Those who know anything of contemporary scholarship or the political philosophy of Edmund Burke know that Peter J. Stanlis clearly holds the title of “Dean of Burke Studies.” While Russell Kirk ushered in the return to Burke in America, it is Stanlis who has, more than any other scholar, sustained the revival of Burke scholarship. It is Stanlis who dropped the bombshell in the laps of jaded and torpid utilitarian expositors of Burke’s thought with his monumental work, Edmund Burke and the Natural Law, first published by the University of Michigan Press and recently reprinted. This was followed by the inauguration of the Burke Newsletter, which became Studies in Burke and His Times, edited by Stanlis; his subsequent publication of Edmund Burke: A Bibliography of Secondary Studies to 1982 instantly became an invaluable resource. The present work, Edmund Burke: The Enlightenment and Revolution, brings into one volume a rich cross section of some of Stanlis’s writings on Edmund Burke. The book is constructed in three parts devoted to Burke’s political philosophy, his critique of the Enlightenment, and his view of revolution in general and on the Revolution of 1688 in particular.

Reading someone so diverse in his subject matter and unsystematic in his style as Burke, one naturally seeks from his commentators the essential meaning unifying the literally global nature of the Irish-born British politician’s works. Stanlis’s reply to such seeking is that Burke “never provided a golden key to his scriptures”; but, lest one despair, “he is neither vague nor inconsistent.” On both of these points, we can hear echoing across continents the strident protests of numerous scholars claiming that Burke is a rhetorician, utilitarian, conservative ideologist, whose main purpose is to sustain the nearly perfect world bequeathed to him by tradition and the British Constitution. Some, such as Ian Hampshire-Monk, in audacious fashion go so far as to deny altogether that Burke was a political philosopher. So implausible are these evaluations of Burke, especially in light of the work of Stanlis and the equally rich and penetrating work of Francis Canavan, S.J., that one can only wonder how seriously Stanlis’s own work has been studied.

Actually, Stanlis’s work, even in the negative reaction it has spawned, has had an enormous impact. For nearly all of the most recent scholarship—including that by F.P. Lock, Hampshire-Monk, and Christopher Reid—has been forced to acknowledge the explicit use of the “natural law” by Burke. In response, these scholars counter by declaring that Burke’s recourse to natural law is a rhetorical ploy. It falls to Conor Cruise O’Brien to put the final spin on the matter, for he claims that Burke is “a conscious and deliberate propagandist,” one who “had long been aware of the value of verbal violence.” Perhaps, as Stanlis modestly remarks, there is no “golden key” to Burkean writ. But beyond doubt Stanlis in this volume lays before the reader those essential elements that consistently permeate Burke’s politics and unify the great profusion of Burke’s genius. What are these elements as disclosed by Stanlis?

Stanlis states unequivocally that “faith in the classical and Scholastic conception of Natural Law is Burke’s ultimate political principle.” Elsewhere he refers to Burke’s “principle of moral prudence” as “the most important principle in his political politics.” If “Natural Law” and “moral prudence” do not provide the “golden key” to understanding Burke, they certainly provide the basic elements of his political philosophy. Further, these two principles are intertwined. The “normative ethical principles of the Natural Law” do not have the status of mathematical theorems entering into a political calculus that details what is to be done in every particular event. Like Aristotle and Aquinas, Burke realized that moral principles necessarily have a universal import. But the circumstances to which they are applied vary according to custom, habit, tradition, and locale. Hence, the necessity of recourse to moral prudence. Stanlis holds that for Burke “prudence is the general regulator of social changes according to Natural and Constitutional law. As such, it is the cardinal virtue that supplies the practical means by which Natural Law principles are fulfilled and harmonized with the concrete circumstances of social life.” Prudence does not resist “change,” which Burke held to be the great law of nature. Rather, “Prudence favored reform before revolution.”

Stanlis’s chapters on “Burke and the Revolution of the Enlightenment” and “Burke and the Sensibility of Rousseau” constitute not only a tour de force of scholarship, but they serve as a critique of modernity. The chapter on the Enlightenment serves to explain Burke’s apparent skepticism towards reason as a skepticism towards “discursive rationalism” and “speculative ideology”— towards what Maritain regarded as “angelism.” Here, abstract reason seeks to impose itself on politics disregarding circumstances and ignoring what Burke called “political reason,” or practical reason. The chapter on Rousseau brings together the scathing charges of Burke against the spirit of the French Revolution including its radical individualism, couched in Rousseau’s “central principle that people are by nature morally good” but are corrupted by “the demands of social customs and institutions.” It is here, especially, that Stanlis brings our focus to bear on the greatest relevance of Burke, which is his condemnation of extreme individualism and the elevation of the sovereignty of the individual will. Consider Stanlis’s own words in his chapter on “Burke the Perennial Political Philosopher”: “But Burke’s greatest relevance in the twentieth century . . . lies in his criticism of the respective crimes and follies of totalitarian tyranny in all its modem forms, and of the anarchy of selfish egoists who think they can live in society as though they existed as isolated, atomized individuals in a pre-civil state of nature.” Clearly, at times Burke employed the modem language of “social contract” and “natural rights,” but he did so only in the context of a natural law philosophy, stressing the social nature of man, his place in an intelligible, created universe with a hierarchy of natures and in a civil society that has as its main purpose the virtuous realization of human persons in community.

One of Stanlis’s most insightful points is lodged within an endnote in which he asserts that Burke is not a “status quo” conservative. He pointedly unveils one of the most stunning inanities of recent journalism, which identifies “as conservative the most radical and doctrinaire Marxist governments that resist every effort to reform or displace their totalitarian tyranny.” How absurd are such phrases as “the conservative, communist hardliners in Beijing,” or descriptions of the failed coup in the Soviet Union last August as an example of “reactionary conservatives trying to turn the clock back to communism,” and how deft is Stanlis’s exposure of a basic misunderstanding of Burkean conservatism.

Finally, we find in Stanlis’s work a fit assessment of Burke’s power as a writer. “Burke did appeal to his reader’s reason, sense, and emotions, but the mere presence of these ingredients in his speeches and writings did not, in themselves, make his style powerful. His imaginative fusion of all of these elements, his skill in converting an image into a state of mind and feeling, combined with his moral imagination, intuition, and erudition, enable his readers to leap from sight to insight, from the physical sense to the metaphysical essence of his subject, so that at once they saw, understood, and felt profoundly the whole point of his argument. . . . His ability to reason in metaphor was the hallmark of his political thought.”

In the smooth, flowing, economical, erudite, and deeply philosophical style of Peter Stanlis, Edmund Burke has acquired an expositor of uncommon ability and tempered passion. The Burke scholar who has failed to engage Stanlis’s works risks the earned disapproval of subsequent generations of Burke students. Those who seriously study Burke in light of Stanlis are altogether likely to discover the evasive “golden key” to Burke’s political philosophy.

 

[Edmund Burke: Enlightenment and Revolution, by Peter J. Stanlis (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers) 259 pp., $34.95]