FOOD FOR THOUGHT: EDMUND BURKE, LIBERTY VERSUS SAFETY

David Bromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/ Harvard U. Press, 2014) ("Commerce is not government. Nor does commerce bring with it a stable social order." Id. at 10. "People accustomed to value a society at peace may come to an understanding with themselves and learn to accept oppressions that seem to assure stability. If my children are securer from the menace of riot because certain laws against Catholics are allowed to stay on the books, why should I lose my sense of safety to uphold a principle? Burke's reply is that the sacrifice of liberty for the promise of order always gives up more than we realize. 'Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny. In such a country as this, they are of all bad things the worst, worse by far than any where else; and they derive a particular malignity even from the wisdom and soundness of the rest our our institutions.' The reputation of fairness of the laws in general may screen a single bad law from contempt; even as, by its inclusion in the system the bad law tends to corrupt the whole. The acceptance of such a law only builds up credit for the false belief that liberty can escape unharmed when an injustice is done to a proscribed group. Burke here deplores the way that legal proscriptions may expose the innocent and give tacit encouragement to the vicious. A new species of parasites come into the world with the anti-Catholic laws, the bribed assistants of repression who worked through servility and deceit: 'A mercenary informer knows no distinction. Under such a system, the obnoxious people are slaves, not only to the government, but they live at the mercy of every individual; they are at once the slaves of the whole community, and of every part of it; and the worst and most unmerciful men are those whose goodness they most depend.' This sounds like an observation from experience; yet Burke is right not to reduce it to an anecdote. His point is that the treachery and reptile cunning of informers becomes widespread once society has lowered its morale to permit such exclusions at all." Id. at 411-412. From the book jacket: "Burke is commonly seen as the father of modern conservatism. Bromwich reveals the matter to be far more subtle and interesting. Burke was a defender of the rights of disfranchised minorities and an opponent of militarism. His politics diverge from those of any modern party, but all parties would be wiser for acquaintance with his writing and thoughts." It would be interesting to contemplate what Burke would say about race-relations in early twenty-first-century America, as well as the subject of its endless wars.).