The Rage of Edmund Burke, by Isaac Kramnick
Rahe, Paul A.
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "The Rage of Edmund Burke, by Isaac Kramnick" Throughout 1976 candidates criticized the media for their lopsided focus on campaign strategy rather than issues. At the same time, one read occasional complaints in the press that the candidates...
...Further, when campaigns are obvious circuses the natural skepticism of the American public is reinforced...
...It was his insistence on marrying Mrs...
...Particularly does Cooke avoid this temptation in his treatments of Edward and Russell, possibly the best memoirs of the lot, and so worth noting...
...In so doing, he panders to the worst prejudice of our time —that which suggests that because most men are captivated by the spirit of the age, all men must be...
...The complexities of Burke's social thought," Professor Kramnick tells us, were "reflective of deep confusion over personal identity...
...There is no evidence indicating that Burke conceived ofan "active/bourgeois/masculine principle" or a "passive / aristocratic / feminine principle...
...He admits that "Burke remembered his stay with his mother's family with great fondness," and later, in referring to his earlier speculation on Burke's childhood, he acknowledges that there is not a shred of evidence suggesting that the boy found the separation from his father "traumatic...
...Any writer should seek this effect, but especially a memoirist, since at his best he will enforce something like adagio speed on the reader, the better to allow him to take in the life being remembered...
...According to Professor Kramnick, these "years of youthful separation" from his father were "traumatic," and, as a consequence, the boy had "problems in the area of sexual object choice...
...BOOK REVIEW Six Men Alistair Cooke / Alfred A. Knopf / $8.95 Terry Eastland A bout a third of the way through this splendid book, I had the feeling that somehow the television had come on and there was Alistair Cooke, speaking the very words that I was reading...
...And because it is, one happily lingers over phrases, sentences, and even whole paragraphs...
...This tendency has two roots—the fact that "general facts serve to explain more things in democratic than in aristocratic ages," and the fact that history which does justice to the few great individuals is offensive to democratic sensibilities...
...The same can be said for Professor Kramnick's interpretation of Burke's writings and speeches...
...The satisfaction of reaching an elite readership with thoughtful articles doesn't pay the bills...
...Despite these periodic laments, it is clear that 1976 was the year that style defeated substance in the political arena...
...As history, it was outrageous, medieval in its cruelty...beyond all human comprehension.' " But no: Cooke likes Edward, all right, but cannot admire the self-pitying Edward in exile...
...Thus when Burke, in his early twenties, underwent "an 'identity crisis' and a 'moratorium' [corresponding] perfectly with the Eriksonian paradigm," his experiPaul A. Rahe is assistant professor of history at Cornell University...
...On the other hand, one shouldn't be too quick to cast blame on the media...
...Edward "had not been simply a lover defied but the mainspring of a constitutional crisis...
...Concerning Russell, the temptation is to say on the subject of the man's goatish ways that he was a great lover, and then to say no more...
...In a democratic age, he will "attribute hardly any influence to the individual...
...He 34 The American Spectator February 1978 claims that his is "a reading of Burke which far from seeking to discredit him hopes to enhance and enrich our understanding and appreciation of his life and thought...
...that Russell figured Gladstone, not Lenin, was the most terrifying man he ever sat opposite...
...This does not bother Professor Kramnick: He is not one to let the facts get in the way of the "organizing and interpretive construct of [his] own creation" which, he admits, he has "imposed from without on [Burke's) life history...
...The fear of the father's angry rebuke of the young boy for his incestuous designs on the mother is resolved in this identification...
...Mencken, Adlai Stevenson, Bertrand Russell, and Humphrey Bogart—were good friends of Cooke or subjects for a lot of his by-lines...
...But Cooke perceptively notes that the puritan in Russell and his "very conscious intellectual nature" forced him "to explain every sexual call of nature as a The American Spectator February 1978 35...
...In short, Professor Kramnick's analysis of Burke the thinker and Burke the politician is based on a "psychosexual hypothesis" which is based on "no solid evidence...
...Edward was no more than a washed-up king, and yet in his self-pity he wanted the perquisites of royalty...
