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Hamrick, James W.

English

2004

M.A.

This thesis gives a biographical and historical account of Edmund Burke's political philosophy. Because of the perennial controversy over Burke's reaction to the French Revolution, Burke scholars have tried to construct a coherent picture of his self-consciously un-theorized political philosophy. While acknowledging other scholars' attempts to account for Burke's political philosophy, I also recognize the difficulty in constructing a political philosophy from writings that do not explicitly engage in the production of political philosophy. Instead of constructing yet another coherent political philosophy, and ascribing it to Burke's writings, I show how the coherence in Burke's writings can be located in their historicity. Specifically, I discuss how coherence can be located in the biographical facts of Burke's personal life, and how these facts are intimately connected to the plight of eighteenth-century Irish Catholics.
That is, insofar as Burke's political texts espouse something like natural law philosophy, or traditional constitutionalism, or Scottish Enlightenment sociology, I argue that the thread of coherence is Burke's personal and philosophical relationship to eighteenth-century Ireland.The thesis focuses on a single, extended passage from Reflections on the Revolution in France. Chapter One discusses how a biographical and historical approach provides a useful alternative to much of the existing scholarship on Burke's political philosophy. Chapter Two analyzes the political and philosophical content that Burke incorporates into the passage from Reflections, and Chapter Three demonstrates how this political and philosophical content is rooted in Burke's personal connection to eighteenth-century Ireland.