Edmund Burke: Prescription and Providence, by Francis Canavan (Carolina Academic Press, 200 pp., $24.95)
As long as conservatives continue to revere the twin values of constitutional government and its basis in a transcendent order, Edmund Burke will remain their chief prophet. In this book, Canavan provides a much-needed clarification of how, in an age like ours when everything is questioned and higher authorities are constantly yet irresponsibly invoked, Burke still serves to reconcile the transcendent ends of government with their fulfillment in constitutions. Canavan untangles the difficulties in Burke’s understanding of prescription and providence, two of his key terms. He argues against Leo Strauss, who thought that Burke’s beliefs were fundamentally historicist: Strauss considered prescription an attempt to sanctify positive law, and claimed that providence merely attributes to God the historical acts of men. Strauss thought Burke failed to provide a transcendent foundation for his politics, whether in nature, reason, or a divine order. Canavan’s book demonstrates that the basis of Burke’s providence is not the pale “natural supernaturalism” of eighteenth-century deism, but a sincere Anglicanism; in which “the reflection of the divine intelligence in created nature is the foundation of a natural moral law which man can discover, and the natural law is both the basis and the supreme norm of man’s constitutions and laws.” The difficulty Canavan faces in discussing the second theme, prescription, is Burke’s incorporation of prescription into natural law. A constitution or long-continued practice cannot, by itself, serve as its own norm. For Burke, the authority of government depends upon its fulfillment of its natural purpose—to serve the needs of human nature. As Canavan interprets Burke, then, prescription turns out to have a teleology. And yet, without empirical evidence to the contrary, prescriptively validated titles and practices should be considered the concrete and contingent fulfillment of nature, reason, and divine order. Burke’s attention to the three latter terms has long made him popular among the Old Right and (I suspect) rather less popular among neoconservatives. A question all conservatives might ponder (though not specifically raised by Canavan) is whether Burke will someday be regarded as the thinker who can unite the principal neoconservative strength—empirical analysis—with the Old Right’s emphasis on higher authority. dan ritchie
Comments