Burke: the Gendering of Power

Abstract

’The very subtlety of his reasoning, which, left to itself, would have counteracted its own activity, or found its level in the common sense of mankind, became a dangerous engine in the hands of power’. Hazlitt’s verdict reveals both the admiration and the opposition that Burke continued to excite in writers nearly twenty years after his death and nearly two years after the French Revolution had finally been defeated at Waterloo.¹ Some of the reasons for that continued and ambivalent engagement with the writer and politician are implicit in Hazlitt’s comment: his sense that Burke’s intelligence was a dangerous ideological force suggests that it still played a part in structuring the power relations of post-Napoleonic Britain. Moreover, in implying that Burke’s complicity with established institutions of power may have been a resolution of a self-counteracting discourse, Hazlitt hints at the diagnosis he made of the spirit of the age in general. For Hazlitt, politicians, poets and theorists fled from the intellectual divisions and contradictions that threatened their authority into metaphysical dreamlands or apologies for established powers, rather than into the common sense of the people.