Franke: Book ReviewEdmund Burke
by Mark Franke
Edmund Burke was a philosophical hero for us Young Americans for Freedom undergraduates back in the Nixon administration. In large part this was due to Russell Kirk’s autobiography, “Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered,” that had just been released.
In recent years Burke’s status has been brought into question by factions within the conservative movement, no doubt inevitable given the splintering of conservatives into multiple factions. I really don’t understand the current infatuation with Leo Strauss, perhaps the leading anti-Burke cheerleader. I really should read more from and about Strauss. But that can wait.
Instead, I chose to read a new Burke biography, actually a joint biography of Burke and Charles Fox, by James Grant. “Friends until the End: Edmund Burke and Charles Fox in the Age of Revolution” (W. W. Norton & Company 2025, 417 pages plus notes, $28 hardcover at Amazon) traces the parliamentary careers of the two men as allies on most issues until the French Revolution, the “end” of their friendship as the subtitle says.
Their backgrounds could not have been more different. Burke was an Anglo-Irishman of modest means with taints of Roman Catholicism in his heritage. Fox’s grandfather was reputed to be the richest commoner in the kingdom due to legal graft taken from his government position as army paymaster. Both ended up all but bankrupt, due to Burke’s outspending his middle-class income and Fox’s gambling away his family’s great wealth.
What they shared was heartfelt opposition to King George and his Tory cabinet, both men identifying as Whigs albeit of different temperaments. They were allies in opposition to Britain’s handling of her American colonies, especially during the expensive War for Independence, and during the interminable yet unsuccessful impeachment of the governor general of the East India Company for alleged corruption.
Their common opposition grew from different roots, a difference that ultimately caused their rift during the French Revolution. Grant does a yeoman’s job of tracing this across several decades of parliamentary activity. Fox seemed to be motivated primarily as a gadfly, enjoying his backbench sarcasm, which was both political and personal against King George III and his chief minister Lord North. Burke’s motivation, meanwhile, was driven by concern for those unfortunate enough to be harmed by British imperial excess, particularly those in America and India.
Following all this gets complicated as Britain’s two political parties, the Tories and the Whigs, were not clearly defined in Hanoverian times. A Whig such as Fox or Burke could sit with the opposition during a Whig ministry. Burke, more than Fox, made a career out of his principled opposition.
The end game was that the two split irreconcilably over the French Revolution, especially as it became more and more violent. Grant explains the root cause of this split was Burke’s intractable devotion to the British constitution, a structure he believed could address any deficiencies in its governance given time and serious thought. Fox was ready to throw it all out to achieve his ideals.
Grant credits these two men and their split as the defining moment for our modern conservative and liberal ideologies. Burke anchored everything in the superiority of the British constitution, a document organic to British culture and one serving “to save sinners from ourselves.” Fox, on the other hand, went all in with the French revolutionaries’ belief in the perfectibility of man based not on the Christianity but on atheism. Well, eventual perfection at least. Meanwhile, the Terror and Napoleon would steer the course for the great unwashed.
There is substantial detail in this book about how the House of Commons operated during the Hanoverian dynasty. Speeches could go on for hours or sometimes days. Burke was particularly loquacious; his outstanding speech-making ability was often self-defeating by going on too long. James Boswell described Burke the speaker as always enthralling but seldom persuasive. This was Burke’s greatest weakness—an inability to know when to shut up. Grant blames this on his “passionate, sometimes inconveniently expressive conscience.”
Burke’s strengths were his appreciation for the sanctity of the constitution and his understanding of the importance of freer trade in a mercantilist environment. He was also a family man as we understand it today. When not attending sessions in Commons, he went home while Fox went to all-night gambling houses where he lost consistently.
The book is long and the detail sometimes hard to grasp. Party discipline was something not exercised in any effective way as factions within and across parties developed to support current or prospective ministries. Fox played that game better than Burke, serving as foreign minister on two occasions, once in opposition to Lord North and once as his ally. It’s hard to follow all the players without a scorecard, but Grant tries to walk us through what is most important.
One wonders if Grant ran out of steam by the time he reached the French Revolution. Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France” is one of his masterpieces but is treated almost as an afterthought despite its influential status, now more than then. But it is a long book with much of it devoted to laying the groundwork for how the two men became allies.
The book’s strength lies in its clear characterization of the two men. Fox gives the reader the impression of someone who is not serious, a political dilettante who is self-indulgent as his driving motivation, almost a buffoon. Burke is his opposite but too often driven to acerbic rhetoric. His speeches are loaded with superlatives and frequent assertions of facts that have no basis. (Reminds one of you know who.)
What I found most surprising in the book is the fact that Edmund Burke, so influential with our Founding Fathers and us YAFers from the 1960s, had almost no influence in Parliament. His crusade to impeach Warren Hastings for corruption took years of parliamentary time in both Commons and Lords but still failed miserably. His reform bills went nowhere. That said, it is his writing that has a lasting impact on our American republic and those of us who still cling to Enlightenment era classical liberalism.
Burke’s legacy is not what he contributes to today’s political debate, although it ought to factor more than it does. Rather, it is its influence on the Founding Fathers when they were most philosophically impressionable. Burke’s fingerprints can be seen all over the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, even if modern minds choose to ignore them.
Mark Franke, M.B.A., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review and its book reviewer, is formerly an associate vice-chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.
Comments...