Burke at Work

Time was when nearly every American school child closely studied Edmund Burke’s great speech on conciliation with the American colonies. I have my mother’s copy of it, with earnest ninth-grade marginalia. But as the content of American public school courses was progressively impoverished in this century, Burke went down the drain with Macaulay and Spenser and Bacon and the other models of English style and of elevated reflection. Yet today, after more than a generation of neglect, Burke defies the educationists and captures the imagination of college students and even high school pupils. Not that he is much taught in classes, except for some surviving fairly strict courses in English literature and history: but our present discontents have impelled thinking young people to seek the sources of normative knowledge in politics and morals, and so they have found their way to Edmund Burke— who, more than anyone else, prophesied the coming of that “antagonist world of madness, despair, and unavailing sorrow” in which we find ourselves.

Thus, with some reluctance, the textbooks anthologists once more make room for extracts from Burke, or at least for essays about his thought and influence.

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Russell Kirk

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Time was when nearly every American school child closely studied Edmund Burke’s great speech on conciliation with the American colonies. I have my mother’s copy of it, with earnest ninth-grade marginalia. But as the content of American public school courses was progressively impoverished in this century, Burke went down the drain with Macaulay and Spenser and Bacon and the other models of English style and of elevated reflection. Yet today, after more than a generation of neglect, Burke defies the educationists and captures the imagination of college students and even high school pupils. Not that he is much taught in classes, except for some surviving fairly strict courses in English literature and history: but our present discontents have impelled thinking young people to seek the sources of normative knowledge in politics and morals, and so they have found their way to Edmund Burke— who, more than anyone else, prophesied the coming of that “antagonist world of madness, despair, and unavailing sorrow” in which we find ourselves.

Thus, with some reluctance, the textbooks anthologists once more make room for extracts from Burke, or at least for essays about his thought and influence.