Edmund Burke

I have added a quotation from my new hero Edmund Burke to Serendib.

I make the same point against Rousseau in Defending Families. Such ad hominem arguments often sound cheap - Paul Johnson filled a book with them in his Intellectuals - but Burke's identification of Rousseau's hypocrisy as a form of vanity lifts him above all that.

Besides I love the phrases "the tribute which opulence owes to genius" and "Thousands admire the sentimental writer; the affectionate father is hardly known in his parish."

The Conservatives claim Burke as their spiritual father, but I doubt if many of them read him. For most of his career he was the intellectual leader of the Whigs, only breaking from them over his opposition to the French Revolution.

Burke was right in that he foresaw the Terror that was to follow it, much as anarchists thinkers identified the totalitarianism inherent in Marx. He wrote his Reflections on the Revolution in France, not as a reaction to the Terror, but in 1790 when the consequences of the Revolution still seemed benign to many British observers.

It is time that we reclaimed Burke. After all, the most important 20th century Liberals are also anti-revolutionaries; think of Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin. Only those with ideology envy - those who really wish they were socialists - will feel uneasy at welcoming Burke home.