Essays: There is something about Burke: no Irish intellectual appears able to rest until he (and they are always men) has given to posterity his analysis of Edmund Burke's thought, and his verdict on the consistency or otherwise with which he pursued his ideas over the course of a 40-year career, chiefly in British politics.
Thus in the past decade or so we have had a full-length "thematic" biography of Burke (dismissed here as "feeble") from the pen of Conor Cruise O'Brien, while Luke Gibbons has written more recently and extensively on Burke's engagement with Irish politics and culture. Seamus Deane, Professor of Irish Studies at Notre Dame, and described in the accompanying blurb as "Ireland's leading intellectual", is the most recent to present his take on Burke. He has revised a number of his essays on Burke published over the last 40 years, and re-issued them in book form in the well- regarded Critical Conditions series published by Cork University Press.
Now, reprinting academic essays is a high-risk undertaking: notoriously, articles, unlike wine, rarely improve with age, and the concerns, passions and debates of an earlier period seldom retain their vibrancy at a distance of 30 years. To some extent, Deane has avoided this sense of jaded déja vu by conflating (though given Burke's obsession with stripping, ravishing and dismemberment, perhaps one should say, slicing and dicing) some 13 essays into nine: but not entirely, for the most recent, that on Cardinal Newman's debt to Burke, is far and away the most arresting, though this may be because the future direction of Newman's university is once again on the anvil.
The central question posed by Burke and here mulled over at length by Deane is: is liberty compatible with colonial rule? Burke's answer was, on the whole, yes, and he pointed to the British colonies in north America. He did, however, enter two major qualifications: where colonial rule was outside the rule of law (the East India Company in India), or where a corrupt faction aggrandised itself by the violent exercise of arbitrary power and unappeasable greed (Ireland or France), there were only two classes, the oppressed and the oppressor, or perhaps three classes, the infantry, the horse, and the artillery. Deane is concerned to show that Burke's thinking on all these issues was "clear and consistent", and that the apparent contradictions in his thought are just that, apparent not real.
Hence Burke was correct in his own terms to laud the American Revolution but revile that of France, because one stemmed from liberty while the other was its inversion. So far so good, but we are not told what Burke made of the "liberty" enjoyed by black slaves throughout north America, nor what he felt about the on-going annihilation of the native peoples in that region. For the record, he was against slavery but did not feel that the time was ripe for abolition - which is hardly earth-shaking. The point here is that Burke was completely uncritical of the American revolutionaries, many of whose leaders were slave-owners, while he was absurdly denunciatory of the leaders of the French Revolution who would abolish slavery in 1794. Famously, Burke had no first-hand knowledge of America, nor indeed of India, about which he spoke and wrote at length, and he only spent a few weeks in France, though he saw enough to persuade him that all was well there. We may remember that for over 30 years Burke was a politician in the Rockingham Whig camp, and it can scarcely be a coincidence that his positions on the great issues of the day - America, India and France - mirrored those of his patrons. Had the Rockinghamites been charged with enforcing the Stamp Act, Burke's widely anthologised speech on the iniquity of American taxation might well have contained different sentiments. We may note that he rejected all calls to jettison the anti-American Declaratory Act, a Rockinghamite measure, denounced the proposed Irish Absentee Tax, which would have hit the Rockinghamite fortune, and steadfastly resisted any attempt at parliamentary reform, which would have damaged the Rockinghamite power. True, his reasoning on these matters was dressed up in principle, but the whiff of political partisanship can be detected too.
By contrast, Burke did have first-hand knowledge of Ireland, and he well knew the furies that lurked on or just below the surface of Irish life. Deane is at his most persuasive in explicating Burke's thinking on Ireland. Ireland, was after all, not a cause, like India or America, which he picked up and put down again: rather it was the one constant theme in his life; and there is a case for arguing that his other crusades were conducted largely in Irish terms. In Burke's view a gimcrack junta of Irish Protestant kleptocrats had seized the levers of power in Dublin Castle and, protected by a series of vicious and ingenious exclusionary penal laws, was indulging its capacity for rapacity with undiminished energy. That, according to Burke, was the case in the 1760s, and it remained the situation in the 1790s. It had been a similar story in India, where the East India Company "officers" (Burke scorns its lack of "men") were systematically raping and plundering an ancient civilisation, and it was a mirror image of Paris where, with "extraordinary and perverted energy" a small cabal of down-at-heel arrivistes was busily inverting the world of feeling by making truth a lie, religion a nonsense, reality an abstraction and fact fiction.
Burke's attack on the French Revolution is brilliantly depicted by Deane, and he memorably portrays the stripped and ravished Marie Antoinette, consigned in a dung cart to the guillotine, as a sort of "Queen Lear", the creation of Edmund Burke whose universality is itself Shakespearean in scope.
A number of the essays develop the borrowings from and the influences on Burke's work, particularly where the connection is readily conceded such as that with Swift, Smith and Montesquieu in the 18th century, and with later thinkers such as Acton and Tocqueville. Deane's range of references is staggeringly wide, and his discussion of the reception (or rejection) of some of Burke's ideas breaks new ground in situating him as an eminent Victorian man of letters. Deane pulls no punches in his discussion of later writers and thinkers. Tocqueville's agonising over American slavery is set alongside his viewing with equanimity Bugead's butchery in Algeria; while Acton's blindspot, like that of most of his contemporaries, was India, and the impossibility there for him of colonial rule with liberty.
In short, this is a book to be savoured over time rather than read in a rush. Collectively, the essays may well enhance Burke's reputation for farsightedness; they confirm his groundedness in Irish affairs; they are revealing as to how his reputation emerged in the late 19th century; and they may also prompt an assessment of him as a politician - a subject which has been relatively neglected. Deane has done well by Burke: to be sure, there's something about Irish intellectuals.
Thomas Bartlett is Professor of Modern Irish History at University College Dublin
Foreign Affections: Essays on Edmund Burke By Seamus Deane. Cork University Press in association with Field Day, 220pp. €29