The Great Melody

"Every Conservative has to read Edmund Burke, and, in particular, the Reflections on the French Revolution , a timeless and brilliant statement of Conservative ideas. Conor Cruise O’Brien has produced a book that is simultaneously an anthology of Burke and a biography. It was a simply brilliant idea. So much of Conservatism is not abstract, so to try to separate ideas from context or biography never quite works. What Conor Cruise O’Brien has done here is reconnect the two. There are brilliantly chosen selections from Burke’s major works, for example, the Reflections , his letter to the electors of Bristol, his impeachment of Warren Hastings. What Conor Cruise O’Brien tries to do is to explain what appears at first to be an odd difference, which is that Burke was a supporter of the American Revolution, having been an opponent of the French Revolution. I believe that almost all of Conservatism can be understood by saying that there’s a difference between the American Revolution and the French one. The difference is between attempting to assert democratic rights and limit the power of government within an evolving system versus attempting to achieve the overthrow of all institutions and the entire class structure using blood. Burke predicted not only what happened in the French Revolution but what has happened over and over again in different revolutions of the similar kind. You could just as easily have his ‘Reflections on the Cultural Revolution in China’, for example. So I think Burke is unmissable and particularly in this form. One of the reasons why there is no such thing as a single international conservatism is because conservatism is so rooted in the institutions and values of particular places, in preserving them, in trying to understand the essence of a nation. And the essence of nations is different. So Republicanism in America and Conservatism in Britain will be different; and they reflect their nations; they are trying to preserve and advance vastly different things. So you can see that Nixon’s cloth-coat Republicanism, for example, might be very different from contemporaneous Conservatives in the UK, reflecting more support for the royal family. And Newt Gingrich’s revolution, and the anti-Washington sentiment, has echoes in British Conservatism but it’s not the same because Britain isn’t the same. It doesn’t have a government like Washington and it doesn’t have a federal system. So Conservatives here have often employed quite centralising policies, whereas in America they are for States’ rights."