Book Reviews

A REVIEWER'S NOTEBOOK JOHN CHAMBERLAIN Edmund Burke and His World IN THE THIRTIES, when the word ~~revolution" was being bandied about, Peter Drucker threw cold water on some of the more lively controver sies with his observation that the American Revolution was not a rev olution at all. It was, he said, a conservati ve counter-revolution, fought by the colonials to preserve their rights as Englishmen. King George III, a German, was the real revolutionary. What Drucker, a Viennese, was trying to tell us should have oc casioned little surprise. For it was all in Edmund Burke, whose fa mous speech on the need for Brit ain's reconciliation with the Ameri can colonies we had read in school. Burke regarded the stand of the embattled farmers at Lexington and Concord for what it was, a desPerate attempt to hold on to (~English liberties." There was no desire to overturn society, to institute a new order.

In the semantic battles of the Thirties, however, we had forgotten that words, over the decades, can come to mean their opposites. Liberalism had come to connote government compulsion. In her en gaging biographical study of Ed mund Burke and His World (Devin Adair, 143 Sound Beach Ave., Greenwich, CT 06870, 232 pp., $12.95) Alice P. Miller provides an antidote to semantical giddiness: her hero fought against the tyranny of verbal abstractions all his life. It is fitting that Russell Kirk, whose study of Burke was the centerpiece of his trail-blazing The Conservative Mind, should contribute an intro701 702 THE FREEMAN November duction to Mrs. Miller's book, for Kirk, in his war against ctdefecated intellect," carries on a struggle that is essential if we are to avoid being done in by the abstraction-worship ing ideologues. But even Russell Kirk, in using the word ctconservative" to describe Burke, has added a bit to the seman tical confusion. For Burke, in his own historical setting; was a Whig. His antithesis, Dr. Samuel Johnson, was a Tory, and Tories, in England, are usually regarded as conservatives. Since CCWhig," in its original Seventeenth Century connotation, meant cthorse thief,"

and CCTory" meant ~~outlaw ," the precise difference between the two great English parties becomes a little mysterious. But Alice Miller, with her own Burkean gift for see ing things in terms of their concrete settings, helps dissipate the mys tery. The Whig members of Parlia ment in Burke's day included, be sides great landowning aristocrats, the new city interests. The Tories were the rural squires. The Whigs believed in keeping the monarchy in its place. The Tories were often blind supporters of the king. Enterprise and Liberty Burke, as a Whig, belonged to the new world of Adam Smith. He un derstood enterprise. Who, better than he, has characterized the New Englanders of the Eighteenth Century as they carried on the whale industry? ((Whilst· we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice," he said, uand behold them penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay and Davis's Straits ... we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold ... Nor is the equatorial heat more discouraging to them than the accumulated winter of both the poles. We know that whilst some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa, others run the longitude, and pursue their gigantic game along the coast of Brazil. No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries, no climate that is not witness to their toils."

The intimate connection between enterprise and liberty seemed plain to Burke. So, in his own world, he was a civil libertarian, which set him apart from Tory conservatives. He happened to be a Protestant, but his mother was a Catholic, and in his youthful experiences in Ireland he had seen too much of the baneful consequences of religious prejudice. The time would come when he would draft for Parliament his Catholic Relief Bill, which would allow Catholics to inherit or buy land and to teach in school without risking life imprisonment. The so-called Gordon Riots which followed pas sage of Burke's bill tore England apart, and it was characteristic of Burke that, although he did not 1979 EDMUND BURKE AND HIS WORLD 703 condone rioting in any form, he wor ried that the rioters might be punished too severely. Support of the Colonists Burke had attended a Quaker school before going to Trinity College in Dublin, and he had the proper Quaker abhorrence of intolerance.

The England of the Gordon Riots might seem a pretty intolerant community, but what strikes the modern reader of the Miller book is the comparatively relaxed attitude that governed in Parliament while the American war was going on. As a partisan of the colonists, Burke risked the imputation of treason. But this did not keep him from in sisting that all acts concerning America since 1763 should be re pealed. It would be wiser, he said, to make peace with the Americans and allow them to carry even some un reasonable points, lest they tum to England's old enemies, France and Spain, for help. The principles of the ,Americans, he said, ttbear so close a resemblance to those which support the most valuable part of our con stitution, that we cannot think of extirpating them in any part of his Majesty's dominions, without ad mitting consequences, and estab lishingprecedents, the most dan gerous to the liberties of this king dom."

Unable to raise troops in England to fight the colonists, King George III had to hire Hessians from Ger many. Burke had scathing words for the war zealots who were willing to fight to the last Hessian. ttThey have all the merit of volunteers," he said, ttwithout risk of person or charge of contribution; and when the unfeel ing arm of a foreign soldiery pours out their kindred blood like water, they exult and triumph as if they themselves had performed some' notable exploit." Limited Government Tom Paine mistook Burke's feel ingsabout the American war for being a generalized sympathy for revolutionists of any stripe. So Burke's immediate condemnation of the French'Revolution came as a surprise to Paine and his friends. 1Pheyhadn't pondered Burke's words about Utheextreme of liberty." Lib erty, he had written, ttmust be lim ited in order to be possessed. The degree of restraint, it is impossible in any case to settle precisely. But it ought to be the constant aim of every wise public counsel to find out by cautious experiments, and ra tional, cool endeavors, with how lit tle, not how much, of this restraint the community can subsist; for lib erty is a good to be improved, and not an evil to be lessened."

Burke accurately predicted the c:ourse of the French Revolution, 'lJIhichended in a military dictator ship that plunged all of Europe into 704 THE FREEMAN almost two decades of war. The claims of the UNational Assembly" to represent all the people of France did not impress him. uA government of 500 country attorneys and obscure curates," he said, Uis not good for 24 millions of men though it was chosen by eight and forty mil lions, nor is it the better for being guided by a dozen of persons of qual ity who have betrayed their trust in order to obtain that power." So Burke, the Whig, ended as a conservative-but only as one who would ((conserve" the liberties (al ways spoken of in the plural) that our fathers, in Kipling's phrase, had won for us ((long and long ago." ® HANDSOME BLUE LEATHERLEX FREEMAN BINDERS $3.00 Order from: THE FOUNDATION FOR ECONOMIC EDUCATION, INC. IRVINGTON-ON-HUDSON, NEW YORK 10533 the Freeman VOL. 29, NO. 12 • DECEMBER 1979 Capitalism LUdwig von .Mises 707 The so-called miracle of product~on in the free market economy stems from the adoption of sound economic policies.