...In aristocratic ages," he observed, the historian's attention "is con-stantly drawn to individuals...
...Such skepticism causes people to dismiss what they read in the newspapers as balderdash, and to doubt the ability of the government to do anything right...
...Here Cooke might have adopted that attitude towards Edward which the former monarch himself came to adopt, namely, that "he had been condemned to exile for nothing but his great love...
...that, indeed, his marriage to Mrs...
...Candidates who ignore fluffery—as Gene McCarthy doesn't learn every four years—end up with small bills from their clipping services and very few votes...
...At this point a reviewer might be expected to criticize candidates and media alike for their emphasis on style over sub-stance, to bemoan this deplorable condition, and to suggest solutions to it...
...He does claim that his argument is "well within the pale of interpretive insight" and that his "speculations are usually based on extensive textual documentation...
...So bring on the flacks...
...At the same time, one read occasional complaints in the press that the candidates had failed to come up with ahy new ideas...
...Burke the conservative is thus replaced by Burke "the ambivalent radical...
...Even more astonishing than his bizarre hypothesis is Professor Kramnick's argument...
...BOOK REVIEW The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative Isaac Kramnick / Basic Books / $12.95 Paul A. Rahe For the layman eager to learn about Edmund Burke's political thought and career, Isaac Kramnick's biography will be useless...
...It is the absence of these latter that credits Cooke as a memoirist, since the temptation of the genre is to indulge the person written about...
...Kramnick finds his Burke "fascinating" because, by disposing of one psychosexual misfit, he believes that he can dispose of all of liberalism's contemporary critics...
...that Mencken was a compulsive hand washer and rarely wrote a piece without retreating to the washbasin five or six times...
...The antagonism between what Burke conceived of as the active/bourgeois/masculine principle and the passive/aristocratic/feminine principle," writes Professor Kramnick, informed Burkean theory as well as Burkean practice...
...I shouldn't have objected had this in fact happened, inasmuch as any one of the memoirs that make up Six Men could agreeably be read aloud, even over the air...
...Burke did use what Professor Kramnick considers stereotypical masculine and stereotypical feminine adjectives, but even Professor Kramnick has to acknowledge that it is "by no means certain that this patterning of words had conscious gender association for Burke, or, for that matter, particular linkage to social or class character...
...About them one learns a variety of things, ranging from the odd bit of fact to traits, habits, and dispositions...
...Thus, what purports to be a book about Edmund Burke is in fact a work of psycho-social typology designed to account for that irrational and obsessive "rage" which Professor Kramnick believes to be "at the heart of conservatism" and to help us understand and appreciate "the eternal longing of the conservative for the elimination of rational thought from politics...
...He failed to understand that "in the British system the monarch is the vessel of the monarchy and that once the vessel is changed the old monarch has at best a dubious status...
...Professor Kramnick finds "the real Burke" produced by this imaginative construct to be "infinitely more fascinating" than the traditional Burke...
...Neither is capable of dealing with serious issues, and when they try the rest of us pay dearly...
...Young Ned was a sickly child, afflicted with a lung disease that forced him to spend the years between his sixth and eleventh birthdays away from his father's damp Dublin home and with his mother's family in the Irish countryside...
...It was just when such identification should have occurred that Burke's father was absent...
...That is, in fact, precisely what distinguishes this book: It is written for the ear...
...One learns about these men, moreover, with good humor and irony and without gush or whitewash...
...ence was complicated by "unresolved oedipal issues...
...Instead, he will "assign great causes to all petty incidents" and lead men to believe that the world's "movement is involuntary and that societies unconsciously obey some superior force ruling over them...
...The "construct" responsible for the violence Professor Kramnick does to the evidence is the product of an injudicious mixing of a debased Marxism (deprived of its claim to scientific accuracy) and a debased Freudianism (shorn of its recognition that self-restraint is a prerequisite for civilization...
...I shall not do this for the simple reason that I share our editor's belief that most politicians are buffoons and most journalists jackasses...
...Cooke tells the story of Edward's abdication, brought about by his insistence on marrying an American divorcee, a Mrs...
