Rage of Edmund Burke [Hardcover]

Kramnick (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 238 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; First Edition first Printing edition (September 25, 1977)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465068294
• ISBN-13: 978-0465068296
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,392,962 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Biography based on the nature of ambivalence, May 6, 2003

By 

Bruce P. Barten (Saint Paul, Minnesota, U.S.A.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rage of Edmund Burke (Hardcover)

For a political biography, THE RAGE OF EDMUND BURKE/ PORTRAIT OF AN AMBIVALENT CONSERVATIVE by Isaac Kramnick goes a long way into the psychology of social breakdown. Burke is remembered mainly as a conservative, old enough at the time of the French revolution to be appalled that anyone thought an attack which left the queen's bedchambers in Versailles full of mayhem and dead bodies could advance civilization. The revolutionary freedom which America is currently attempting to bring to foreign portions of the world by demonstrating air superiority might be considered as deranged as the situations examined in this book, which was published in 1977, when hardly anyone had reason to suppose that the form of freedom offered by American military conquest was similar to the acts of Medea conjured by Edmund Burke into a description of the nature of rebellion in his REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE, quoted in this book as an instance in which "Burke might well have sensed the relationship between his own radical streak and his enduring hatred towards his father. Guiltily, however, he recoiled from the bloody horror and emphasized the loving and caring son. The good subject, he insisted,

should approach to the faults of the State as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude. By this wise prejudice we are taught to look with horror on those children of their country who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces and put him into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their poisonous weeds and wild incantations they may regenerate the paternal constitution and renovate their father's life." (p. 64).

Other major figures mentioned in this book include Bedford, James Boswell, Charles James Fox, Warren Hastings, Tom Paine, Joseph Priestley, Rockingham, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Richard Shackleton, and Mary Wollstonecraft. The beginning of the book emphasizes the role that religious dissenters in England played "in scientific and political innovation." (p. 13). Joseph Priestly, "founder of the modern Unitarian movement," (p. 13) opposed the "Poor Laws, which for the bourgeoisie were one of the most onerous of the old order's interferences with economic liberty." (p. 14). In those exciting times, a mob "burned his laboratory and home in 1791, sending him to finish his days in dissenter's paradise--America." (p. 13).

Freud is mentioned well a few times in this book, showing that it is possible to take a modern view of times that were shaking the foundation of everything that was not America. People who are used to the pampered civilized existence which Americans of today expect others to worship even as they experience extreme forms of chaos might learn a few things that provide a better perspective for understanding Freud than the middle class version of conservatism provides. This book is interesting, if you can stick with it.