SKIPPING MODERNITY:

For Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century Irish statesman who served in the British House of Commons, the hallmark of a sane society is reconciliation of the present and the future to the past. We live our lives in the present, with time always progressing forward in a linear direction, so Burke's respect for the past makes him conservative. Given the modern world's appetite for change, Burke's emphasis on continuity and permanence makes him seem like a strange outsider. Furthermore, Burke's conservatism is expressed in a fierce and fiery, almost reactionary, style.

This puzzled his detractors, who were constantly suspecting Burke of some ulterior motive, of exerting some nefarious influence in the cause of some hidden agenda. The Duke of Newcastle said, "Burke's real name is O'Bourke, a wild Irishman, a Jacobite, a papist, a concealed Jesuit." At best, but equally threatening to the state, Burke was an eighteenth-century Socrates, a dangerous gadfly, challenging the settled assumptions of Britain. The portrayal of Burke in Boswell's Life of Johnson avoids quoting the statesman directly, and sometimes disguises the identity of the "Burkean" speaker, as if to conceal Burke from the authorities. If this was a conservative, it was a strange conservative indeed. Moreover, Burke took contrarian positions on world issues, positions his critics found difficult to reconcile: religious liberty for Ireland, independence for America, justice and respect for India's traditions, and to hell with the French Revolution.

Indeed, Burke presented a formidable challenge to friend and foe: a great intellect, a stunning orator, propelled by an intense inner energy that was hard to take. Burke seemed to concentrate all his capabilities in the immediate moment. If you found yourself conversing with Burke, it was said, you felt as if you were being "grazed by a powerful machine." Samuel Johnson, who yielded to no one in considering himself a great man, repeatedly praised Burke as a great man. If Burke should drop in at a blacksmith's shop to have his horse shod, Johnson said, the blacksmith would say, "We have had an extraordinary man here." Even to the domineering Johnson, Burke was an intimidating presence: "His stream of mind is perpetual." Once, when Johnson was feeling poorly, he said, "That fellow [Burke] calls forth all my powers. Were I to see Burke now, it would kill me."

Not since Cicero had a major political thinker been a practicing politician in the center of the arena. So it is refreshingly welcome to have Burke reassessed today by another politician, Jesse Norman, Member of Parliament for Hereford and South Herefordshire who has taught philosophy at University College London.

Edmund Burke: The First Conservative is not a standard biography.1 Norman has set his book in two parts. Part One, "Life," is a lively review of Burke's political career from his "outsider" origins to his entanglement in the causes of Ireland, America, India, and France. How those controversies generated his ideas is largely left to Part Two of the book, "Thought."

Norman locates Burke in many ways as an Enlightenment figure. By the same token, Burke was presciently aware that Enlightenment ideas could produce deep social pathologies as prescribed by, in Burke's words, "the perverse and paradoxical genius of Rousseau." This position enabled Burke, the author argues, to become "the hinge or pivot of political modernity," the first and greatest critic of the modern age, and the earliest postmodern political thinker. 

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