It Really Doesn’t Even Sound Like Burke

Charli Carpenter at Duck:

My quote, attributed to Edmund Burke, read “the only thing necessary for the persistence of evil is for good people to do nothing.” It is commonly quoted by human rights scholars and activists to caution against the bystander effect.

Porter’s essay, replete with exhaustive sources from multiple websites, is a genealogy of the use of this supposed Burkeism, but Porter concludes form his analysis that Burke never actually wrote anything like this.

I’m kind of surprised it took this long. The persistence of evil line doesn’t strike me as Burkean at all; it’s true enough that he supported certain kinds of activism (American Revolution, efforts to strangle the French Revolution), but there’s also such a large and clear strand in his thought that suggests that evil is caused by good people trying to do something, without a well-thought out conception of what that something should be.