As even the most junior Burke scholar knows, the master divided motive into three parts and arranged the parts in a hierarchy suspended between Heaven and Hell. As always, Burke numbered and named the beast. He called the three kinds of motives, the personal, the categorical and the generic. Burke uses the work of Milton to cast light on the nature of motive. For Burke, Milton begins in highly personal fury, ascends through party spirit with the cold craft of a warrior chieftain, and finally goes generic in framing his rebuke of Samson as an attack on the wicked principle of monarchy.
Murderous hatred is elevated to a ritual purification of the political order.
2 Let us consider Burke's favorite target, a person who dominates every major university at the close of this turbulent century, the entrepreneurial scientist. After the death of his old left idols in the murderous farm collectivization, Burke abandoned his 1930's stereotype of the American Capitalist and found a new and more sinister villain, the Cold War Scientist. The Dynamism of Motives Burke's motive names the full range of the action. Why or Purpose of an action. Sociologically, they continue, a motive is a term in a vocabulary which appears to the actor and to the observer to be an adequate reason for his conduct.