The title of Françoise Sagan’s 1959 novel asked this question of Brahms, not Burke. But, as an alliteration junkie, I couldn’t resist the temptation of a little verbal playfulness.
Yet the question I ask myself is dead-serious, as is the reply: yes, I do like Burke, passionately. But not unequivocally. Actually, the only person in history other than Jesus Christ whom I do love with no reservations is Bach, but then I’m not much given to hero worship.
Neither, I suspect, is Daniel Hannan. Yet the general tone of his thought-provoking article Tax is Theft suggests that he’d be willing to make an exception for Edmund Burke, whom Lord Hannan calls “the grandfather of Anglophone conservatism”.
I agree with Lord Hannan on most things, including most points he makes in his article, but my understanding of conservatism differs from what I infer to be his.
To begin with, there is no such thing as ‘Anglophone conservatism’, although it’s true that people who call themselves conservatives in English-speaking countries have much in common. However, the differences between, especially, English and American conservatives are as salient as the similarities.
Lord Hannan identifies the similarities precisely and correctly: commitment to localism, not centralism; small, not big, government; low, not high, taxation; free, not corporatist, economy; free, not protected, trade; enlightened patriotism, not obtuse nationalism; limited, not promiscuous, public spending – and I’m sure there are quite a few others.
However, I do have a semantic problem there. All these undoubtedly good things circumscribe libertarianism, but they don’t circumscribe conservatism. Lord Hannan seems to use those terms interchangeably, which obviates the need for one of them. If they are identical, why do we need both words? That’s not how language works.
Thing is, they aren’t identical. The principal difference between libertarianism and conservatism is their attitude to the Enlightenment and its dicta. Conservatives reject them more or less wholesale, and libertarians don’t.
The former correctly see the Enlightenment as a systematic and, alas, successful attempt to destroy Christianity. That knocked out the cornerstone of our civilisation, which used to be called Christendom, but no longer is.
What English conservatives seek to, well, conserve is the last survivals of Christendom still not expunged or debauched by post-Enlightenment modernity. The primary ones are the monarchy and the Church, with the two inextricably linked.
If this type of conservatism still held sway in Britain, Burke would indeed be one of the formulators (not sure about the ‘grandfather’) of British conservatism. He regarded religion, specifically Christianity, as the bedrock of civil society.
An unrelenting critic of deism and atheism, Burke saw an established religion as the guarantor of constitutional liberties and the upholder of moral and political tradition. And while remaining a lifelong adherent of his father’s confession, Anglicanism, Burke also campaigned for the rights of those who, like his mother, remained Catholics.
It’s from that premise that Burke wrote, prophetically, his scathing pamphlet Reflections on the Revolution in France that came out three years before the worst excesses of the Terror, including regicide. That book was more than just a polemic.
When castigating what was wrong about the French Revolution, Burke managed to convert homespun traditionalism into a coherent political philosophy. That makes Reflections one of the most significant works of conservative thought, which no self-respecting bookshelf should be without.
Yet Burke was a Whig, not a Tory, and nothing illustrates the difference more vividly than a contrast between his hailing of the American Revolution and Dr Johnson’s opposition to it.
The editor of Burke’s works, EJ Payne, summarised Burke’s account of it as “a revolution not made but prevented.” In common with most Whigs, Burke didn’t recognise the divine right of anointed kings, and hence didn’t reject the principle of replacing a monarchy with a republic – provided the ancient principles of government were thereby upheld.
Burke didn’t detect the slippery slope he was stepping onto: the political (or any other) culture of Christendom ultimately couldn’t survive Christendom. America and France started a downward slide, but then, unlike us, Burke didn’t have the benefit of hindsight.
Burke’s friend, Dr Johnson, a Tory to the core, pointed out a telling, if not especially profound, paradox: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”
That was excellent knockabout stuff and a strong rhetorical point. It’s true that Messrs Jefferson, Washington, Madison et al. saw no incongruity between their pronouncements and owning (in Jefferson’s case also procreating) chattel human beings. However, the real issue lay even deeper than that.
