Studies in Burke and His Time, Volume 23
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STUDIES IN BURKE AND HIS TIME AND HIS STUDIES IN BURKE I N THE N EXT I SS UE ... S TEVEN P. M ILLIE S STUDIES IN The Inner Light of Edmund Burke A N D REA R A D A S ANU Edmund Burke’s Anti-Rational Conservatism R O B ERT H . B ELL The Sentimental Romances of Lawrence Sterne AND HIS TIME J.D. C . C LARK A Rejoinder to Reviews of Clark’s Edition of Burke’s Reflections R EVIEW S O F M ICHAEL B ROWN The Meal at theRegina Saracen’s JanesHead: Edmund Burke F . P. L OCK Edmund Burke Volume II: 1784 – 1797 , Edmund Burke:and The the ScottishMan with Literati Too Many Countries S EAN P ATRICK D ONLAN , Edmund Burke’s Irish Identities M ICHAELDavid F UNK E. White D ECKAR D N EIL M C A RTHUR , David Hume’s Political Theory Wonder and Beauty in Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry Burke, Barry, and Bishop Butler E LIZA B ETH L A MB ERT , Edmund Burke of Beaconsfield R O B ERT H . B ELL Fool for Love: The SentimentalDavid ClareRomances of Laurence Sterne Brian Friel’sS TEVEN Invocation P. M ILLIEof EdmundS Burke The Inner Lightin ‘Philadelphia,of Edmund Burke: Here A Biographical I Come!’ Approach to Burke’s Religious Faith and Epistemology STUDIES IN James Matthew Wilson VOLUME 22 2011 Is Burke Conservatism’s Intellectual Father? REVIEWreviewsS OofF AND HIS TIME F.P.RichardLOCK, Edmund Bourke, Burke: Empire Vol. and II, Revolution:1784–1797; DANIEL I. O’NEILL, The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate: Savagery, Civilization,The and Political Democracy; Life of Edmund EDWARD FBurkeESER , Locke; SEAN PATRICKP. J. Marshall DONLAN, E D&., Donald Edmund Bryant,Burke’s Irish eds .Identities, P. O . B OX 4 4 31 , W IL M INGTON , D E 19807-0431 The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Volume IV: VOLUME 22 2011 Party, Parliament, and the Dividing of the Whigs VOLUME 25 2015 EDITORS Elizabeth R. Lambert Michael Brown Gettysburg College University of Aberdeen EXECUTIVE EDITOR Ian Crowe Belmont Abbey College PUBLISHER Annette Y. Kirk Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal ASSOCIATE EDITORS Bruce P. Frohnen Frederick G. Whelan Ohio Northern University University of Pittsburgh FOUNDING EDITOR EDITOR EMERITUS Peter J. Stanlis† Joseph Pappin III University of South Carolina EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Steven Blakemore Florida Atlantic University Mark C. Henrie Arthur N. Rupe Foundation David Bromwich Yale University F. P. Lock Queen’s University, Ontario H. Lee Cheek, Jr. East Georgia State College Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. Harvard University J. C. D. Clark University of Kansas Steven P. Millies University of South Carolina L. M. Cullen Trinity College, Dublin Jeffrey O. Nelson Intercollegiate Studies Institute Sean Patrick Donlan University of the South Pacific Jennifer Pitts University of Chicago John Faulkner Ohio University–Lancaster David Willetts King’s College, University of London © 2016 Educational Reviewer, Inc. / The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal. Studies in Burke and His Time is the journal of the Edmund Burke Society of America, published by the Educational Reviewer, Inc., in cooperation with the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal. VOLUME 25 2015 Contents 2 Editor’s Introduction 5 Notes on Contributors 6 Edmund Burke: The Man with Too Many Countries Regina Janes 28 Burke, Barry, and Bishop Butler David E. White 42 Brian Friel’s Invocation of Edmund Burke in Philadelphia, Here I Come! David Clare 55 Is Burke Conservatism’s Intellectual Father? James Matthew Wilson BOOK REVIEWS 65 Richard Bourke, Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke. Steven P. Millies 71 The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Volume IV: Party, Parliament, and the Dividing of the Whigs, 1780–1794, edited by P. J. Marshall and Donald Bryant. John Faulkner Editor’s Introduction j The British jurist Sir Frederick Pollock wrote that “Burke [is] full of ideas more instructive than other men’s systems.” Whether it has been nationalism, Marxism, or more insidious forms of political deter- minism, it does appear that interest in Burke’s writings has risen par- ticularly at times when confidence in the victory and benefit of systems has reached a peak. The immediate postwar years were one such period, and the 1990s, too, when the future appeared to be the “Third Way,” and intellectuals contemplated the end of history. What do we make of Burke, though, now that the familiar features of such political sys- tems—nation states and patriotism, political parties, the moral bases of an explicitly Christian society—appear themselves to be disintegrating? Since these features were also the very things by which we could con- nect ourselves—just—to his world, we might ask now, “Which Burkean ideas and writings will impress themselves most forcefully on the figure we summon up over the next few years to counsel us?” In this process of reconfiguration, it is likely that highly recognizable aspects of Burke’s thought will strike us in a new and surprising