David Bromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence

Excerpt

It is in the nature of intellectual biography to emphasize the evolution in its subject’s thought, and that perhaps makes the topic of David Bromwich’s superb first installment of a planned two-volume life of Edmund Burke—the opening acts of his career, stretching from his first publications through the American crisis—fraught, especially given its comprehensive and illuminating treatment of Burke’s correspondence alongside his public writings. After all, Burke’s critics, both his contemporaries and their descendants, have long accused him of betraying his early liberalism in his late hostility to the French Revolution. Any consideration of Burke’s initial works must contemplate this charge, and Bromwich indeed provides the material with which to evaluate—and, one feels confident in saying, refute—it. But Bromwich’s The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence also redirects our attention to more profound yet overlooked questions, such as the compatibility between Burke’s aesthetics—which reject proportion as the basis for beauty—and his politics, which emphasize prudent moderation. It is the novel questions, as much as the new light shed on the worn ones, that make this book such a welcome contribution to—and perhaps vault it to the forefront of—the increasingly crowded pantheon of Burke scholarship. …