Foreign Affections: Essays on Edmund Burke

The new essays are chronologically divided into meditations about thinkers who preceded Burke, most notably Montesquieu but also Swift and Diderot and thinkers who came after him, notably Lord Acton and Cardinal Newman; that is, possible influences on Burke followed by some considerations of his legacy.

The question that most often comes to the fore in Foreign Affections is whether liberty is compatible with colonial rule? Yes answered Burke unless such rule escaped the rule of law and was replaced by arbitrary power. This answer for Burke endorsed revolution in America, but not elsewhere, Deane argues, where colonial atrocity was condoned whilst revolutionary violence condemned. Deane casts Burke as a reluctant critic of colonial atrocity. His focus, however, is not on teasing out the ambiguity of Burke’s positions on political legitimacy, empire and the Irish question. Rather his position is one of general antipathy to both Burke and what Deane emphasises about Burke’s political legacy. This legacy could be summarised as ‘a liberal antirevolutionary position on violence and progress.’ Something gets conflated at times between what can be fairly attributed to Burke and to what might be construed as part of Burke’s broader legacy. Deane’s engagement with both occurs through the ‘Irish Studies’ lens of the present day Catholic nationalist post-colonialist thought. Orwell’s dictum that whoever controls the past controls the present and whoever controls the present controls the future comes to mind. Insofar as this applies to Irish historiography it also applies to readings of literature and political philosophy. The account of Burke presented here is never less than partisan and sometimes sectarian.

Foreign Affections makes no reference whatsoever to the main competing text that has placed Burke’s preoccupations about the Irish question at its centre. Conor Cruise O’Brien’s The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke gains entry to Deane’s bibliography, but is neither discussed nor mentioned in Foreign Affections ¹. There is no reference to O’Brien in the index, despite the prominence of his efforts to rehabilitate Burke. This is a glaring omission, a no doubt conscious one, the petulance of which undermines the creditability of Deane’s scholarship. Deane and O’Brien have for decades prowled the battlefields in the culture wars that have shaped the school of ‘Irish Studies’ built by the former. Both represent implacably opposed intellectual positions on the Irish question. Deane’s approach to the matter suggests the pretended indifference of a family feud (‘Do not mention his name. I will not hear his name spoken in this house.’). Almost thirty years ago in The Crane Bag, an Irish journal that aspired to the sort of intellectual conversation avoided here, Deane dismissed O’Brien’s ‘liberal humanism’ and introduced some of the criticisms of Burke found in Foreign Affections. This dismissal occurred in a debate between Deane and Seamus Heaney published in 1977.

‘Do you not think’, Deane asked Heaney, that ‘the kind of humanism which Conor Cruise O’Brien sponsors is precisely that kind of humanism, totally detached from its atavisms, which, though welcome from a rational point of view, renders much of what he says either irrelevant or wrong, particularly in relation to the North, where bigotry is so much part of the psyche?’ The obstinate voice of rationalist humanism, Heaney retorted, was important for if that was lost everything was lost. He argued that O’Brien did an utterly necessary job in rebuking all easy thought about the Protestant community in the North; ‘It is to be seen in this way: seven or eight years ago there was tremendous sentiment for Catholics in the North, amongst intellectuals, politicians and ordinary people in the South. Because of his statements O’Brien is still reviled by people who held these sentiments; yet now these people harbour sentiments which mirror O’Brien’s thinking, and still they do not cede to the clarity or the validity of his position’ ². But surely, Deane objected, did not O’Brien’s ‘bourgeois form of humanism’ impose a rational clarity upon the Northern position that was untrue to the reality. Heaney replied that O’Brien’s real force was in the South rather than the North: ‘it is not enough for people to simply say, “Ah, they’re all Irishmen” when some Northerners actually spit at the word Irishman.’ O’Brien’s contribution was an obstinate insistence on facing up to this kind of reality ³.

