Cultural Politics in the 1790s pp 33-58 | Cite as
Edmund Burke’s Immortal Law: Reading the Impeachment of Warren Hastings, 1788
Chapter
Abstract
Edmund Burke’s 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France probably did more than any other single text or event to galvanize radical political culture in Britain. Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, among many others, produced major responses to it, while journals like Daniel Isaac Eatori’s Politics for the People, or A Salmagundy for Swine and Thomas Spence’s Pig’s Meat: or Lessons for the Swinish Multitude used what they read as Burke’s euphemism for the people — ‘a swinish multitude’ (RRF, p. 173) — as the basis for their ironic addresses to the British working class. One of the things Burke’s radical critics repeatedly pointed out was the performative, manipulative and distinctly literary quality of his writing and speeches and, relatedly, the ways in which these appealed to the sensibility, not the reason, of his audience. Paine’s condemnation in Rights of Man is perhaps the best known of these critiques:
As to the tragic paintings by which Mr Burke has outraged his own imagination, and seeks to work upon that of his readers, they are very well calculated for theatrical representation, where facts are manufactured for the sake of show, and accommodated to produce, through the weakness of sympathy, a weeping effect.
Keywords
Sexual Violence Cultural Politics Moral Community Communal Identification Natural Society
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
- 1.Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (1791; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985) pp. 49–50.Google Scholar
- 2.Linda Zerilli, Signifytng Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke and Mill (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1994) p. 61.Google Scholar
- 3.Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, vol. 5, eds Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: William Pickering 1989) p. 8.Google Scholar
- 4.Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic ldeology: Language, Gender, and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) pp. 1–13.Google Scholar
- 5.See Burke’s ‘Articles of Impeachment’ (14, 21, 28 May 1787), W&S, vol. 6, pp. 125–258.Google Scholar
- 6.On the sentimental character of Burke’s representation of India see Frans De Bruyn, ‘Edmund Burke’s Gothic Romance: the Portrayal of Warren Hastings in Burke’s Writings and Speeches on India’, Criticism: a Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, vol. 29, no. 4 (Fall 1987) pp. 415–38.Google Scholar
- 7.Burke, A Vindication of Natural Society (London, 1757), in PreRevolutionary Writings, ed. Ian Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) p. 14.Google Scholar
- 8.Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1995), p. 3.Google Scholar
- 9.Sara Suleri, The Rhetortc of English Indta (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) p. 51.Google Scholar
- 11.Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995) pp. 42–6.Google Scholar
- 12.Paine, p. 118.Google Scholar
- 13.Michael Warner, ‘The Mass Public and the Mass Subject’, The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) p. 239.Google Scholar
- 14.Burke, Vindication, p. 14.Google Scholar
- 15.See, for example, Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).Google Scholar
- 16.Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (London: Routledge, 1985) p. 44.Google Scholar
- 17.Frans De Bruyn, ‘Edmund Burke’s Gothic Romance’, pp. 424–5.Google Scholar
- 18.Burke to Philip Francis (c. 3 January 1788), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. H. Furber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1669) vol. 5, p. 372.Google Scholar
- 19.The details Burke relates were based on John Patterson’s report on the 1783 rebellion in Rangpur. See W&S, vol. 6, p. 413, n. 1. 20. Burke used this phrase in his ‘Speech on Nabob of Arcot’s Debts’ (28 February 1785), W&S, vol. 5, p. 521.Google Scholar
- 21.Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: Illinois University Press, 1988) p. 296.Google Scholar
- 22.Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756; Oxford: Oxford University Press) p. 79.Google Scholar
- 24.Tom Furniss’s discussion of the undecidability that informs the category of the sublime in the Reflections provides a helpful way of thinking about this duality. Furniss notes that ‘the sublime is a mode by which bourgeois society defines itself through the exclusion of the “barbarous” past. Yet the sublime can also be read as the return of that which polite commerce represses within itself and which structures its own ethos.’ See Furniss, Aesthetic Ideology, p. 147. The undecidable structure of sublimity that Furniss discusses here is analogous to the undecidable nature of pleasure evoked by the speech. 25. Slavoj Zizek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (London: Verso, 1994) p. 75.Google Scholar
- 27.Major [John] Scott, A Third Letter from Major Scott to Mr Fox on the Story of Deby Sing (London, 1789) p. 8.Google Scholar
- 28.[Ralph Broome], The Letters of Simpkin the Second, Poetic Recorder of all the Proceedings Upon the Trial of Warren Hastings in Westminster Hall (London, 1789) pp. 12–13.Google Scholar
- 29.Zifek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, p. 55.Google Scholar
- 30.Frans De Bruyn, The Literary Genres of Edmund Burke: the Political Uses of Literary Form (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) p. 14.Google Scholar
- 31.See, for example, Furniss, Aesthetic Ideology, pp. 138–63, De Bruyn, The Literary Genres of Edmund Burke, pp. 163–208 and Zerilli, Signifying Women, pp. 60–94 — three exemplary and sophisticated readings of the Reflections.Google Scholar
Copyright information
© Andrew McCann 1999