ABSTRACT
Burke did not expect to win. One could almost say he anticipated margin alization. “If a new order is coming on,” he realized, his “political opinions must pass away as dreams.”2 He spoke often enough of opponents’ views as “dreams,” but he saw that there was, nevertheless, a choice of orders. The new order may be fostered by dreams but become a new reality:
A sea change has brought in new tides of opinion. The dramatic events of 1989-90, the collapse of communism in Western countries (and also the Gulf War which marks the end of the end of history) will no doubt come to play their role. The changes I want to record predate these events and are scholarly or address broad changes in the Western intellectual community. An extension of an amended theory of totalitarianism from the Russian to the French Revolution and a displacement of the attribute “modernizer” from the figure of the Jacobin revolutionary to a new heterodox figure, the ancien regime bourgeois aristocrat, has sponsored a new historiography of the Revolution. These currents of thought are perversely allied with internal transformations along the right-left spectrum, which might renew conserva tive hostility to Burke (as a historicist skeptic), rehabilitate Burke’s old reputation as a liberal patriot, and awaken the left to a peculiar convergence of Burke’s and their sympathies.
