Burke, Enlightenment and Romanticism

doi:10.1017/CCO9780511794315.005

2 - Burke, Enlightenment and Romanticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2012

Richard Bourke

Edited by

David Dwan and

Christopher Insole

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David Dwan: Affiliation:
Queen's University Belfast
Christopher Insole: Affiliation:
University of Durham

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In a letter sent to his Quaker school-friend, Richard Shackleton, at the start of his third year as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, Burke identified a mania for syllogistic reasoning with the dark days of Scholastic philosophy, contrasting its procedures with those of ‘these enlightened times’. He had encountered neo-Aristotelian logic through the textbooks of Franciscus Burgersdicius and Martinus Smiglecius during his first year at university; at the same time, he was exposed to the Logica of Jean Le Clerc. By the mid-1740s he was associating the former with the kind of pre-enlightened ‘ignorance’ that modern philosophy had helped to overcome (C, I: 89). A decade later, in the Account of the European Settlements in America, which Burke composed with his close friend, William Burke, the passage from ignorance to enlightenment is set within a conventional, Protestant historiographical framework. Technological and scientific progress, along with humanism and the Reformation, are presented as having created the conditions for material and intellectual improvement. These developments, moreover, are shown to have occurred in tandem with the consolidation of modern monarchies, the revival of politeness, and the establishment of a ‘rational’ – meaning prudently oriented – politics. Altogether, learning prospered, manners improved, and policy became enlightened. In a fragmentary ‘Essay towards an History of the Laws of England’, which Burke undertook around the same time, the slow, faltering march towards a government of laws is taken to have been ‘softened and mellowed by peace and Religion; improved and exalted by commerce, by social intercourse, and that great opener of the mind, ingenuous science’ (WS, I: 322). What these diverse observations illustrate is that enlightenment for Burke encompassed the progress of society through the expansion of commerce under the protection of law, the improvement of morals under the government of Providence, and the liberalisation of religion under the influence of science.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke , pp. 27 - 40

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9780511794315.005 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2012

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2 - Burke, Enlightenment and Romanticism

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