it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.
Here is Buffa's take on The Remarkable Edmund Burke:
It is a mark of how much has changed, how words have changed their meaning, that Edmund Burke who, more than anyone else in the 18th century, defined what conservatism meant, has next to nothing in common with those who call themselves conservatives today. Today’s conservatives think government the enemy of liberty, and public spending at best a necessary evil; Burke thought liberty impossible without government, and public spending better than the expenditures of private wealth. When government spends on public projects, “The poorest man feels his own importance and dignity in it.” When the rich spend on themselves, it “makes the man of humbler rank and fortune sensible of his inferiority and degrades and vilifies his condition.”Visit D.W. Buffa's website.
This may seem to suggest that Burke wanted to narrow, if not eliminate, the difference between rich and poor. That was the last thing he wanted. Give everyone an equal share in the wealth of the country, you might end up with a reasonably prosperous middle-class, but you would not have the landed aristocracy of 18th century England, the kind of “gentlemen” able to run a country. If this sounds decidedly undemocratic, it is; and Burke makes no apologies. Liberty requires more than individual rights and majority rule. Libery without wisdom and without virtue “is the greatest of all possible evils, for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.” Liberty requires order, and order depends upon the existence of what both Burke and Thomas Jefferson called the “natural aristocracy.” Without this aristocracy, “there is no nation.” But what, exactly, beyond the wealth of the the landed aristocracy of England, makes one a member of this “natural aristocracy?” Burke tells us, tells us in a single sentence, a single sentence that would shock to the limits, which I confess are not very great, of every law school teacher teaching legal writing who fails to understand that brevity of expression reflects, too often, only the paucity of thought; a single sentence that fills up all but two lines of a full page of Burke’s twelve volume Collected Works:To be bred in a place of estimation; to see nothing low and sordid from one’s infancy; to be taught to respect one’s self; to be habituated to the censorial inspection of the public eye; to look early to public opinion; to stand upon such elevated ground as to be enabled to make a large view of the wide-spread and infinitely diversified combinations of men and affairs in a large society; to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; to be enabled to draw the court and attention of the wise and learned, wherever they are to be found; to be habituated in armies to command and to obey; to be taught to despise danger in the pursuit of honor and duty; to be formed to the greatest degree of vigilance, foresight, and circumspection, in a state of things in which no fault is committed with impunity and the slightest mistakes draw on the most ruinous consequences; to be led to a guarded and regulated conduct, from a sense that your are considered as an instructor of your fellow-citizens in their highest concerns, and that you act as a reconciler between God and man; to be employed as an administrator of law and justice, and to be thereby amongst the first benefactors to mankind; to be a professor of high science, or of liberal and ingenuous art; to be amongst rich traders, who from their success are presumed to have sharp and vigorous understandings, and to possess the virtues of diligence, order, constancy, and regularity, and to have cultivated an habitual regard to commutative justice: these are the circumstances of men that form what I should call a natural aristocracy, without which there is no nation.Who, today, writes like this? Who, today, wants to? Who, today, taught first by radio and television, taught now by social media on electronic devices - and soon to be taught by artificial intelligence that, though we had not thought very much before, we will not have to think at all - would even think it worth the effort to try? And still, despite that, we cannot quite rid ourselves of the sense, the suspicion, that we are missing something, that the world has become a poorer place; that if, by some miracle, someone would once again write, and speak, like Edmund Burke, there would be reason to hope that the future might be better than what we are forced to hear in the dismal rhetoric of the present. It is not impossible, precisely because Burke was not impossible. He was not, himself, the product of the kind of background he described in that magnificent single endless sentence that manages somehow to seem too short. Edmund Burke was not the titled heir of an English aristocrat; Edmund Burke was the son of an Irish lawyer.
Biographies have been written about Burke; British and European histories are filled with his name. But perhaps the most interesting, and most incisive, thing written about him is the article on his life in the once famous 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, the edition that brought together the greatest scholars of the age to write about what, some of them, had studied all their lives. John Morley, who had led some of the most prestigious literary reviews in London when literary reviews were read by everyone in public life; who had, in 1904, written the definitive biography of William Gladstone, and who had himself served in Parliament, describes Burke’s life, especially his early life, in a way only someone can who has led a life with something like the same experience.
Burke graduated from Trinity College in Ireland, but, Morley writes, “His knowledge of Greek and Latin was never thorough…. He could quote Homer and Pindar, and he had read Aristotle. Like others going through the conventional course of instruction, he kept a place in his memory for the various charms of Virgil and Horace, of Tacitus and Ovid, but the master whose page by night and day he turned with devout hand was…Cicero.” Burke left college, “with no great stock of well-ordered knowledge.”
