So I’ve been asked to say more about the Burke-Strauss conference. Well, I don’t want to give away too many secrets. I will say that the discussion concluded inconclusively, as is appropriate. But I will make some general comments.
It does seem that Strauss makes a fairly big deal of not being critical of Burke’s practical judgments or even of his understanding of the threat theory poses to practice. It’s easy to say that Burke doesn’t take something like “natural right” seriously, but he certainly had a standard of good and evil by which he judged England and its constitution. His major political accomplishment, in fact, seems to have been to have held the British empire to a highly civilized moral standard. He may have, as in the American case, argued in terms of interest, but those persuasive efforts were in the service of principle.
