Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Winston, once summarised Disraeli’s life as “Failure, failure, failure, partial success, renewed failure, ultimate and complete triumph”. The same might be said of the great 18th-century philosopher-statesman Edmund Burke. Despite a chequered career, 250 years later it is Burke who offers the deepest critique of politics today, and the greatest hope for its future.
Burke came to prominence in the age of Dr Johnson, David Hume, Adam Smith and Edward Gibbon. Over his long career he fought five great political battles: for more equal treatment of Catholics in Ireland; against British oppression of the 13 American colonies; for constitutional restraints on royal patronage; against the power of the East India Company in India; and most famously, against the dogma of the French Revolution. Their common theme is his detestation of injustice and the abuse of power.
In these battles Burke’s record was mixed. He often over-reached himself, he rarely exercised real political power, and he was variously denounced as vainglorious, a blowhard and an irrelevance. A man of enormous personal warmth and good humour, he lost friends and supporters thanks to his near-obsessive insistence on the campaigns of the moment. Yet the extraordinary fact is not that Burke was occasionally wrong, but that he was so often right – and not through luck, but because his powers of analysis, imagination and empathy gave him an extraordinary gift of prophecy.
Burke foresaw some of the greatest discontents of the modern era, including its extreme liberalism and individualism. Various disasters have gravely undermined conventional beliefs in the primacy of the individual will, in the power of human reason alone to resolve political and economic problems, and in the capacity of unfettered individual freedom to deliver personal or social well-being.
Thus the White House under John F Kennedy gathered together one of greatest assemblages of expertise ever seen in American politics, yet they took their country into Vietnam. Western policy towards Russia in the Nineties all but ignored the country’s low levels of trust and social capital, and actively assisted the loss of public assets at fire-sale prices to the new oligarchs. The euro was introduced, and has been sustained, as an elite project that deliberately ignored, and ignores, long-standing concerns about the huge differences in the societies of the various nations involved, and the legitimacy of the euro’s own surrounding institutions.
Yet Burke also reminds us of threats within Western societies themselves. For there is increasing evidence that extreme liberalism causes people to lose sight of the true sources of human well-being and to become more selfish and individualistic, by priming them with ideas of financial success and celebrity.
In his own time, Burke regarded as his greatest achievement his campaign to restrain the crony capitalism of the East India Company, and to insist on the accountability of private power to public authority. In effect, he offers a profound critique of the market fundamentalism now prevalent in Western society. But this critique comes not from the Left of the political spectrum, but from the Right. Markets are not idolised, but treated as cultural artefacts mediated by trust and tradition. Capitalism becomes not a one-size-fits-all ideology of consumption, but a spectrum of different models to be evaluated on their own merits.
As Burke shows us, the individual is not simply a compendium of wants; human happiness is not simply a matter of satisfying individual wants; and the purpose of politics is not to satisfy the interests of individuals living now. It is to preserve a social order which addresses the needs of generations past, present and future.
The paradox of Burke’s conservatism is thus that, properly understood, it is intrinsically modest, while extreme liberalism appears to promote arrogance and selfishness. Burke’s conservatism constrains rampant individualism and the tyranny of the majority, while extreme liberalism threatens to worsen their effects. Burke tempts us to the heretical thought that the route to a better politics may not be through managerial claims – “we can do it better” – but through a deep change of viewpoint.
In his own life, Burke was devoted to an ideal of public duty, and deplored the tendency to individual or generational arrogance, and the “ethics of vanity”. His thought is imbued with the importance of history and memory, and a hatred of those that would erase them. He insists on the importance of human allegiance and identity, and social institutions and networks.
Finally, a Burkean conservatism would also question the self-image of modern media and politics, in which there is no truth, but only different kinds of “narrative” deployed in the service of power. Instead, Burke offers principles that do not change, the sanction of history and the moral authenticity of those willing to give up power to principle. He gives us again the lost language of politics: a language of honour, loyalty, duty and wisdom, which can never be captured in any spreadsheet or economic model.
As the Western world now seeks to reset its political and economic course, it is this vision of human possibility and renewed social value that may prove to be Burke’s greatest legacy. It may also be the future of conservatism.
Jesse Norman’s biography of Edmund Burke (William Collins, rrp £20) is published this week. To order a copy from Telegraph Books for £18 plus £1.35 p&p, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
Jesse Norman is speaking at the Telegraph Hay Festival on May 26