Thinking the Revolution - A review of Richard Bourke and Niamh Gallagher's The Political Thought of the Irish Revolution

 Ireland, in spite or even because of its claim to a great literary culture, is not a country much associated with intellectuals.   Two of the country's greatest writers, Jonathan Swift and Edmund Burke, can justly be called anti-intellectual intellectuals, with their scabrous and ferociously negative portrayals of 'projectors' (Swift) and the revolutionary cabals of the philosophes (Burke).  In the annals of intellectuals dealing in politics, one thinks of O'Connell's brilliant but cruel evisceration of Thomas Davis.   The great cultural revival of the late 19th century was built on the work of scholars, antiquarians, critics, archaeologists, but it is Yeats and Synge whom we now remember.   

It was the signal achievement in more recent times of the late and sadly lamented Seamus Deane to assert the equality - at the very least in his own work - of scholarship and critique with literary activity and expression.    A significant poet and the author of one very fine novel, Deane nevertheless poured the primary energy of his career into scholarship and criticism of the highest order.   Unlike many of his peers, Deane was never afraid to consider Irish literature as a zone not only of aesthetic representation or experience, but of intellectual and even ideological exploration and activism.    He was, therefore, our premier historian of ideas.   

Richard Bourke, a one-time student of Deane's at UCD, has in the course of his career picked up the baton and forced the issue of intellectual history into that amorphous zone, 'Irish Studies', with a rigour and seriousness still rare among his contemporaries.    His most recent book, an anthology entitled The Political Thought of the Irish Revolution, published in an illustrious Cambridge series, and edited with Niamh Gallagher, not only pushes the matter further still, but extends it to pedagogical ends and to a wide readership.   Here the reader will find between the same covers a wide variety of Irish political writing and thinking, of the left and of the right, in defence of the Union, and in condemnation of it.

I review this rich and fascinating collection in the current Dublin Review of Books.   My thanks, as ever, go to Maurice Earls for making this review possible.

Conor

The Primacy of Politics