Passing Burke’s Statue

Outside Trinity College Dublin stands the statue of Edmund Burke, the parliamentarian and writer who lived from 1729 to 1797. Students hurry past. Tourists pause briefly. Traffic flows on. Most will not notice him. Yet he remains there, carved in stone, familiar and overlooked at once. For me he is not a monument but a reminder. Burke believed that politics without virtue collapses into arrogance or zealotry. His warnings, like the statue itself, are easy to miss.

Burke’s warnings found an unlikely companion on my undergraduate reading list: Fyodor Dostoevsky. An Irish parliamentarian of the eighteenth century and a Russian novelist of the nineteenth might seem strange bedfellows. Yet they return to me whenever politics falters. Both refused to reduce human beings to abstractions. Both insisted that without conscience, humility, and compassion, politics decays into corruption or fanaticism.

Burke’s suspicion of purity began in childhood. Born to a Protestant father and a Catholic mother, he grew up between divided worlds. That doubleness bred in him a lifelong mistrust of claims to absolute clarity, knowing that they often concealed arrogance or oppression.

Dostoevsky’s education came later and more brutally. In 1849, arrested for radical sympathies, he was led into a St Petersburg square, blindfolded, and prepared for execution. At the last moment, the Tsar’s reprieve arrived. Death vanished. In its place came years in Siberian penal camps. There he discovered the resilience of men whom society dismissed as brutes. From that ordeal he concluded that no theory could contain the mystery of human freedom. Purity of ideology could be as deadly as cruelty itself.

If Dostoevsky’s crucible was Siberia, Burke’s was politics. In 1788 he brought Warren Hastings, the former Governor-General of Bengal, before Westminster Hall for impeachment. The trial was spectacle. Scarlet cloth hung on the walls. George III and Queen Charlotte looked on. Fashionable society crowded the galleries. Hastings, composed and immaculate, was accused of corruption and cruelty. Burke, heavyset and unwell, spoke for four days, denouncing “crimes which would for ever disgrace human nature.” He lost the case. Yet his thunder exposed the moral cost of empire. Power without virtue, he warned, corrodes those who wield it and ruins those who endure it.

Dostoevsky sounded the same warning in another register. In Notes from Underground, his narrator mocks the dream of a perfectly rational society, insisting that people will sometimes act against their own interests simply to prove that they are free. In Demons, young radicals intoxicated by theory descend into absurdity and murder. Both novels capture the danger Burke had thundered against in Westminster. Politics untethered from virtue collapses into cruelty, whether cloaked in the silks of empire or the slogans of ideology.

For both men, virtue did not mean moral perfection. It meant restraint. It meant humility. It meant compassion. Restraint was the discipline that prevents conviction from hardening into fanaticism. Humility was the recognition of human frailty. Compassion was the willingness to see dignity in others even when the world denies it. Virtue in this sense was not bland compromise. It was a way of holding together the contradictions of human life without pretending they can be abolished.

The relevance is not distant. Elites govern and answer only to each other. Platforms regulate speech for billions and remain opaque. Finance bends nations to its will. These are our Hastingses. And yet the loudest cries against elites often conceal darker ambitions. Populist leaders dismantle institutions in the name of the people while concentrating power in themselves.

The danger of polarisation is the illusion of purity. A politics incapable of seeing another’s humanity. A politics that imagines the world neatly divided into saints and sinners, friends and enemies.

The language of virtue itself is often hijacked. Some wield sacred texts as weapons, enforcing laws so severe that no ordinary life could bear them. Others cloak themselves in the rhetoric of justice yet demand a purity of agreement that leaves no room for doubt or forgiveness. In both cases, virtue becomes performance. Compassion is staged. Conscience is traded for the thrill of exclusion. What passes for clarity is only cruelty. And cruelty is most dangerous when it masquerades as virtue.

François de La Rochefoucauld once observed, “Virtues are lost in self-interest as rivers are lost in the sea.” The image arrests. The river does not become the sea. It disappears into it, losing shape, name, and identity. So virtue must remain distinct from self-interest if it is to endure. It is not a badge for public display but a current within, resisting co-option even when thunderous voices claim to speak in its name.

Burke and Dostoevsky left us their warnings. Politics cannot be built on abstractions. Nor on the intoxication of power. Nor on the rage of the crowd. It must be rooted in virtue, in humility before human frailty and reverence for human dignity. Extremes promise certainty but yield only destruction. Virtue, in its patience and restraint, is the harder path. Yet it is the only one that endures.

It is easy to pass Burke’s statue in Dublin without noticing. Perhaps that is fitting. As our world slides deeper into polarisation, his silent presence still reminds us of something simple. Politics worthy of human beings begins with virtue. Without it, freedom has no ground on which to stand.