BURKE AS CONSERVATIVE POPULIST

William F. Buckley once said “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University." and I can see his point about some of them because of personality issues, not because they are intelligent and well-educated.  Of course, Buckley was expressing a populist belief that the average Joe can make as good or better judgments  than a member of the educated elite.  This in part explains Sarah Palin's popularity and does have a long history in America. This attitude was also championed by the great conservative thinker, Edmund Burke.

In F.P. Lock's magisterial biography of Burke (vol.1), we learn that Burke's first book, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), expressed his distrust of learning (Lock, p, 97):

The Enquiry illustrates Burke's respect for the 'natural', uncultivated responses of ordinary people. Feeling is more reliable than reason: 'It is, I own, not uncommon to be wrong in theory and right in practice; and we are happy that it is so. Men often act right from their feelings, who afterwards reason but ill on them from principle'.

This has some interest for us liberals because we are often attacked by conservatives for relying on feelings instead of reason.