Volume 39, Number 20 · December 3, 1992
Who Was Edmund Burke?
By Alan Ryan
The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke
by Conor Cruise O'Brien
University of Chicago Press, 692 pp., $34.95
Edmund Burke died 195 years ago, but he remains the most appealing of conservative writers—not least because it is unclear whether he is a conservative at all. He supported Catholic Emancipation in his native Ireland, he was revered in revolutionary America for his defense of the colonists' rights, he was a ferocious critic of the Crown's meddling in British politics, and an anticolonialist before his time. Isaac Kramnick's interesting study, The Rage of Edmund Burke,[*] describes him as 'an ambivalent conservative,' which is one way of putting it. Conor Cruise O'Brien's new book reminds us that it is as plausible to regard him as essentially a liberal—pluralist and antitotalitarian, but neither reactionary nor authoritarian.
Review, 8128 words
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