The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke

When I read this book ten years ago, I had only a glancing sense of Irish history. I read it to gain some perspective on that history through the eyes of one of Ireland's insightful men of letters. The thesis that Burke was loyal...a constitutional monarchist...in the midst of his own deeply held opposition to British treatment of his own country, was a revelation to me. I did not know this...nor did I know that he extended his loyal opposition to British imperial behavior, to the USA and India. I felt then...through O'Brien's eyes...that Burke was heroic and extraordinarily far sighted; not to mention politically prudent. I haven't yet changed my opinion, after reading earlier contemporary criticism of Burke's alleged blind conservative monarchism. I think that O'Brien is correct to assert that Burke's action and thought was not that simple and un-nuanced. O'Brien makes a convincing case for Burke's underlying purposes. These purposes, based upon civilized respect for all parties involved, in such a heated historic dispute....in my very humble opinion....presage the non-violent movements toward independence that eventually bore fruit for India and Ireland. Conor Cruise O'Brien, himself a civilized man of insight and erudition, paints the "big picture"...a perspective that I think could very well become the definitive version of this pre-history, and of Edmund Burke.

"The Great Melody" by Conor Cruise O'Brien is not your traditional biography; there is little here concerning Burke's personal and family life. Instead, the work concentrates on Burke's political career and thought and, specifically, how they relate to his Irish heritage. The result is a fascinating look into the mind and personality of a man who suffered from a conflict of emotions over his Irish heritage that included his father's conversion to Protestantism while his mother and wife remained Catholic. Burke himself was torn in different directions his entire life; loyalty to Britain and also his Irish ancestors and friends suffering under the Penal Laws, loyalty to the British constitution, but also a deep feeling for the need of justice for the oppressed people at home and abroad.O'Bien's book takes an in-depth look at Burke's career in parliament and as a member of the Whig party through an extensive analysis of his letters, speeches, political relationships, and writings, specifically, as they relate to his struggle on behalf of the American colonists, the struggle of the Irish Catholics, the people of India suffering at the hands of the rapacious East India Co., and the French Revolution. The work can be a little dry at times and tends to quote in an overly lengthy manner, but the immense erudition and scholarship and the insightful picture of Burke that emerges more than compensate for this. I do wish, however, that O'Brien had spent more time on "Reflections On The Revolution in France," but he feels that since it is so readily available to the reader there is no need. Finally we see an Edmund Burke as he really was and not the "old reactionary" that is so often depicted. We come to understand that Burke always believed that "the people are the true legislator," that Burke did not want to see Americans in Parliament who were slave holders, that he was a life-long opponent of increased powers for the Crown and the corruption such power entailed, that he was one of the few who consistently fought against injustice toward the American colonials, that he found all authoritaianism abhorrent, and that he opposed commercial monopolies and the abuse of power in all its forms. But, because he opposed the overturning of society and its reengineering on the basis of "metaphysical abstractions," he was often portrayed as a reactionary by later pundits. Lewis Namier and his followers are particularly taken to task by O'Brien for this tendency. In the end we see a Burke who always supported basic human rights, but remained constantly aware that real life circumstances must make social and political change possible if such change is not to lead to chaos and violence. Burke's fear of radicalism based upon abstract theory was real and the destructiveness of the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Nazi bio-racial religion more than sufficiently proves his point. A reading of O'Brien's fine book can only lead the intelligent reade

