Abstract
Many recent critics of Burke’s Enquiry have read it as a covertly political text, though not all have discerned the same political message. Against this trend, the present essay argues that the Enquiry is what its title implies: a ‘philosophical enquiry’, and that Burke’s concerns in it are with universal human experience, not with ‘politics’ in even the broadest sense.
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- 1.
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958). References to the Enquiry will be given in the text, in the form (I.xiv.64), referring to the part, chapter, and page in Boulton’s edition, except that references to the prefaces, and to the ‘Introduction on Taste’, have only a page number.
- 2.
Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind from Burke to Santayana (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1953), 11–61; and Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1967). The iconoclasts include Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative (New York: Basic Books, 1977); Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender, and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Luke Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
- 3.
The earliest study to link the two is Neal Wood, “The Aesthetic Dimension of Burke’s Political Thought,” Journal of British Studies 4, no. 1 (1964): 41–64. As recently as 1960, Francis P. Canavan denied that Burke’s aesthetics could help explain his politics: Francis P. Canavan, The Political Reason of Edmund Burke (Durham: Duke University Press, 1960), 40–1.
- 4.
Thus Gibbons writes that, while ‘the shelf life of many of his key political ideas’ has passed, his ‘aesthetic theories, and particularly his disturbing concept of the sublime, have received a whole new lease of life in contemporary critical debates’ (Edmund Burke and Ireland, 15).
- 5.
Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (London, 1725).
- 6.
James Prior, Life of Edmond Malone, Editor of Shakespeare (London: Smith, Elder, 1860), 154.
- 7.
Abbé J.-B. Du Bos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (1719), i.4. An English translation appeared in 1748.
- 8.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. C. D. Clark (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), [114]. Bracketed page references to Clark’s edition refer to the pagination of the first edition, as inserted in his text. Paul Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Swift to Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), discusses Burke’s clothing imagery (pp. 223–32).
- 9.
Burke, Reflections (ed. Clark), [7].
- 10.
Burke, Reflections (ed. Clark), [25].
- 11.
Burke, Reflections (ed. Clark), [253].
- 12.
Burke, Writings and Speeches, ed. Paul Langford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981–), i.349–59; C. P. Courtney, Montesquieu and Burke (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963), 46–55.
- 13.
Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology, 1; Michel Fuchs, Edmund Burke, Ireland, and the Fashioning of Self (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1996), 195–96; Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland, 107.
- 14.
Frans De Bruyn, “Edmund Burke’s Natural Aristocrat: the ‘Man of Taste’ as a Political Ideal,” Eighteenth-Century Life 11, no. 2 (1987): 41–60.
- 15.
Campanella (1568–1639) is now best known for his utopia, City of the Sun (written 1602; published 1623).
- 16.
Reported in Jane Burke to William Burke, 21 March 1791, in Burke’s Correspondence, ed. Thomas W. Copeland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958–1978), vi. 239.
- 17.
Burke, Reflections (ed. Clark), [146].
- 18.
Sara Suleri calls it ‘an incipient map of his developing political consciousness’; The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 36.
- 19.
Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland, xii, 2, 11, 13, 87.
- 20.
These political readings, initiated by Neal Wood (Journal of British Studies, 1964), have become an unexamined commonplace. David Bromwich, “Burke on the Sublime and the Uncontrollability of Passion,” Annals of Scholarship 14–15 (2001): 97–103, esp. 98, sounds a rare note of scepticism.
- 21.
Thomas Dormandy, The Worst of Evils: The Fight against Pain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 200–1.
- 22.
When Burke moves from these common examples to the imaginary case of a man suffering from cholic being stretched on the rack, he signals the theoretical nature of the case by calling the victim Caius, a typical name given to one of the parties in a fictitious legal case (I.ii.33).
- 23.
See the caricature and description reproduced in Baldine Saint Girons’ French translation of the Enquiry, Recherche philosophique sur l’origine de nos idées du sublime et du beau (Paris: Vrin, 1990), 173–75.
- 24.
English reactions spanned a wide range. One writer thought that ‘the villain cannot suffer too much for so horrible a crime’, and approved his being ‘excruciated in every manner human wit can devise’ (Literary Magazine, 2 (January–February 1757), 1–4). A reviewer (Cl – d) in the Monthly Review regarded the torture as unjustified (17 (1757), 57–78).
- 25.
