Crowe – Recognition of Peter Stanlis

Ian
Crowe
Director, Edmund Burke Society of America

Recognition
of Peter Stanlis

The
Contested Roots of American Liberty
Regional Meeting of the Philadelphia Society
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
October 14, 2006

Ladies and
Gentlemen,

I find it
impossible to countenance summarizing Peter Stanlis’s contribution to Burke
studiesólet alone to scholarship more broadlyóin under ten minutes.
Let me, therefore, do what every self-respecting Brit does in such a
situation, and move the goalposts. In
keeping with the theme of this conference, I am creating a subdivision of the
Edmund Burke Society of America, the “British-American Burke Project,” in
order to focus upon one central facet of Peter’s distinguished career.
That is, his contribution to fostering a special relationship between the
republics of letters in the United States, and in Great Britain and the
Commonwealth of Nations.

Peter’s teaching career began at the moment when a
parallel, political “special relationship” stood triumphantly over an
alien, militant ideology. Today,
two militant ideologies later, that “fraternal association of the
English-speaking peoples” is stretched to its limit, its intellectual elites
in confusion, or outright rebellion. It
appears that, “Out of this flower safety, we have plucked this nettle,
danger.” Peter, meanwhile, having
energized Burke studies through the publication of Edmund
Burke and the Natural Law in 1958 (and more than twenty scholarly
publications on Burke thereafter) is about to launch a similar revolution in
scholarship on Robert Frost. His
forthcoming study promises to be the capstone of an intellectual career
extraordinary for its energy and consistency; but it also promises, when
considered with his Burkean legacy, to serve as a timely reminder that the
strength of our special relationship depends upon resources that are not only
political or military but also imaginative, poetic.

Ten years ago, I subscribed, body, heart and mind, to that
anti-Americanism described recently by David Cameron: “a complacent cowardice born of resentment of
success and a desire for the world’s problems simply to go away.”
Peter shattered my Anglocentric complacency in two ways.
First, he arranged for someone else to pay for my first visit to the
States. Second, he sent to me for
inclusion in a publication I was compiling, an essay on “Edmund Burke and
British Views of the American Revolution”: it is a piece that struck me as one
of the most concise and penetrating comments on Burke’s astonishing, positive
vision for the future of the empire to which he was committed.

Since then, I have come to admire Peter’s enormous
contribution to explicating that special “friendship and mutual understanding
between our vast but kindred systems of society.”
And, given the difficulties our political elites have found in doing
likewise, perhaps I can best account for his achievement here by pursuing an
implicit parallel. For which I turn
to what will be a familiar passage from Sir
Edward Coke’s Institutes
of the Laws of England,
in which that great lawyer likens the ideal properties of a counselor or
statesman to three attributes of an elephant:
“that he hath no gall—: that he is of a most ripe and perfect
memory—: that he is inflexible, and cannot bow:—.”

Men without gall,
Coke explains, “though they be maximae
virtutis et maximi intellectus—yet they are sociable, and goe in
companies.” The model academic is
content in the seclusion of his study, but also at home arguing in the
conference room, since he knows that these are integral parts of one process of
enlightenment. Peter can stalk
his prey relentlessly, but his weapons are always the close reading and
scholarship of intense reflection, and his vision of intellectual engagement is
a splendid, fruitful compound of courtesy and incisivenessóI think of the
words of Lord Shaftesbury here: “We polish one another, and rub off our
Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision.”
This is the vision that has driven the “Burke industry” to which
Peter has made such a vital and diverse contribution. It is evident in print,
with the extraordinary achievement of the Burke
Newsletter and Studies in Burke and
His Time; with that invaluable research tool, Edmund
Burke: A Bibliography of Secondary Studies, which he edited with Clara
Gandy; and with Burke: Selected Writings
and Speeches, still without doubt the best anthology available: and it is
evident in practice, in the host of societies to which he has contributed and,
of course, the numerous seminars and colloquia he has organized over the years.

Second, the
elephant is “of a ripe memory, that remembering perils past, might prevent
dangers to come.” Peter’s
prodigious powers of recall were one of the qualities that brought him to the
attention of Robert Frost; but in his writings that diverse material is ordered
by a poetic imagination to produce works remarkable for their true
interdisciplinary quality, and therefore for their enduring vitality.
In this way, Peter’s pioneering study of
normal”>Edmund Burke and the Natural Law (recently re-reissued!) turns us
from secularized interpretations of Burke’s statesmanship to a more authentic
apprehension of the politics of the eighteenth century, and to a recovery of
that discourse for our own times. He shows us where Burke’s thought “begins
to be ulterior—where it carries you on somewhere—”
So, for example, the concept of empire under a moral natural
law emerges not just as a flat rhetorical device in the short-term maneuverings
of Burke’s “party” or faltering career, but as a vibrant intellectual
foundation for Burke’s astonishingly ambitiousóboth compelling and
unattainableóconception of what R.B. McDowell has called a “generous and
just imperialism.” It is surely only within this elevated imaginative
framework that the Special Relationship can function as a means of creative,
ordered and critical dialogue between our countries.

Finally, our
elephant is “not to be bowed, or turned from the right, either for fear,
reward, or favour—” It was
Peter’s lot to be accused of applying his research to the cause of
politics (as if that were an act otherwise unheard of in the Academy) and of bending
Burke to the cause of Christian, and particularly Catholic,
anti-Communism. It is a prosaic
charge at best, betraying an utter failure to grasp the complexity of Peter’s
understanding of his subject. Peter
has reminded us, drawing upon those
central concepts of natural law and moral prudence, that Burke’s awareness
of the dangers of what he confronted as “metaphysics” is relevant in facing
the challenge of what we know today, mutatis
mutandis, as “ideology.”

And just as metaphysics was, then, the enemy of moral prudence, so ideology now
contends against all that is truly poetic in our world.
Indeed, the flat imaginations
and hollow rhetoric of today appear to have reduced “prudence” merely
to the excuse of a people who
can no longer be troubled with taking sides.
Yet the fight is never
completely lost: and as Peter knows, while Burke, in his later years let
slip one fatalistic sentiment (of which some have made much), he was more true
to himself when he urged, in the dark days of the conflict with Revolutionary
France, that “The heart of the citizen is a perennial spring of energy to the
state—.The public must never be regarded as incurable.”
In which case, it’s high time
for that study of Robert Frost to open up another long-awaited second
front.

Frost was not for confounding politics and poetics, and I
doubt Peter is straining to join hands with that new British Frankenbunny, the
“liberal conservative.” But Peter’s
distinguished, imaginative service to the republic of letters carries with it
the wisdom necessary to strengthen our special relationship in its various
manifestations. Louis Bredvold once
wrote: “The idea that scholarly research may be one way of attaining to ripe
wisdom is nowadays too rarely entertained; wisdom is not a concept that our
contemporary philosophers spend much time in analyzing or defining—And yet our
dynamic world probably stands far more in need of wisdom than further
discovery.”

Thank you, Peter, for your industry over the years in the
cause of true wisdom.