My theme is the cultural struggle between the idea of a process, and that of a starting point... This cultural struggle is found at its liveliest in the field of politics, and one of its particular skirmishes is Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. The issue raised by that book may be simplified into the question: is revolution or tradition the idea by which the process of politics may be best understood? Burke was confronted by a body of men who sought in every possible way to create an unbridgeable gap between the ancien régime and the new order being unfolded in France during the 1790s. They renamed streets and months, abolished the historic provinces of France, and set up temples for the new cults they espoused. Burke argued that this was both unwise and impossible, insisting on the ubiquity of tradition in a manner similar to that in which he had previously insisted upon the ubiquity of law in the case of Warren Hastings. We are all, Burke argued, the products of tradition, and the illusion that we can escape from our past is entirely crippling. The melodramatic turbulence with which men attempted to break out of their pasts appeared merely as a colossal folly.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "My theme is the cultural struggle between the idea of a process, and that of a starting point... This cultural struggle is found at its liveliest in the field of politics, and one of its particular skirmishes is Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. The issue raised by that book may be simplified into the question: is revolution or tradition the idea by which the process of politics may be best understood? Burke was confronted by a body of men who sought in every possible way to create an unbridgeable gap between the ancien régime and the new order being unfolded in France during the 1790s. They renamed streets and months, abolished the historic provinces of France, and set up temples for the new cults they espoused. Burke argued that this was both unwise and impossible, insisting on the ubiquity of tradition in a manner similar to that in which he had previously insisted upon the ubiquity of law in the case of Warren Hastings. We are all, Burke argued, the products of tradition, and the illusion that we can escape from our past is entirely crippling. The melodramatic turbulence with which men attempted to break out of their pasts appeared merely as a colossal folly." in the context of "Kenneth Minogue, 'Revolution, Tradition and Political Continuity', in Preston King and B. C. Parekh (eds.), Politics and Experience: Essays Presented to Professor Michael Oakeshott on the Occasion of His Retirement (1968), pp. 283-284" to mean that wisdom is timeless.