Aditivos a emplear en morteros y hormigones

University of Exeter

3 The years from 1777–1783 are, Bromwich contends, the “happiest to contemplate for an admirer of Burke as a statesman” (312).

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Iain Hampsher-Monk, ed., Edmund Burke: Revolutionary Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. lxii + 349.

Iain Hampsher-Monk has written an excellent introduction to Burke’s

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and the first of Burke’s Two Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796) for this new edition of those works. At

twenty-five pages, he can’t hope to be comprehensive, but he succeeds in being compelling—exactly what you want in the introduction to a classic. Hampsher-Monk, who wrote essays on the Reflections and on Burke’s other counter-revolutionary writings in The Cambridge Com-

panion to Edmund Burke (2012), is especially strong on discriminating

Burke’s “procedural conservative” approach from the “rationalist” method of the revolutionaries. Many of Burke’s contemporaries thought he had betrayed the cause of liberty that he had embraced with regard to Ire- land, India, and (above all) America. Burke scholars have explained his consistency in various ways, down to David Bromwich’s recent analy- sis of Burke’s continual awareness of the fragility of the consensus on which political authority rests.1 _{Hampsher-Monk accounts for Burke’s}

consistency in a different way. He presses the significance of the revo- lutionary goal of achieving stability on the basis of social equality (xxv), which required the rejection of any other, competing foundations, such as religion or property rights. Burke saw the implications of this goal more quickly and more clearly than anyone: he saw property rights as essential for guaranteeing the independence of “the Church, universi-

1 David Bromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beau-

ties, charitable trusts and other elements of what we would now call civil society,” Hampsher-Monk writes (xxiv). And he saw that the Church in particular would have to be eliminated by the revolutionaries, because its moral weight inhibited them from carrying out their most radical social changes (xxv).

I’m not particularly happy with “procedural conservative” as the name for Burke’s mode of politics. As Hampsher-Monk describes it, this approach begins with existing institutions and ideas, then pro- ceeds to sustain or reform that reality so as to maintain the integrity of the whole. Fair enough. But that doesn’t embrace Burke’s critique of, say, Warren Hastings, who made the argument that he was beginning with that very reality in India. A phrase like “historic constitutionalism” would better describe Burke’s approach: it preserves the procedural ele- ment while leaving open the sources of the constitution to debate, as I believe they were in Burke’s own thought.

Hampsher-Monk describes Burke’s opponent as the “rationalist reformist” who “starts from a set of principles—in this case those of natural right, or the rights of man—and seeks to deduce the features of a morally defensible political order from those principles” (xxviii). Such a set of principles, Burke realized, could never be limited to one coun- try: it must aspire to universal dominance. As a student of mine once wrote, it’s a beautiful political system except that it forgets to take into account the nature of man—the wisdom of experience as accumulated in traditions and institutions, the power of passion, and above all the limits to reason.

As Hampsher-Monk writes, Burke had been able to assume the limits to reason when he satirically banished them from his first pub- lished writing, the Vindication of Natural Society (1756). In the Reflections, he had to assert them clearly.

The pairing of the Reflections with only the first of the Two Letters

on a Regicide Peace seems odd to me. In particular, the omission of the

second of the Letters is questionable since the first two were published together. (The second would have added only about 35 pages.) Still, Hampsher-Monk gives a good defense for the letter he does include: it provides a rationale for intervening in the affairs of France based on Roman law, which “provided for pre-emptive intervention to prevent a

neighbor damaging one’s property” (xxxvi). This is much more modest than an appeal to international law or natural law, and it’s worth our attention.

If Cambridge has now finished publishing Burke’s primary sources, it’s offering us an odd mixture. Pre-Revolutionary Writings (1993), edited by Ian Harris, is an anthology of his writings on America, aesthetics, Ireland, party government, and a few other items. Together, the two vol- umes leave out nearly all of Burke’s writings on India, the great shorter works on the French Revolution, and key works on parliamentary rep- resentation. Still, as Hazlitt said, the only selection of Burke is “all he wrote,” and Oxford University Press has taken upon itself the task of producing the standard Writings and Speeches, eight volumes of which have now been published according to my count.

Just a few other remarks: Hampsher-Monk accepts 1730 as Burke’s birth year, following F. P. Lock’s magisterial biography. His glossary of terms (misleadingly labeled “Notes”) does an excellent job of explaining major individuals, institutions, and events, from D’Alembert to Wil- liam III. And his footnotes provide excellent insight into Burke’s allu- sions and historical references.

The book is a valuable addition to the available versions of the

Reflections. And with the prospect before us of a long struggle with an

“armed doctrine” like the one undergirding the “Islamic State,” the Reg-

icide Peace may assume increasing resonance.