Edmund Burke and post-modern conservatism

There has been a lot of talk about Jesse Norman’s book on Edmund Burke, and deservedly so for it’s a good book – accessible, learned and relevant.

Burke is, I suspect, one of the great unread authors; but he’s worth studying because he’s influenced so many of our past and present concerns. The place of tradition is one example; Burke sometimes defended traditions for their own sake, and one wonders what he might have made of gay marriage, the ‘snooper’s charter’ or the European Union. And his conception of the individual’s relationship with society (which one might broadly define as the institutions and ‘little platoons’ that make the nation state) is another example. As Jesse Norman puts it in an interview with the Spectator published today:

‘Burke has a completely different concept [to Hobbes and Rousseau] of the social contract. He doesn’t think individuals should be considered in that theoretic way. On the contrary, he thinks individuals should be embodied as culturally engaged individuals: molecularly rather than atomically.