Though identified by Boulton and later editors as Alexander the Great, the ‘unhappy prince’ is more probably a topical allusion to Demetrius (c. 206–180 BC), son of Philip V of Macedon (238–179 BC). Demetrius is the hero of Edward Young’s tragedy, The Brothers, staged at Drury Lane between 3 and 17 March 1753. The story (which ultimately derives from Livy) was not well known, as is evidenced by the publication of two pamphlets explaining it for theatergoers (An Account of the Two Brothers, Perseus and Demetrius, the Sons of Philip King of Macedon. Collected from the Grecian History, ‘Very necessary for the Readers and Spectators of The New Tragedy’ (anonymous); and M. O., The Story on which the New Tragedy, Call’d The Brothers, Now Acting at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, Is Founded; both London, 1753). Burke’s casual allusion assumes that readers will readily identify the prince. I infer that he had seen the play, and expected it to become a stock piece (in fact, it was never revived). If so, here is a small but valuable addition to our meager stock of biographical information about Burke in the early 1750s.
- 26.
Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland, 110–11.
- 27.
Likewise, Burke comments on Campanella’s ability to ‘enter into the thoughts and dispositions of people’ as no more than a conscious refinement of a common, involuntary experience.
- 28.
Speech at Opening of Impeachment, 18 February 1788 (Writings and Speeches, vi. 419).
- 29.
Burke to Charles O’Hara, 1 March 1766 (Correspondence, i. 241).
- 30.
Numerous examples are reproduced in Nicholas K. Robinson, Edmund Burke: A Life in Caricature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
- 31.
Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, revised L. F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–1964), ii. 89–90.
- 32.
Francis Canavan’s study, Edmund Burke: Prescription and Providence (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1987), treats the role of Providence in Burke’s political thought, but not in the Philosophical Enquiry.
- 33.
Fuchs, Edmund Burke, 179.
- 34.
Fuchs, Edmund Burke, 179–81.
- 35.
‘Salon de 1767’, in Diderot, Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Hermann, 1975–), xvi. 234–5.
- 36.
Gita May, “Diderot and Burke: a Study in Aesthetic Affinity,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 75 (1960): 527–39, while convincing on Diderot’s debt to Burke, overstates the ‘affinity’.
- 37.
Fuchs, Edmund Burke, 200; Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland, 7.
- 38.
The references in the early letters are collected in Boulton’s Introduction to the Enquiry, pp. xv–xx. Nevertheless, I doubt whether in any substantive sense Burke began work on the Enquiry before he left Ireland. The letter to Shackleton of 25 January 1745, which Gibbons reads as ‘a rehearsal for arguments later outlined in the Enquiry’ (Edmund Burke and Ireland, 2–3), seems to me parodic and mock-heroic rather than serious.
- 39.
Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke, 93. I disagree, however, with the sexual implications that Kramnick then reads into the Enquiry (93–8).
- 40.
William Markham (a future Archbishop of York) to the Duchess of Queensbury, 25 September 1759, in Correspondence of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, ed. William Stanhope Taylor and John Henry Pringle (London, 1838–1840), i.432. Montagu praised Burke as ‘on great and serious subjects full of that respect and veneration which a good mind and a great one is sure to feel, while fools mock behind the altar, at which wise men kneel and pay mysterious reverence’; to Elizabeth Carter, 24 January 1759, in Elizabeth Montagu, the Queen of the Blue-Stockings: Her Correspondence from 1720 to 1761 (New York: Dutton, 1906), ii.159–60.
- 41.
Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland, 6.
- 42.
Burke to Richard Shackleton, 7 December 1745 (Correspondence, i.58).
- 43.
Burke’s responses to the reviewers are readily followed in Boulton’s edition.
- 44.
In conversation with Edmond Malone, July 1789 (Prior, Life of Malone, 154). In a draft letter of 1795 to an unknown correspondent, Burke likewise refers to an unsuccessful attempt to ‘revive those studies which I had begun to cultivate early in Life’ (Correspondence, viii. 364).
- 45.
F. P. Lock, “Rhetoric and Representation in Burke’s Reflections,” in Edmund Burke’s ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’: New Interdisciplinary Essays ed. John Whale (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 18–39, esp. 21.
- 46.
‘It is very rare indeed for men to be wrong in their feelings concerning public misconduct; as rare to be right in their speculation upon the cause of it’ (Writings and Speeches, ii.256).
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Lock, F.P. (2012). The Politics of Burke’s Enquiry . In: Vermeir, K., Funk Deckard, M. (eds) The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke's Philosophical Enquiry. International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 206. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2102-9_6
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