The Founding Fathers were deists or agnostics almost to a man, and some of them, specifically Thomas Jefferson, detested Trinitarian Christianity. After the First Amendment proscribing an established religion was passed, Jefferson gloated that it put up “a wall of separation between Church and State”.
Implicitly, this was a dig at England, which Jefferson and most of his colleagues cordially loathed. They wanted to transplant onto American soil the trees of the English Common Law, while severing their roots nourished by England’s Trinitarian faith.
Dr Johnson realised that the American Revolution was inspired by Enlightenment ideas and therefore dismissed it. Edmund Burke didn’t realise that and therefore hailed it.
That’s why throughout the next, nineteenth, century Burke became a seminal figure in what Americans called conservative, but was in fact libertarian, thought. In Britain, however, he remained a marginal presence, with the Whigs seeing him as not Whiggish enough, and the Tories too much so.
The latter understood conservatism in its proper sense, as an upholder of social, political and cultural tradition above all else, but not to the exclusion of all else.
The Victorian Whigs, while also respectful of tradition, believed in laissez-faire economics at home and free trade abroad. They were opposed to protectionism, and their success in having the Corn Laws repealed spelled Britain’s economic success.
Whig ideas put into practice created in the Waterloo-to-Ypres century the greatest economic growth Britain has ever enjoyed, though at some cost to traditional institutions. At the same time the rearguard action by Tory aristocracy was modestly successful in alleviating the pains of this rapid growth and keeping the now threadbare social fabric from being torn to tatters too quickly.
All that ended with the First World War. Out went the Tory aristocracy, gassed in Flanders, taxed in Whitehall. In barged the twentieth century, with the key political confrontation in Britain now being not one between Tories and Whigs, but between Whigs and socialists, or, if you’d rather, the Right and the Left.
The word ‘conservatism’ lost its true meaning, just as the concept it designated lost its true base. It was at that point that Burke came into his own, with Whiggery ruling the roost to the right of the political divide. Modernity took some elements out of Burke and conveniently discarded what really was conservative about his thought: the first two parts in the quintessential conservative triad of God, king and country.
That was no hardship in the US, where post-revolutionary Tory conservatism never existed, nor could have existed. The US polity was and remains essentially an Enlightenment project, however different it may be from its more radical offshoots, such as socialism.
In America, the cocktail of Enlightenment anthropocentric egalitarianism and laissez-faire economics shaken with a measure of Burke has produced what Americans call ‘conservatism’, and Lord Hannan calls ‘classical liberalism’, aka Whiggery.
Conservatism in its true sense is dead in Britain as a dynamic political and intellectual force, but some individual conservatives are still extant. When they try to enter the public arena, they have no choice but to accept the trans-Atlantic political taxonomy.
Thus Margaret Thatcher, a Whiggish radical through and through, is worshipped as a conservative icon. And Lord Hannan has no choice but to create a terrible mishmash of words like ‘conservative’, ‘libertarian’ and ‘classical liberal’.
This is meant as no criticism of either Lady Thatcher or Lord Hannan, good sorts both, although one wishes the latter could have found a way to use the word ‘Christian’ once in a longish article about conservatism. Still, he is realistic enough to recognise that Thatcherite Whiggery is the best we can hope to get in today’s Britain.
That, to him and American libertarians, comprises such excellent notions as free trade, small government, low taxation, minimal regulation. Real English conservatism, on the other hand, may welcome all such lovely things. But they aren’t what it’s all about.
Edmund Burke, that sagest of all Whigs, would dislike the world ‘conservatives’ try to construct, partly in his name – and he would abhor other facets of modernity.
I’m sorry though that, prophetic as he was in most other respects, Burke failed to see that the political ideal he saw in his mind’s eye was incompatible with the Enlightenment – in either its French or American variants.
There is an article today at CrisisMagazine.com on the word conservative. That author also draws a line between classical liberalism and conservatism, but considers Burke a conservative. I tend to agree with your assessment. He does conclude that conservatism is tied to Christianity.