ABSTRACT
Burke is hardly a romantic medievalist, however, to understand his thought with reference to political developments in early nineteenth-century Germany, where his influence was enormous, is inevitably to short-change its neo-classic, eighteenth-century, practical, and characteristically English, spirit. Even at those moments when, one feels, the vast seething stability of the organic commonwealth looms hauntingly in his imagination, Burke is less interested in painting his fancy of it, or in spinning a theory about it, than in deciding how one had best behave, and in keeping his generalizations 'useful' or 'expedient'. Bacon, to take a representative figure, is an example of English empiricism in a dramatic early stage. Burke's organicism is a premise for experience, not a systematic philosophy of the kind which soared into fashion during the nineteenth century, after his death; it has affinities with Hooker instead of with Hegel, with Wordsworth instead of with Novalis, or in this century with Whitehead instead of, say, with Heidegger.
