Burke's Reflections

Having just finished Edmund Burke's 1790 tome Reflections On The Revolution Of France last night, I thank Tea at Trianon's Maria Elena Vidal, whom I often thought of while reading then book, for bringing this article by Gertrude Himmelfarb to my attention — Reflections on Burke's Reflections.

Indeed, the book was "an extraordinary feat of political imagination" in which he not only "recogniz[ed] the seeds of the Terror so early and so dramatically" but also "reveal[ed] the flawed philosophy and the temper of mind that had inspired the Revolution and had made it so total."

"Burke," the author reminds us, "had a great distaste for abstract concepts and precepts, and a high regard for prudence and expediency in the practical affairs of government." This reader, too, was impressed by "Burke’s rhetoric," which she describes as "deliberately harsh and provocative." The author continues:

The defense of prejudice and superstition, of prescription and presumption, of chivalry and “pleasing illusions,” are hardly words intended to endear him to his enlightened readers, for whom these words were (and still are) red flags. He might have used more agreeable, more palatable terms —belief, tradition, convention, opinion. Instead, he deliberately chose to shock his readers, to oblige them to confront the issues more boldly by expressing them more starkly—to confront not only the French Revolution, but the inevitable cultural revolution that he believed to be even more subversive than the political revolution.