Saturday, September 11, 2010

My hero / Edmund Burke By David Marquand

 

Detail of a portrait of Edmund Burke by James Northcote.

My hero: 

Edmund Burke 

by David Marquand

David Marquard

Saturday 11 September 2010


E

dmund Burke was one of the most gifted, original and complex people ever to sit in the House of Commons. He still defies classification. Today, he is widely seen as the "father of conservatism". I think that is blinkered nonsense and I passionately dissent from it. John Morley, the Liberal politician and man of letters, wrote an admiring biography of Burke. The great liberal historian Lord Acton thought he belonged with Macaulay and Gladstone as one of the three greatest British liberals. Gladstone himself saw Burke's writings as a "magazine of wisdom".

No one can deny that there was a conservative side to Burke. He believed in property, hierarchy and tradition. These values helped to inspire his thunderous denunciation of the French revolution, Reflections on the Revolution in France. But his conservatism had nothing in common with the individualism of Margaret Thatcher and George W Bush. Thatcher's notorious aphorism that there is "no such thing as society" would have horrified him. For him, society was a partnership between "those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born".

A profound, sometimes anguished fellow-feeling for the victims of arbitrary power ran, like a golden thread, through Burke's 30 years in parliament. He loathed the Protestant ascendancy in his native Ireland, was a persistent thorn in the flesh of George III, whom he suspected of seeking to undermine the Commons, and fought to conciliate the disaffected American colonies, instead of repressing them. He spent more than a decade campaigning for the voiceless millions subjected to oppression at the hands of Britain's East India Company. His campaign against the French revolution sprang from the same loathing for injustice: to him, mob rule was as oppressive as the unchecked rule of a king.

The last is a hard lesson for liberals and social democrats. All the more necessary for the left to reclaim him.


THE GUARDIAN



2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016
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