Edmund Burke: the greatest Whig, the first conservative

The Telegraph ^ | 6/21/2013 | Daniel Hannan

[markomalley]

I still remember the shock I felt when I was about half way through Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. I was spending an undergraduate summer meandering slowly from Chicago to New Orleans when, in the middle of a passage about something else, I came across a glancing reference to France’s “captive king”. Stunned, I put the paperback down and stared round-eyed at my fellow Greyhound passengers.

Until that moment, it had not properly hit me that the entire book, the most penetrating denunciation of revolutionary excess ever composed, had been written before the Terror started. As a piece of political prophecy, it stands unsurpassed.

Burke predicted the chaos, the repression, the arbitrary confiscations , the executions and even, with uncanny foresight, the Bonapartist dénouement:

In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account. The moment in which that event shall happen, the person who commands the army is master of your whole republic.

There are never any prizes in politics for being right too early. Burke stood apart, an ascetic soothsayer, a lonely vate, descrying a future invisible to his contemporaries. He was right about America, right about Ireland, right about India and, outstandingly, right about France. As is usually the way, his peers never properly forgave him.

[exnavy]

Burkes peers were mostly liberal. And liberals are the largest group of constituents to ever not learn the lessons of history.

[TArcher]

>>Burkes peers were mostly liberal.

Yep.

The Fire is in the Minds of Termites.

{ Hi Peanuts! }

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Burkes peers were mostly liberal. And liberals are the largest group of constituents to ever not learn the lessons of history.

Back then, “liberal” referred to people Americans now call “conservative.” The meaning of the term, in the US only, was given its American Newspeak - essentially inverted - meaning in the 1920s (source: Safire's New Political Dictionary).

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks markomalley.

[Winniesboy]

It's interesting that in the original edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which reached the letter 'L' in 1901, there are 14 definitions of 'liberal, of which the following is the one relating to politics:

'LIBERAL. Of political opinions: Favourable to constitutional changes and legal or administrative reforms tending in the direction of freedom and democracy. Hence used as the designation of the party holding such opinions, in England or other states; opposed to Conservative.'

I imagine the 'tending in the direction of freedom...' bit might be rather startling to a modern American reader!

[Excellence]

srbfl

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

used as the designation of the party holding such opinions, in England or other states; opposed to Conservative.'

I imagine the 'tending in the direction of freedom...' bit might be rather startling to a modern American reader!

We are called “conservative,” but if you actually reflect on our actual preferences, they are for

1. liberty, which is the freedom to do things differently than they have been done in the past - why exactly would we call that “conservative?”

2. Drill, baby, drill! Why, exactly, would we call that “conservative?"

The answer is that there used to be a word for our POV, and it was liberal. But journalism fixed that; now “liberal” refers to people with the exact opposite POV as us.

[Brad from Tennessee]

From Wikipedia:

Classical liberalism is a political philosophy and ideology that emerged as a response to the Industrial Revolution and urbanization in the 19th century in Europe and the United States.[1] It shares a number of beliefs with other belief systems belonging to liberalism, advocating civil liberties and political freedom, limited government, rule of law, and belief in free market.[2][3][4] Classical liberalism is built on ideas that had already arisen by the end of the 18th century, such as selected ideas of Adam Smith, John Locke, Jean-Baptiste Say, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo, stressing the belief in free market and natural law,[5] utilitarianism,[6] and progress.[7] Classical liberals were more suspicious than conservatives of all but the most minimal government[8] and, adopting Thomas Hobbes's[citation needed] theory of government, they believed government had been created by individuals to protect themselves from one another.[9]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism