金融时报:保守主义教父伯克

保守主义教父伯克

尊重传统，强调秩序，反对激进变革，埃德蒙·伯克被世界各国的保守党人奉为教父。他反对各种肆意而不受制约的权力，不管它是来自君主还是来自群众。支持者和反对者都承认，伯克的遗产很大程度上塑造了今天的世界。

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

blissful ['blɪsfʊl; -f(ə)l] adj.充满喜悦的

specious ['spiːʃəs] adj.似是而非的，华而不实的

recantation [,ri:kæn'teiʃən] n.改变论调

blasphemous ['blæsfəməs] adj.亵渎神明的，不敬的

pantheon ['pænθɪən] n.先贤祠

tumultuous [tjʊ'mʌltjʊəs] adj.喧闹的，狂暴的

sans-culottes n.无套裤汉，即法国革命者

kaleidoscopic [kəlaɪdə'skɒpɪk] adj.千变万化的，万花筒似的

poppycock ['pɒpɪkɒk] n.废话

Burke & Sons (1275 words)

By John McDermott

More than a decade on from the blissful dawn of the French Revolution, William Wordsworth issued an apology. “Genius of Burke! Forgive the pen seduced/ By specious wonders”, he wrote in the 1805 version of The Prelude.

Whereas the poet had been taken in by the cries from the Paris street, Edmund Burke, had forewarned terror. It is a fine recantation, amplified a century later by William Yeats’s “The Seven Sages”, which paid tribute to Burke’s campaigns for justice in America, India, France and his native Ireland.

Burke’s philosophy defies easy summary. As Alan Ryan(Professor of Politics at Oxford) writes, this “leaves his readers free to project on to him almost any doctrine they like (or dislike)”.

For Jesse Norman, a Conservative MP, this is blasphemous. “Edmund Burke is both the greatest and most underrated political thinker of the past 300 years,” he writes at the outset of his superb new biography. Norman aims to place Burke above Hume, Smith, Mill, Marx and Rawls in the pantheon. Not only that, he seeks to reclaim Burke as a conservative thinker – one who has much to teach today’s politicians. Implicitly, this also requires Norman to answer the question, “what is conservatism?” For if Burke is the father of conservatism, as Norman attests, then his children seem like runaways.

The first half of Norman’s book tells the story of Burke’s life. Born in Dublin in 1729, Burke attended Trinity College before heading to London to make his name. He became a minor literary figure with early works of satire and aesthetics.

In 1765, Burke entered parliament, where over the next three decades he became one of the most famous rhetoricians of that tumultuous age. Norman describes Burke’s “five great political battles”: for more equal treatment of Irish Catholics; against British oppression in the American colonies; for parliamentary restraints on monarchical power; against brutal exploitation by the East India Company; and, of course, against the ideas and actors of the French Revolution.

The problem Norman sets himself is that none of these fights strike the contemporary reader as indisputably “conservative”. They all have in common the desire to resist the imposition of arbitrary power by a sovereign (or the mob) on individuals. Burke may have had little to say about women and, unlike his rival Thomas Paine, he was wrong about the effects of democracy. William Gladstone(Liberal Party leader, Prime Minister for 4 times from 1868-1894) found Burke to be “a magazine of wisdom”. More recently, centre-left thinkers have claimed Burke for their side. But Norman is clear: Burke was a conservative first, not a liberal, as revealed by his most famous tract, Reflections on the Revolution in France.

That book was notionally a response to a letter from a French friend, Charles-Jean-François Depont, but it was really a reply to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosopher of the sans-culottes. Rousseau believed that man is a solitary creature of nature corrupted by society. He can achieve redemption, however, through the use of reason to form a “civil society” governed by a “general will” of rational people. What came before did not matter.

Not so, according to Burke. Humans are social animals. There is no meaning to be attached to man as solitary creature. Humans grow up in societies and it is these – not reason – that give our lives meaning. Societies and their institutions are inheritances from past generations, replete with wisdom and mystery. They should receive our respect and care. As Burke put it in the Reflections, “Society ... becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born.”

Given this analysis, the job of the politician is to understand the “tempers” of those he represents and, as Norman puts it, “to protect and enhance human society” through careful and proportionate reform. Burke was not a “reactionary” in the sense of opposing any form of change to the status quo, or wishing to revert to a point in history. He supported Irish Catholics, American colonists and Indians because he felt that the British state and the East India Company had undermined the societies they were supposed to develop. He opposed the French revolutionaries because it was they who, in a bloody drop of the guillotine, had undermined theirs.