...Each of the six men—Charlie Chaplin, Edward VIII, H.L...
...Had Edward known what happened in 1688, he would have also known that there were none...
...Simpson touched the public interest and so was subject to scrutiny by Parliament...
...In arguing that Burke's ideas "should be treated as products of historical and personal experience," Professor Kramnick is denying the possibility of reflective detachment and suggesting that Burke's thought obeys "some superior force" ruling over it...
...The most popular—and profitable—publications seem to be those of the Rupert Murdoch variety, and publishers who traffic in serious analysis of the issues generally face rising deficits...
...Candidates, on the one hand, obviously are eager to generate as much favorable media coverage as possible, and if the media choose to cover such things as "Peanut Brigades" and snowball fights in Miami (snowballs courtesy of the Commander-in-Chief), then Jimmy's and Jerry's flacks are eager to oblige...
...It is this underlying polemical purpose which explains Professor Kramnick's attempt toclassify Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol, Edward Banfield, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, James Q. Wilson,, Allan Bloom, Andrew Hacker, and the late Alexander Bickel with such Burkeans as Peter Stanlis, Russell Kirk, and Francis Canavan...
...Simpson that raised the issue of whether there may not be some ways in which a king has independent political power...
...The publication of this Marxist psychobiography of Burke illustrates an important and powerful trend—one best described more than a century ago by Tocqueville...
...As a result, Burke's personal crisis was "never completely resolved [and his] basic ambivalence persisted throughout his life...
...Behind the public creed lurked nagging issues of private need...
...and that Bogart, though afraid to say so, was at bottom an incurable puritan...
...It is in this that his importance and even his greatness consist...
...that Stevenson could not commit what his political managers asked for—at least one grammatical error a day during a campaign swing through California...
...he did not get them, and Cooke wisely does not indulge him now...
...In and of itself, Professor Kramnick's silly book is not worthy of notice—but the fact that it was written by a reputable scholar and published by a respected commercial press should arrest our attention...
...But for the reader with an interest in the follies to which contemporary academics are particularly prone, it is a gold mine—a veritable treasure house of trendy gibberish...
...But as Conor Cruise O'Brien has demonstrated, what you find are "little scraps of Burke embedded in great wedges of Kramnick prose, purporting to paraphrase Burke, and in fact just plain distorting him to suit the Kramnick thesis...
...Burke's separation from his father from age six to eleven thus looms as the critical experience in Burke's youth...
...that Edward inherited from his grandfather a sensual, sybaritic Terry Eastland is an editorial writer for the San Diego Union...
...One learns, for example, that Chaplin was as unaware of his rising fame early in his career as he was later on of the $900,000 that had piled up in a checking account...
...Cooke might have written as Shana Alexander, whom he quotes, once did: " 'On this side of the water, the entireaffair can only make sense as romance...
...They are the Republic's salvation...
...Ignorant of history as king, Edward was similarly ignorant in exile...
...There was a time when psychohistory was regarded with disdain by members of the historical profession: That time has passed...
...He personifies this transformation...
...What is less clear is who is at fault...
...He does this not only in his ideas, but also in himself...
...This was reflected in the presence of both his good friend Will and his wife Jane in the Burke household, and in Burke's oscillating admiration for the masculine "bourgeois principle" of assertiveness and ambition and the feminine "aristocratic principle" of self-deprecation and deference which characterized both his political thought and his public behavior...
...Simpson, and then moves on to comment on Edward's 35 years in exile...
...Kramnick explains: Successful resolution of the oedipal conflict requires an identification with the father...
...Bring on the superficial reporting...
...This new Burke offers "nothing less than a pivotal insight into that great turning point in our history—the transformation from the aristocratic to the bourgeois world...
...This may explain why Kramnick concludes his chapter on Burke's "identity crisis" with the admission: "there is no solid evidence that can be produced here which would positively sustain the interpretation of Burke's sexual and psychic life offered in this book...
...side but from no one did he get that necessary attribute of royalty, a sense of duty...
Vol. 11 • February 1978 • No. 4