Deane wrote explicitly about Burke for an issue of The Crane Bag that he edited in 1978. Curiously the piece, entitled An Example of Tradition, is not listed amongst those reworked for Foreign Affections. It emphasised the revival of Edmund Burke’s writings on Ireland by Matthew Arnold and the centrality of Burke to nineteenth century liberal thinking Ireland; for instance the repeal of Penal Laws and efforts to kill Home Rule with kindness. In 1881 Arnold produced an anthology, Edmund Burke on Irish Affairs and argued in its preface for a degree of Celtic cultural independence ⁴. Deane cast Arnold (and Burke by association) as parent to the subsequently prevalent archetype of the vitalic ‘Celt as dreamer, imaginative, unblessed by the Greek sense of form, at home in wild landscapes’ and so as the antithesis of Europe’s anxious anaemic political and social modernity. Ar nold’s idealisation of the Celtic race, according to Deane, informed a sectarian and even racial conception of Irishness. This, he maintained, was distinct from the Anglo-Irish tradition that W.B. Yeats created out of Swift, Berkley, Goldsmith and, also Burke. It was distinct from the heroic revolutionary tradition that Pearse created out of Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet. Through Arnold, Deane argued, a notion of Celtic Ireland had ‘removed itself to Britain, encased in Burke’s capricious reputation,’ to later return as an unlikely (and presumably inauthentic) influence on the Irish Literary revival ⁵.

In Foreign Affections Deane outlines Burke’s positions on political legitimacy, colonialism and the plight of the Catholic Irish under the Penal Laws. He quotes a contemporary account by Tom Paine - one accepted by Burke - which maintains that Burke would defend the British constitution in its entirety: ‘loaded with all its encumbrances, clogged with its peers, and its beef; its parsons and its pudding, its commons, its beer, its dull slavish liberty of going about just as one pleases’. Deane explains this as an argument that the constitution of England, the old constitution of France, European civilisation with all its faults, disorders and incoherence accorded with the unpredictable and complex nature of history and the human person. These amounted to a social complex order that could be discerned but never properly understood. Its complexity could be fatally disrupted if it were to be replaced by an artificial man-made order. Burke feared that the result would be despotic and dehumanising. Revolution, the surrender of experience to abstract principle, amounted to the surrender of civilisation (however flawed) to barbarism.

For Deane, the British liberty defended by Burke, as exported to Ireland was ‘the exclusive preserve of colonists’. Burke both opposed the Penal Laws yet legitimised the system that imposed them. This disjuncture is at the heart of Deane’s difficulty with Burke. As he put it: “The late attacks of 1792 on the Penal Laws in Ireland are of a piece with his earlier writings, they remain almost entirely free of the new version of political obedience that he forged for his anti-revolutionary philosophy”. The question, then, answered differently by Burke and Deane, is whether one can oppose tyranny without having a revolution. For those who answer in the affirmative (and no doubt it is easier to do if one has not experienced tyranny) Burke will always be an attractive figure. Not so for those for whom the answer is no.

The chapter on Newman exemplifies Deane’s approach at its most nuanced. His thesis is evident in the title: ‘Newman: Converting the Empire.’ It links Newman’s championing of Catholic institutions in Ireland with a mission of Catholic colonial expansion. The connection with Burke concerns firstly his views about the ambiguity of both vis a vis British imperialism. Deane also views Newman as an inheritor of Burke’s views about universalism and counter-revolution. For Burke legitimacy depended much upon tradition. Deane draws parallels with Newman’s theology on the legitimacy of the pre-Reformation Universal Church. For both, Deane suggests, counter-revolutions could never reinstate worlds that had earlier been lost. They could only pretend to do so, whilst inaugurating new ones. Deane likens Newman’s pursuit of the liberty of Catholics in Ireland to Burke’s efforts. However he views both as imperial crusaders. Neither opposed the legitimacy of Empire, be it in Ireland or elsewhere.