Burke died in 1797. His legacy has been hotly contested. In Edmund Burke in America, the historian Drew Maciag charts the use of Burke by US intellectuals. “Burke will be heard to say whatever needs to be said,” he argues. This is especially true of the past few decades. Neo-conservatives have used his anti-Jacobinism to call for strong military action in the cold war and after 9/11. Religious conservatives have cited Burke’s belief in Providence. Others, foreshadowing the Tea Party, have sought to parallel his reverence for the unwritten English constitution and the Glorious Revolution with theirs for the US constitution and the wars of independence.

In Maciag’s telling, Burke has been abused by American rightwing thinkers. His conservatism ends up appearing kaleidoscopic. Maciag implies that if the father of modern conservatism has spawned such diverse offspring, it makes no sense to think of a single, identifiable “conservatism”.

For Norman, what defines Conservatism is “an inevitable tension between its leading principles, such as that between liberty and authority”. But although there may not be a bumper-sticker definition, Burke remains for Norman the first conservative. This is because, in contrast to liberals, he “sees freedom as ordered liberty”, believes in “tradition, habit and ‘prejudice’”, detests radical change and embraces duty’s primacy over will.

What it is not is an accurate portrayal of the conservatives who predominate in either the Conservative or Republican parties. To differing extents, these are children of Thatcher and Reagan rather than Burke. Parse it all you like, Thatcher said “there is no such thing as society”. As a governing philosophy hers was almost diametrically opposed to Burke’s conception of the social order. She would have found poppycock the idea that society was metaphysical, bestowing meaning on individuals. At times David Cameron has adopted a Burkean air but his Big Society of “little platoons” is in retreat. In its place, he has adopted as his defining metaphor the idea of Britain being in “a global race” as capitalist competition heats up across the world. His public service reforms are radically transforming Britain’s postwar settlement.

Norman, who advises the Number 10 Policy Unit, writes that politicians need to learn lessons from Burke. He argues that “extreme liberalism is now in crisis” and that “rampant individualism” must be curbed. Good political leaders “do not regard politics as a subset of economics”. They understand that “culture matters” and “preserve and enhance the social order in the national interest”.

Burke should not provide the only reference for today’s politics. There is still much more to be gleaned from, among several others, Paine, Mill and Rawls, with whom conservatives tend not to engage. They help us understand what it is we should actually conserve. As Burke well understood, not all that is old is good. But how is one to know whether he would, say, support gay marriage, an issue dividing today’s Tories?

Nevertheless, Norman succeeds in elevating his subject, showing what is conservative about Burke, and why he matters today. Ironically, he makes such a strong case that it would seem perverse if only Tories took something from Burke’s legacy. Burke may be a conservative but, as he would have explained better than anyone, his is an inheritance for all of society.

John McDermott is the FT’s executive comment editor

请根据你所读到的文章内容，完成以下自测题目：

1.What is the best interpretation for quoting William Wordsworth at the begining?

A. To praise Wordsworth's integrity.

B. To illustrate the penetrating influence of the French Revolution

C. To reveal Burke's genius foresight on the Revolution.

D. To explain the common misunderstanding of the British about the Revolution.

答案(1)

2.In that “tumultuous age”, Edmund Burke stood together with whom?

A. King's government(against parliament).

B. American revolutionaries.

C. The East India Company.

D. French revolutionaries.

答案(2)

3.Who was Burke's mortal enemy in the field of political philosophy?

A. Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

B. Adam Smith.

C. John Steward Mill.

D. Thomas Paine.

答案(3)

4.What do we know about Conservatism?

A. It denies any tension between liberty and authority.

B. It looks kaleidoscopic today.

C. It is usually hostile to reforms and changes.

D. It sees old things as crystallization of wisdom.

答案(4)

* * *

(1) 答案：C.To reveal Burke's genius foresight on the Revolution.

解释：通读全文不难发现C正确。

(2) 答案：B. American revolutionaries.

解释：ACD都是他高调反对的一方。这四场斗争，加上他支持爱尔兰天主教徒反对英政府的压制，就是诗人叶芝和保守党议员诺曼所总结的他的“five great political battles”.

(3) 答案：A.Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

解释：伯克的名作《法国革命论》就是对“革命导师”卢梭的批判。文章用了好几段话来解释这个。卢梭那种用理性设计来搞激进变革、重塑社会的哲学在他看来是非常危险的。他的主张跟CD两人有些分歧，但跟亚当·斯密颇为契合，因为坚定支持自由贸易，伯克甚至在1780一度丢掉了国会席位。

(4) 答案：B.It looks kaleidoscopic today.

解释：今天的世界上有各种五花八门的门派采用伯克的保守主义思想，从主张强硬外交军事政策的“新保守主义”， 到宗教保守人士，到文化保守派，到财政保守派茶党·····这一点在文章另一处也有强调：如果说伯克是保守主义教父的话，then his children seem like runaways. CD不正确，而A中的两者都是保守主义的主张，它们是有矛盾的，但保守主义认为两者可以调和。

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