus, for example, in speaking of India, Burke holds that "the rights of men, that is to say, the natural rights of mankind, are indeed sacred things"; whereas in talking of the effects of the French Revolution he declares that "wherever the rights of man were preached," the outcome was "toil and trouble, discord and blood."

The apparent inconsistencies are readily reconciled if one perceives of Burke not as an enemy to the abuse of power but as a conservative--however, this O'Brien steadfastly refuses to do. To O'Brien, Burke is a "pluralist," a "liberal and counter-revolutionary," not a conservative. He airily dismisses Russell Kirk's studies of Burke as the work of a "polemical and propagandist" cold warrior, but it seems obvious to me that Kirk's interpretation is much closer to a common-sense reading of Burke. One illustration: O'Brien quotes a long passage that ends, "The situation of man is the preceptor of his duty." That encapsulates the essence of conservatism, but O'Brien regards it merely as "a good example of the Burkean aphorism."

-ARCHIVES: "conor cruise o'brien" (Find Articles)

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 19, 2008 8:14 AM