“Language is the Eye of Society”: Edmund Burke on the Origins of the Polite and the Civil
Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Iris an dá chultúr), Vol. 18, pp. 80-97, 2003
19 Pages Posted: 18 Sep 2009
Date Written: 2003
Abstract
Throughout his career, Edmund Burke used a variety of languages of social analysis. These included the dialects of ‘civic’ critique — ‘civic humanist’, ‘republican’, etc. — that have received sustained attention in recent years. ‘Standing armies’, ‘jobbers’, and ‘factions’ appear frequently in his discussions of America and India, France and Ireland. By the mid-eighteenth-century, however, the civic critique had been significantly altered by the languages of ‘politeness’ and benevolism, and by works of travel literature and comparative history. Especially in his pre-parliamentary career (c.1747/8-67), Burke fashioned these into a new, ‘civil’ critique that would be central to his response to the revolution in France. There, the rhetoric of ‘chivalry’ expressed not reaction, but a defence of European ‘civility’, of social progress built on the ‘honour ethic’. This set the whig reformer Burke against political radicalism, but left him in the mainstream of enlightened thought.
Keywords: Edmund Burke, Ireland, Irish history, politeness
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