Deane acknowledges the scope of Burke’s concern about colonial oppression. However, he contentiously states that this concern is incoherent and can be intellectually dismissed. His case is that Burke’s claims about “an external conspiracy of Illuminati, philosophes and Freemasons to overthrow the altar and throne in Europe” discredit the main planks of his thought. Deane’s dismissal is pretty much an absolute one. To put it colloquially, if Burke subscribed to the flaky conspiracy theories of his day then:

Burke is not to be taken seriously as a political thinker, especially on Irish affairs. As an intellectual, or a rhetoritician, or as a hired gun for the Whigs, or as an apologist for the Irish Catholics, the French émigrés or the Begum of Outh, he is too partisan to be reliable.

This is much the same as arguing that Newton’s theory of gravitation must be false because Newton believed in alchemy. The damning reference to Burke’s allegedly crackpot beliefs reads like a textbook example of an ad hominem argument. The reader is offered no footnote, no context, not even a secondary reference. Deane uses the term conspiracy here, but there is no entry in the index for the term (nor entries for Illuminati or Freemasons) to help the perplexed reader. As for the judgement about Burke’s partisanship, the problem with this line of attack is that it always cuts both ways. To illustrate this, just change the reference to eighteenth century Whigs into one about twentieth century Northern Irish nationalists and replace Burke’s foreign affections with present day post-colonial preoccupations. Similar dismissive tactics are employed elsewhere in the book. For instance, the first page of Deane’s opening chapter refers to ‘routine’ assessments of Burke’s thought. He provides just the one example, this from Luke Gibbons the author of another volume in the same Critical Conditions: Field Day ‘Irish Studies’ series that includes Foreign Affairs. The supposed ‘routine’ verdict is that Burke did not clarify the philosophical foundations of his thought; “either because he was a practicing politician, and not that way inclined, or because his thought was so confused, his betrayal of principle so stark that these foundations could not but have been murky.”

In his introduction to a subsequent chapter - one entitled ‘Freedom Betrayed’ – Deane notes that Burke, like Adam Smith, became incorporated by the likes of F.A Hayek into “the Manichean view of history that prevailed during the Cold War.” This observation is an interesting starting point, but is not developed any further than throwaway attacks mentioned above. The parallel between present day appropriations of Smith and Burke, not discussed by Deane, warrant consideration. John Kenneth Galbraith has argued that Smith, as a moral philosopher, would not have approved of the present day neo-liberal idealisation of market forces that have become linked to his name ⁶. Smith’s moral philosophy emphasised the interdependence of people in society. His opposition to eighteenth century trade barriers emerged in a specific context. Galbraith argues that his position on laissez faire might well have been different had he lived a century later.

Similar arguments might be made in the case of Burke. Neither can be blamed for whatever Manichean world-view was held by those who would appropriate them posthumously. Deane tellingly quotes an assessment of Burke quoted from Thomas Moore’s 1825 biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan:

Burke was mighty in either camp; and it would have taken two great men to effect what he, by this division of himself achieved. His mind, indeed, lies parted asunder in his works, like some vast continent severed by a convulsion of nature, - each portion peopled by its own giant race of opinions, differing altogether in features and language, and committed to eternal hostility to each other.

Deane identifies two Burkes - one who is the defender of liberty, another the betrayer of liberal causes – but likes neither. More sympathetic readings of Burke, especially the Burke of Irish affairs, are ignored. Foreign Affairs in addressing, one, just one side of the story fails both. David Lodge’s campus novel Small World featured a young Irish literary theorist whose thesis was on the influence of T.S Eliot on William Shakespeare. That is, his topic was the impact of thinking about Eliot on thinking about Shakespeare’s oeuvre. This can of course be a perfectly reasonable approach to scholarship. Yet as Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote other men are the lens through which we read our own minds. This is a book as much about Deane as about Burke.

Bryan Fanning is the author of Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland.

Notes

1 Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke (London, 1992)

2 Seamus Deane, ‘Unhappy at Home: Interview with Seamus Heaney’ The Crane Bag (1977), 1.1, p.69

3 Deane, ‘Unhappy at Home’, p.69

4 See Seamus Deane, ‘An Example of Tradition’, The Crane Bag (1978), 3.1, p.377

5 Deane, ‘An Example of Tradition’, p.378

6 Kenneth Galbraith, A History of Economics: The Past as the Present (London; Penguin, 1991), p.64