The Historical Consciousness Of Edmund Burke

One of the foremost characteristics of the British society in the 18th century comes from the battle between the tradition and the modernity. Benefiting from the Glorious Revolution and the Union of 1707, the old constitutional spirit and the classical political virtues get the chance to prolong their affections on the British political life. However, the rise of commercial civilization inspires the human relations and social life with a need for modern contents and fabrics. A reply to this kind of tension, to some extent, turns to be the essential part of the British thoughts in the eighteenth century. The way of the reply in Britain, different from that of the continental thinking, is mainly neither providential nor metaphysical but historical. It is a general characteristic for the British thinkers to explain the civilization historically and justify their political arguments within historical languages. A strong sense of history reflects itself in the British contexts in the 18th century. This is the intellectual background that we must take account before we study Burke’s historical consciousness, and which plays as the introduction of the treatise.In the past two centuries, the western scholars have disputed much over the basis of Burke’s thinking, which get explained either from the perspective of utilitarianism or from that of natural law, and they have paid insufficient attention to the aspect of Burke’s historical consciousness. While as a great thinker of the themes such as history, tradition, custom, convention, etc., and as the foremost elucidator of conservatism, Burke sets up his political philosophy with the help of historical consciousness. The treatise tries to criticize the exited two explanations and provide a reply to the dispute mentioned above, which part will be showed in chapter 1. Then in the next chapter, basing on the contexts that Burke expressed on the American Revolution and the French Revolution, I seek to demonstrate the fundamental and decisive role that historical consciousness plays in Burke’s political thinking.This role is hard to say unknown to the early Burkean scholars, but only until the next half page of the 20th century did some papers with the theme aiming exclusively at Burke’s historical consciousness come out. Some of them hold that, basing on the religious contents in Burke’s speeches, history is essentially a manifestation of God’s will to Burke; others intend that, according to the characteristics and effects of historical consciousness in Burke’s thinking, Burke belongs to the camp of historicism. Chapter 3 will reexamine these works and point out that, as a pragmatic politician, Burke views the religion from a secular perspective for the secular functions, and he reviews religion from politics more often than he views politics from religion; for Burke, history is the course that expands spontaneously in the secular world, and it is composed of the particular empirical phenomena. How does this empirical historical consciousness take its shape in Burke’s thinking? and how about its characteristics? The next chapter will answer these questions by referring to Burke’s personal experience as a politician, his view of human nature and his worship to the common law tradition. As a conclusion, the treatise assumes that Burke’s empirical historical consciousness is a fundamental characteristic of his political philosophy, and it not only shaped the tradition of English conservatism but also affected directly the formation of German historical school of jurisprudence and German historicism. Hence, a clarification of Burke’s historical consciousness concerns essentially a comprehensive understanding of Burke’s conservatism and his position in the intellectual history.As with the methods, inspired by the methodology of History of Ideas initiated by Lovejoy, the treatise is based on an assumption that political thought is usually tied to some traditions, and that the ideas of different times must have some kind of historical relevance, so their meanings can be explained completely only within the background of traditions and times(Lovejoy,1936), so the treatise bases its explanation of Burke in the tradition of western political thought and the background of Enlightenment. In addition to that, I would follow especially the method of historical contextualism developed by the Cambridge School. It assumes that the political thought is deeply implicated within the historical discourses, and that meanings of any text do not exist apart from the language’texture’of the time. So, in order to approach the original meaning of political thought, one should know what the thinker’was doing in saying what he said’ and investigate his illocutionary act (Skinner,2002). The complexity of Burke’s thought lies precisely in that nearly all his utterances are tied to varies of political practices and events, which provide us the historical’texture’to review the historical consciousness of Burke.