Burke in the 21st century: another Age of Revolution? Michael Ignatieff gives the first Trinity Long Room Hub Edmund Burke Lecture since 2019 October saw the return of the annual Edmund Burke Lecture for the first time in three years. Many of Trinity’s annual events and lectures went online during the pandemic and lockdown but the Edmund Burke Lecture demands to be given in the eponymous theatre, the largest in college, to an enormous audience. It’s the most prestigious humanities lecture in the Trinity calendar - all the speakers, since the launch of the series in 2014, have been leading public intellectuals: Baroness Onora O’Neill, Paul Muldoon, Margaret Macmillan, Robert Fisk, Roy Foster, Mary MacAleese and this year’s speaker, Michael Ignatieff, a historian who served as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Leader of the Official Opposition from 2008 to 2011. The lecture was established by the Fallon family in honour of Trinity graduate Padraic Fallon (1946- 2012) who pioneered a new type of financial journalism. The remit of the lecture is to keep Burke’s astonishing intellectual legacy alive by providing a forum for distinguished thinkers to engage with challenging contemporary issues, explicitly recalling Burke’s deep engagement with the issues of revolution and empire that dominated his day. Burke, whose statue flanks Front Arch, has the distinction, as a political thinker, of being claimed by all sides - conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats - and not because he was ‘all things to all men’ but because of his exceptional independence of mind and clarity of thought. Everyone wants Burke on their side but he cannot be easily shoe-horned. In an interview with the Irish Times ahead of his lecture, this year’s speaker, Michael Ignatieff got across Burke’s subtlety: ‘He is the greatest 18th century thinker about the problem of political violence because he supports the Glorious Revolution of 1688 [in England] and he approves of the 1776 Revolution [in America] but he thinks of the French Revolution of 1789 and the revolt of the United Irishman in 1790s as an abomination. How do you explain that?’ The Edmund Burke Lecture is always compelling, often provocative. One recalls Roy Foster giving the 2018 lecture, comparing the 1916 revolutionaries to jihadists. For this year’s lecture, titled ‘Democracy and the Legacy of Revolutionary Violence’, Ignatieff tackled the question of how democracies with a revolutionary heritage manage their historical memory of foundational violence. Noting that ‘Revolutions have given us the democracies we cherish, but their birth was always bloody’, he observed that ‘Revolutions, then and now, may also be unavoidable, even necessary - a last resort when all else fails, especially when democratic leadership fails to respond to the challenges of change.’ Professor Eve Patton, Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub which manages the Edmund Burke Lecture, noted that ‘Michael Ignatieff’s chosen topic for the Burke Lecture was entirely apposite for an Ireland currently reflecting on the violent cradling of the modern Irish state a century ago, and pertinent to numerous crises across the contemporary world landscape.’ Ignatieff ended on a question, asking whether we are, once again, as Burke was in his lifetime, in an Age of Revolution?
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