Everyone knows Edmund Burke's most famous quote: "for evil to triumph, it is only necessary for good men to do nothing". As a former lecturer in political science, I was mainly familiar with Burke as the founder of Anglo-conservatism (infinitely more nuanced and modern than his equivalent in Franco-conservatism, the Count Joseph de Maistre). I had also read an early work, namely "An Enquiry into the nature of the Beautiful and the Sublime", which I thought a brilliant little jewel. But there's much more about Burke than that. O'Brien, the great man of Irish diplomacy, shows in this extraordinary book that Burke, whom recently history has shown as a fawning servant to the political leaders of his time (Rockingham and Pitt), was at the heart of the great fight between George III's royal absolutism and the emerging English democracy. Burke was on the right side of virtually all the fights he picked. He advocated equality before the law for the Irish subjects of the king, first tolerance and then freedom for the American colonies, the end of the colonialist abuses of the East India company, and a quarantine on the infectious ideas of the French Revolution. The later one is still a contentious affair. Zhou En Lai famously opined that it was still too early (in the 1970s) to judge the French Revolution. Burke would have had none of that. As early as 1790, in the "benign" initial phase of the revolution, he foresaw the Terror, the execution of the Royal Family, the Consulate and the Empire, and the French banner covering all of the Europe, in the name of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity". O'Brien shows the extraordinary situation of an Irish Protestant (always accused of crypto-Catholicism) having great informal influence on the politics of Great Britain, while holding menial offices or representing various "rotten boroughs" in Parliament (this is no aspersion on Burke's memory- that's how politics was done at the time, and anything that gave Burke a pulpit couldn't have been all bad). The "Great Melody" of the title provides the underlying themes around which O'Brien organizes the public part of Burke's life. Far from tiresome, this is a useful device that provides unity and coherence to Burke's thoughts and actions. O'Brien's attacks on mid-century historiography are perfectly adequate, given that much of what was written as that period was designed to regress Burke into irrelevancy, as a sycophant and a lackey. He never was that. He was a good and a great man, and O'Brien does him justice in his book. Perhaps the only fault that I could find in it is a tendency to assume the reader's prior knowledge of the arcanes of Irish history. But these are quibbles. If you can stomach a history of ideas, full of events and studded with memorable characters, this is the book for you.

An excellent biography, highly readable, a bold and ultimately persuasive thesis - that Burke was not only a major political thinker but that he shaped much of the late 18th century. From a fascinating introduction showing how modern scholars had successfully destroyed and obscured Burke's true legacy to its brilliant organizing principle (a line from Yeats), this is a great book. This book should be required reading for every senator, congressman, and presidential candidate - if only to improve the level of discourse by reading Burke's great speeches. Yeats' lines on Burke: "American colonies, Ireland, France, and India/ Harried, and Burke's great melody against it." O'Brien shows how much one great man can do against tyranny, and how little. The book falls short on two counts: one, inadequate bios of Rockingham, Fox, Portland, Pitt the Younger, and his relation to Sam Johnson and Joshua Reynolds. Two, Burke the man does not walk these pages as Johnson does Boswell's book. True, O'Brien has organized the book around Yeats' lines, but the domestic Burke, the friend of Johnson and Reynolds could have been amplified. These are minor faults. This biography is excellent in so many ways that it compares very favorably with Boswell's Johnson and indeed excels it on many fronts.

O'Brien does a masterful job of bringing to life a neglected and misunderstood politician and political theorist. Those whose knowledge of Burke is limited to "Reflections" are in for an awakening. By book's end the reader will feel much like I. Berlin (whose correspondence with CCOB is in the appendix) and recant previously held stereotypes of Burke as a reactionary. A thorough detailing of Burke's writings and speeches makes clear that he was far from the two dimensional figure derided in political theory seminars. O'Brien makes old political controversies regarding Ireland, India, America and revolutionary France fresh and engaging. An initial puzzle of this book is O'Brien's passionate refutations of the Namierite view of Burke. Yet, Burke continues to be a bogeyman to the academic left for good reason. Burke hated tyranny in any form and virtually alone among his contemporaries recognized that recasting society in the name of an idea promised the worst form of tyranny. Devotees of the French Revolution detest Burke whose credentials as a champion of the oppressed in Ireland, India and America were beyond reproof. O'Brien himself, however, was curiously un-Burkean during his political career as it related to the Cold War. Burke correctly recognized that the French Revolution was a proto-totalitarian movement. He saved his most withering scorn for his former allies who viewed the revolution as a net benefit for the French and the world. In contrast, O'Brien in his UN days urged that Ireland follow the "decent" countries such as Sweden and stay above the US-Soviet fray. One wishes that O'Brien, now in his eighties, would have come to grips with his past as a neutral in the struggle between freedom and the successors of the French Revolution.