Richard Bourke

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN

HONORARY CONFERRING

Friday, 9 December 2022 at 11 am

TEXT OF THE INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS DELIVERED BY PROFESSOR BRIAN O’CONNOR, UCD School of Philosophy on 9 December 2022, on the occasion of the conferring of the Degree of Doctor of Arts, honoris causa on Richard E. Bourke.

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Acting President, Colleagues, UCD Graduates recent and of longer standing, and all our Guests, it is my great privilege to set out the accomplishments of Richard Bourke to whom the University will today award an honorary doctorate.

Richard Bourke is Professor of the History of Political Thought, and Fellow in History and Politics at King’s College, Cambridge, positions he has held since 2019. Among his many honours is Fellowship of the British Academy.

Richard Bourke was born in Dublin in 1965. After attending the St. Killian’s Deutsche Schule that adjoins this campus he enrolled at UCD where he enjoyed exceptional success as an undergraduate, being awarded in 1986 a double first degree in English Literature and Philosophy. From UCD followed a brief yet prize-winning period at the University of Oxford before he turned to Cambridge for a PhD at the Faculty of English which he gained at the remarkable age of 25.

His prodigious doctoral thesis on William Wordsworth was subsequently published as Romantic Discourse and Political Modernity. This may be the book of a young man, but it exhibits the vibrancy and insight of an uncommonly fine intellect for which a distinguished future might easily have been foreseen.

Through an extraordinary series of learned papers in the years following, Professor Bourke, then a lecturer, later professor at Queen Mary University of London, gained the regard of many of the greatest minds in the academic domains of political thought and intellectual history. Quentin Skinner admires Professor Bourke for ‘the sheer rapidity as well as the trenchancy of his thought’ and also ‘the confidence and courage of his stance to the world, his refusal to go along with merely fashionable beliefs, his insistence on always thinking and judging for himself’. With equal esteem Raymond Geuss writes of Professor Bourke’s ‘extremely wide scholarship, erudition, sheer innate intelligence, sense of proportion, and his genuinely humanistic approach to the study of history and politics’.

His landmark publication to date is a monumental study of the political thinker and politician, Edmund Burke. The book, Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke, has received numerous accolades and secured Professor Bourke’s standing as his generation’s leading historian of political ideas. It is marked out by its scholarly and conceptual brilliance, and, as a masterpiece of contextual precision, surpasses any other work in the field. The analysis is unflinching yet sympathetic, unwilling to settle the complexities of a life or a time with narratives that might spare us the opportunity to be disconcerted.

Shortly to appear is Hegel’s World Revolutions. In this hugely anticipated work, Professor Bourke, with characteristic thoroughness and finesse, takes to task those many theorists who have distorted Hegel’s intricate position by identifying him with only single lines of his comprehensively articulated dialectics of modernity.

A thread that brings unity of enquiry to these three great studies – of Wordsworth, Burke, and Hegel – is the response across Europe to the revolution in France. Professor Bourke’s work has been absorbed by the question of how a philosophical politics – be it Wordsworth’s comforting romanticism, Burke’s justification of a progressive but recognizable social order, or Hegel’s thesis about the rationality of historically evolved institutions – emerges from a direct confrontation with the cataclysmic subversion of government. Professor Bourke’s approach to these topics has been transformative. A phrase from Coleridge we find in Professor Bourke’s work might well apply to him: no one among his contemporaries, has ‘ever read history as philosophically’.

That ability is in evidence too in his many publications on aspects of Irish political history. Dr. Hussein Omar from UCD’s School of History observes that Professor Bourke’s ‘contributions to Irish history and historiography are no less impressive’ than his work in intellectual history, and, as Dr Omar continues, ‘some of his most exciting work bridges the two fields – which rarely meet – in subtle and unexpected ways’. Of particular note, not least in view of today’s reheated but not insignificant discussions on the future of this island, is his ground-breaking book, Peace In Ireland: The War of Ideas whose first edition appeared as far back as 2003. Avoiding the safety of working ‘at the periphery of the social apparatus’, to borrow one of his phrases, Professor Bourke manages to bring nerveless academic rigour to the public sphere.

He embodies the practices of intellectual curiosity and thoroughness and serves as an exemplar for anyone who believes – as I am sure all the new graduates assembled here do – that we are entitled to look beneath the surfaces of what culture and society have to offer. We must be prepared to discover the unexpected or the inconvenient at the cost of unsettling ourselves personally, and for that, as Richard Bourke repeatedly demonstrates, fearlessness is required.

We should also dare, like Professor Bourke, to mould our intellectual efforts to the matter in hand, to respond to what is under investigation in the ways demanded by what needs to be understood. This too is bravery, a willingness to renew oneself as an enquirer time and time again.

University College Dublin has a considerable history of educating those with a fascination for culture, and who innovatively bring together what they have found in literature, history, philosophy or social theory. Today we take great pleasure in honouring Professor Richard Bourke, one of the very most distinguished of this long invaluable tradition..

Praehonorabilis Praeses Pro Tempore, totaque Universitas,

Praesento vobis hunc meum filium, quem scio tam moribus quam doctrina habilem et idoneum esse qui admittatur, honoris causa, ad Gradum Doctoratus in Artibus; idque tibi fide mea testor ac spondeo, totique Academiae.