Publishing Parliamentary Oratory: The Case of Edmund Burke
- Publishing Parliamentary Oratory:The Case of Edmund Burke
Why study Edmund Burke? Everyone agrees that he is centrally important, but many would be slow to explain exactly why. They would be right to hesitate, for several reasons. One is simply that major aspects of his life and thought have yet to find their historian. He is considered here because no one has examined why Burke issued certain parliamentary speeches as separate publications.
The explanation given here is threefold. These published speeches, first, were means to educate readers in his way of thinking: to inculcate his sophisticated understanding of crucial problems. This implied communicating to parliamentarians, as well as to others. Second, publication brought political advantages, because it expanded the range of effects that these speeches could have. Besides these important though transient results, third, publication gave Burke lasting gains, including a form of control: it multiplied his reputations, raised his standing, and enabled him to revise his public persona before contemporaries and posterity alike. These three answers are one in that they identify important benefits from adding publication to speaking. Something could be said, too, about drawbacks, and about much besides: but as this is an essay, not a book, its subject is some aspects of Burke's practical rationale for publishing.
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Having noted the obvious, we can go beyond it. It is obvious that publication was necessary for speeches to have an effect beyond Westminster - where, after all, the vast majority of the reading public was found. So it requires little emphasis that 'to reprint' an address was a means 'to send it to every part of the Kingdom'.1 Publication was necessary, besides, for reasons that were subtler and therefore are more interesting.
Separate publication was necessary for the parliamentary speeches that Burke issued to work their proper effect in parliament, and beyond. The orations intended here2 go far beyond the minimal requirements of a parliamentary speech, namely stating [End Page 112] the facts and drawing the inferences that justify one's vote or preface one's proposal, and they are either major treatments of their subject or prefaces to them.
First, they analyse fundamental political problems, identifying the inadequacy and incoherence of a policy or an institution. American Taxation identified the incoherence of a British policy which combined a withdrawal of taxation in principle with an insistence upon it in one particular, and its lack of fit with American circumstances.3Conciliation with America proceeded by showing the incoherence of a policy that combined coercion with concession, and was a sequel to American Taxation in that it set out a consciously self-consistent policy that fitted the facts Burke adduced.4 Both dwelt upon the inadequacy of British thinking to the subject of overseas rule. Oeconomical Reformation and Public Expenses, its preface, show the relative inadequacy of the British executive to its task of governing effectively at home.5Fox's East India Bill argued the encyclopaedic inadequacy of the East India Company to governing overseas territories.6The Nabob of Arcot's Debts set out the labyrinths of corruption created by the Company's servants and the inadequacy of William Pitt and Henry Dundas as reformers,7 whilst Army Estimates exposed the inadequacy of revolutionary ideas to governing France nearly nine months before Reflections.8
Analysis was joined by explanation. The explanation was historical: the importance of historical narration in one of these speeches is evident in that there are Dublin reprints of one in The History of American Taxation.9Conciliation is notable for a philosophical history, which emphasized the historic character of the American settlers and their country, and explained why these were not apt objects for current British policy. Oeconomical Reformation indicated at once the origins of current governmental procedures in a feudal rationale, and their utter unfitness for practical work under modern circumstances. So historical explanation, second, was a major feature of these speeches.
Third, some of them specified intellectual or practical changes. If some were negative in their practical inferences, especially Army Estimates, elsewhere the explanation was a preface to positive claims. American Taxation, having told the tale of disorder arising from an inadequate conception of...
