Booknotes

Of articles which are submitted for publication in Philosophy, a surprisingly large proportion are about the views of Richard Rorty. Some, indeed, we have published. They, along with pretty well all the articles we receive on Professor Rorty, are highly critical. On the perverse assumption that there must be something to be said for anyone who attracts widespread hostility, it is only right to see what can be said in favour of Rorty's latest collection of papers, entitled, Truth and Progress, (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Polemical Papers by Jenny Teichman (Ashgate 1997) will certainly engage and amuse the bystander. They will not amuse Jonathan Lear or Martha Nussbaum or Peter Singer or Ronald Dworkin or Richard Rorty or Jacques Derrida, to name only some of the most prestigious of Teichman's targets. But then home truths usually do not amuse their recipients. Teichman's points are certainly not unsubtle, but they are expressed with the directness characteristic of the home truth, and indeed of good thinking.

This, doubtless, is part of Teichman's object. Through the directness of her writing and her own rootedness in good sense, she communicates to the reader that a big reputation and inflated style are no guarantees of good sense. She says that in her essays she is discussing cases where philosophers are explicitly or implicity recommending or condemning various important human practices and institutions. There is, therefore, a sense in which her targets are already polemical and ought to be ready for ‘replies of a somewhat polemical character’.

Another reason for polemic ‘has to do with puffs and blurbs’. Puffs are ‘brief recommendations signed by authoritative people, usually but not always friends or colleagues of the authors’ and put on the covers of academic books. Blurbs are usually written by the authors themselves. Despite being aware of the provenance of puffs and blurbs, even seasoned academics are taken in occasionally. But the case is far worse with students who don't understand the conventions, and who are discouraged from intellectual self-reliance by what appears to them to be the weight of authoritative opinion.

A few years ago a posthumous collection of essays by F. R. Leavis appeared with the title The Critic as Anti-Philosopher. The idea seemed to be that because in his approach to literature Leavis rejected theory and the deduction of conclusions from principles, there was something un- or anti-philosophical about him. If so, Edmund Burke is also an anti-philosopher.

It would, though, be a shame if it was thought that, as a result, Burke's works are unworthy of philosophical attention, particularly these days when what is called particularism is an emerging trend in ethics and politics. Jim McCue's Edmund Burke and Our Present Discontents (Claridge Press, 1997), nicely coinciding with the bi-centenary of Burke's death, might be a good place to start a philosophical exhumation of Burke's political thought.

Not everyone will agree with McCue's judgements related to our present discontents or even with his extrapolation to them of Burkean themes. Nonetheless, there is plenty of philosophical meat in what he draws out of Burke. How, for example, is it possible for Burke consistently to oppose the French Revolution, while having argued strongly in favour of the American Revolution (and incidentally against Warren Hastings' adventures in India)? Was Burke not just an opportunist, a career Whig who jumped ship at an opportune moment, and thereby securing for himself a posthumous reputation as a seminal Tory thinker? McCue convincingly shows that on the key issue of sovereignty, Burke's apparent shifting of position conceals a deeper consistency. Burke's underlying insight is that in matters of sovereignty the consent of the governed is far more important than democracy in any formal sense or, indeed, any abstract notion of authority, such as the divine right of kings. In working out this thought in an actual case far more weight would be accorded local facts, manners and attitudes than abstract principle. The danger with constitutional arrangements based on abstractions, however good they sound to philosophical analysis, is that by wiping away the very traditions and balances which have in practice restrained rulers and executives they will be ‘powerful to usurp, impotent to restore’.

Against their professed aims top-down constitutions are likely to be ‘strong only to destroy the rights of men’, by, for example, handing power over to an elected but unrepresentative assembly or, even worse, to an unelected and unrepresentative bureaucracy. Burke would clearly have hated the European Commission. He would have defended the hereditary principle in the House of Lords (because of what it does, not because of any abstract justification). What, though, would he have said of Scottish devolution, if, as we have to believe, the Scots just do not want to be treated as a branch of a London-based executive? Is there any analogy here with the ‘habits of soreness, jealousy and distrust’ Burke discerned in the American colonists subjected to a Parliamentary tax they found both burdensome and unjustified?