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Why conservatives need Edmund Burke

Why conservatives need Edmund Burke

Last updated on: February 24, 2017 at 5:45 am by Gene Veith

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Why conservatives need Edmund Burke 2017-02-23T19:21:46-05:00 Gene Veith

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In another in our series of my-former-students-who-are-making-me-proud-by-their-writing, Gracy Olmstead explains why today’s conservatives need to pay attention to Sir Edmund Burke, the father of conservatism.

Burke, in criticizing the French Revolution, showed why social reform must “conserve” what is good in the society. Rather than raze the society to the ground and start over from ground zero. Interestingly, Burke supported the American Revolution, which–compared to what the Jacobins did–was actually conservative in its respect for God, insistence on English common law, and retention of traditional morality.

Some of today’s conservative activists are more like right wing Jacobins, opposing everything that represents the “establishment,” than Burkean conservatives, who, by definition, want to “conserve” something.

But my application isn’t to today’s political controversies. I have been studying the Reformation lately. The Lutherans really were advocating, in C. P. Krauth’s terms, a “conservative Reformation.” The medieval church was in bad need of reform, but the Lutherans “conserved” what was good in it: sacramental spirituality; the liturgy; the creeds; church art; the Christian intellectual tradition. Later Protestants rejected everything that could remotely be considered “Catholic,” trying instead, in a succession of ways, to start the church all over from scratch.

Thus, in Burkean terms, we had both a conservative Reformation and a Jacobin Reformation.

From Gracy Olmstead, Why We Need Edmund Burke Now More Than Ever, The Federalist:

My husband is currently gutting and remodeling our kitchen. We live in an older house, so we’ve had water damage to fix, crumbling pieces of sheetrock to replace. One of our goals, however, is to maintain the integrity of this home: to make it better by strengthening and building on its foundation.

This holds true in structural terms. We aren’t going to make changes that threaten the integrity of the foundation or the walls. We won’t tax the constraints of our small space. In our design, we’ll seek to respect the age of our home: formulating a design that feels fresh, but also “vintage” in certain aspects.

This kitchen redesign project has got me thinking a lot about Edmund Burke. The eighteenth-century British statesman is seen by many as the founding thinker of conservatism. In his iconic (and must-read) book “Reflections on a Revolution in France,” Burke considered the French Revolution. He spoke sympathetically of their project—ousting a tyrannical and oppressive monarchy—but warned the French that their project was much like a house renovation. If they destroyed the foundation, their entire enterprise was likely to crumble.

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