Edmund Burke, Imperialist Ideologue?

Abstract

Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire.
By Daniel I. O’Neill. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016.
272p $34.95 paperback.

In his Reflections on the Revolution in France Edmund Burke attacked two alarming trends in French politics. One was the growing taste for what he called “innovation.” The French, he warned, had been bamboozled by novel doctrines to their extreme detriment, a fate his English readers would avoid provided they remained true to their native reluctance to innovate. The second trend was the prevalence of what we might today call “ideological thinking” among French political and cultural elites. Those who are blinkered by an ideology (in this case the rights of man), Burke suggested, will lack the capacity for finessed political judgment necessary to steer the state through choppy waters.