light. Each of the articles in this issue provides an absorbing example of this, considering as they do familiar themes in Burke studies through connec- tions and contexts that transform their import and so draw fresh insights from the store of those instructive ideas. In “Edmund Burke: The Man with Too Many Countries,” Regina Janes explores Burke’s association with the concept of patriotism (a “mutually repellent” combination) in a way that explains how the former, as “an Irish emigrant living an un-English but Anglophilic dream of property and place,” attempted 2 Editor’S Introduction a distinctive play on the latter as a sentiment consistent with the “fer- vid internationalism” of his pre-revolutionary writings and one quite at odds with the inward-looking nationalism still often associated with the rhetoric of Reflections, and of Britain’s war against Revolutionary France. David White’s study of the intellectual and artistic connections between the Irish painter James Barry, the theologian and philoso- pher Bishop Joseph Butler, and Burke himself sheds intriguing light on Burke’s (now largely accepted) latitudinarian religion. Burke was an early patron and mentor to his compatriot Barry, and recommended to him Butler’s Analogy of Religion at a time when the artist was in spiri- tual crisis. It was a recommendation that, along with Joseph Addison’s essays, Burke proposed for religious doubt on more than one occasion; but White’s argument unfolds in ways that also disclose important new paths to the depth and complexity of Burke’s thought, well beyond the parameters of his own religious convictions. David Clare provides similarly unexpected avenues of investiga- tion in his examination of the function Burke’s famous Reflections on the Revolution in France serves in Brian Friel’s play Philadelphia, Here I Come! Starting from the playwright’s unexpected deployment of one of Burke’s most familiar passages, the paean to Marie Antoinette, Clare unfolds an extended intertextual presence of the Reflections throughout the play, showing how key arguments of loss and gain embedded in Burke’s antirevolutionary polemic are employed as commentary upon the persistent migration of the Irish to the New World. In “Is Burke Conservatism’s Intellectual Father?” James Matthew Wilson revisits a perennial question with a succinct perception. Situ- ating his thought in the context of traditions of analysis, such as Whig contractual theory, with which it is often considered starkly antagonistic, Wilson teases out vital (but often blurred) distinctions of terminology that indicate the presence of a robust tradition of Christian Platonist thinking, woven in the polemic of the Reflectionsand informing a differ- ent, more nuanced and vibrant form of “conservatism” than the nostalgic form of retrenchment with which Burke’s name is still associated today. In whatever clothing Burke might yet appear, there is no doubt that it will be all the more illuminating owing to the monumental edito- rial efforts that have produced scholarly editions of his correspondence 3 STUDIES IN BURKE AND HIS TIME and much of his writings. Most recently, Oxford University Press’s nine-volume edition of Burke’s Writings and Speeches has been brought to completion by the appearance of Volume IV, on “Party, Parliament, and the Dividing of the Whigs,” and we are delighted to carry a review of that volume in this issue. Reflective of these abundant sources is Richard Bourke’s recent study Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke, which stands as a signal achievement in its incorpo- ration of a vast amount of primary source material, and which is also reviewed extensively in these pages. As part of its own ongoing contribution to the promotion of research and conversation on Burke studies, and following the success of its meeting at Villanova in February 2015, the Edmund Burke Society will center its next international conference on the topic of “Edmund Burke and The Conservative Mind: Russell Kirk on the Burke Revival, Then and Now.” The conference is being planned in association with St. John Fisher College, Rochester, New York, and will combine an examina- tion of Russell Kirk’s contribution to the postwar Burke revival with assessments of how Burke’s inexhaustible imagination may guide reflec- tion and analysis in the early twenty-first century. Anyone interested in attending the conference or presenting a paper should look out for forthcoming details on the Burke Society webpage or contact this jour- nal’s executive editor at [email protected]. Ian Crowe 4 Notes on Contributors j DAVID CLARE is an Irish Research Council-funded postdoctoral fellow, based in the Moore Institute at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His first monograph, Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook, was published by Palgrave Macmil- lan in November 2015, and his work has appeared in the Irish Studies Review, the New Hibernia Review, the Irish University Review, Eighteenth-Century Fic- tion, the James Joyce Literary Supplement, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, and Emerging Perspectives.