Edmund Burke by Conor Cruise O'Brien

by Conor Cruise O'Brien

Excellent Book

Genres: Philosophy, Biography

Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Irish politician, writer, historian and academic.

Member of the Irish Parliament for the socialist Labour Party.

Member of the Northern Ireland Forum for the United Kingdom Unionist Party, which advocated direct rule of Northern Ireland from London.

Virulently anti-IRA.

Reviews

[Toby · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a significant abridgement - distillation would perhaps be more accurate - of Conor Cruise O'Brien's magisterial biography of Burke, The Great Melody. At 340 pages it is less than half of the original text and without having read O'Brien's unexpurgated biography it's difficult for make an accurate judgement. It is fundamentally a political biography. Indeed there are so few personal details about Burke that it is not really a biography at all. There is nothing at all on his theory of the Sublime, for instance, and his political writings are quoted so extensively that at times it feels like a reader.

Instead the biography focuses on the key passions, obsessions really, of Burke's life: Ireland, America, India and France. O'Brien's original take on Burke's life is that Ireland underlies everything. His sense of his father's betrayal of his people by a convenient conversion to Protestantism, and his own inability to repay that, guides his passion against all other injustices.

A biography of Burke is really a study in failure. He failed to persuade the English government to make any significant concessions to Irish Catholics. He failed to persuade the government to repeal the American taxes. His obsessive pursuit of Warren Hastings ended up with a failed impeachment and he split the Whig party over the French Revolution, dying in the real fear that a French invasion was imminent. His political career saw him hold no notable offices and make more enemies than friends.

And yet he remains even today the most influential of the late eighteenth century political thinkers - supposedly the founder of Conservatism, although I cannot imagine what he would make of the modern Conservative party and its leaders who seem as far from Burke as its possible to be.

[Cody Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great biography. As may be suspected by the author it has a perhaps over emphasized focus on Burke's Irish heritage and his fondness od Catholics, but its extreme thoroughness makes it a must read.