The reader can decide for himself the comparative merits of what Burke learned and what is taught in a university today. If, as Morley suggests, Burke had something less that what might have been expected from his Trinity education, this was not a misfortune: “He neither received the benefits nor suffered the drawbacks of systematic intellectual discipline.” He had the same freedom from the limitations of formal training when he studied law. “Like a great many other youths with an eminent destiny before them, Burke conceived a strong distaste for the profession of the law.”
Burke’s political career began in 1765 when he became private secretary to Lord Rockingham, the British prime minister. A year later, he became a member of the House of Commons, and gave his first speech the same day that the great William Pitt gave his last. The House of Commons, Thomas Macaulay would later write, “was in doubt to which of them the palm of eloquence should be assigned. It was indeed a splendid sunset and a splendid dawn.” What did Burke do, besides give a maiden speech no one who heard it ever forgot? “The first session I was in Parliament, I found it necessary to analyze the whole commercial, financial, constitutional, and foreign interest of Great Britain and its empire.” Just what we today expect from a newly elected member of Congress, or the United States Senate.
Burke could talk, Burke could write. He was considered, Macaulay reports, “as the only match in conversation for Dr. Johnson.” His speeches on America, speeches in which he defended the right of Americans to insist that only they could tax themselves, “will last as long as the English language.” Everyone who heard him speak, everyone who read what he wrote, agreed that there was no one like him. Morley called him “one of the greatest names in political literature,” whose “writing is magnificent, because he knew so much, thought so comprehensively, and felt so strongly.” Everyone agreed that Edmund Burke was a very greatman; and everyone who said that, insisted that when it came to the French Revolution, Edmund Burke simply had no idea what he was talking about.
We think of the French Revolution as a great event, the end of king’s tyranny and the beginning of the ‘rights of man,’ the belief that everyone, every citizen, has the equal right to decide who should govern, and the terms and conditions under which those who govern will be allowed to act. What seems to us a commonplace, the foundation of political liberty, was, for Burke, the beginning of the end, the false doctrine of those who know nothing of what liberty requires. Everything, “our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners and civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles, and were, indeed, the result of both combined: I mean the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion.” They “kept learning in existence,” learning that “enlarged their ideas and furnished their minds,” and this learning kept liberty alive.
The French Revolution meant that, “the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisticators, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.” There is nothing left of tradition, nothing left of the feeling of obligation one generation owes to another; laws, instead of honored because handed down from one age to the next, “are to be supported only by their own terrors, and by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations, or can spare to them from his own private interests.” With the French Revolution, the country will become a “nation of gross, stupid, ferocious, and at the same time poor and sordid barbarians, destitute of religion, or manly pride, possessing nothing at present, and hoping for nothing hereafter.”
What produced this demand that everyone have an equal right to govern themselves? “A false philosophy passed from academies into courts; and the great themselves were infected with the theories which conducted to their ruin. Knowledge, which in the last two centuries either did not exist at all, or existed solidly on right principles and in chosen hands, was now diffused, weakened, and perverted.” In other words, the Enlightenment, with its promise that everyone, if taught properly, could learn to think for themselves, and the philosophy of Rousseau, with its insistence that “man is born free, but is everywhere in chains,” and that the only legitimate government is one people construct for themselves. Burke insists that nothing like this is possible.
We are not born free; we do not choose our country, any more than we choose our parents. We learn the ways of the world in the place, the nation, in which we come into existence; we learn our morals before we have the use of reason. The real social contract is not an agreement about who should rule and who should obey; the real social contract is a partnership “in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfections;” a partnership, moreover, “not only between those who are living, but those who are dead, and those are to be born.” Those who speak of new beginnings, who insist that the past has nothing to teach, that it is nothing but a regrettable record of irrational prejudice and violent oppression, understand nothing of the real nature of things: that instead of progress, there has been a decline; that instead of greater freedom, there is now, because of the French Revolution, the greater slavery of lowered horizons and regimented minds.
Everyone agrees that Burke was wrong about the French Revolution, wrong when he insisted that it was “the deepest, the most craftily devised, the best combined and the most extensive design that was ever carried on, since the beginning of the world, against all property, all order, all religion, all law, and all real freedom.” Still, it might give us pause to remember that John Morley, after declaring at the beginning of his article on Burke that he was wrong to insist that the Revolution was not necessary, that reform had been possible, writes at the end of that same article that events in France confirmed “Burke’s sagacity and foresight.” And it might give us reason to wonder whether this, or any other, republic, can survive without a class of men and women educated in the best of what the past has to teach: ancient philosophy and both ancient and modern history - the liberal arts education that formed the natural aristocracy that both Thomas Jefferson and Edmund Burke thought essential to the preservation of freedom, and to which the works of Edmund Burke have become such a valuable addition.
Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot.
--Marshal Zeringue
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