The Anglo-Irish statesman and political thinker whose Reflections on the Revolution in France founded modern conservatism, whose speeches on American conciliation, Indian affairs, and parliamentary reform defined the role of the Whig statesman, and whose theory of prescription and prejudice answered the rationalist politics of the Enlightenment.
burke
Anglo-Irish statesman, orator, and political thinker (1729–1797) whose Reflections on the Revolution in France founded modern conservative political thought, whose decades in Parliament addressed American, Indian, and Irish questions with sustained moral seriousness, and whose theory of the political tradition shaped Anglo-American conservatism from the nineteenth century to the present.
Life
Edmund Burke was born on 12 January 1729 in Dublin, the son of a Protestant attorney and a Catholic mother — a religious mixed marriage that placed the family on a careful line between the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy and the disenfranchised Catholic majority. The biographical detail mattered for his lifelong commitment to Catholic relief in Ireland and to Irish causes generally.
He entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1744 at fifteen, completed his B.A. in 1748, and moved to London in 1750 ostensibly to train at the Middle Temple as a barrister. The legal training was abandoned almost immediately for a literary career; Burke produced in quick succession his first three works: A Vindication of Natural Society (1756, an ironic satire on Bolingbroke's deistic mode that some early readers took at face value), A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757, an aesthetic treatise that established his reputation and was later read seriously by Kant in the Critique of the Power of Judgment), and the launch of the Annual Register in 1758, the annual political-historical review of which he was the principal editor for many years.
The political career began in 1765 as private secretary to the Marquess of Rockingham, then forming his first ministry. Through Rockingham's patronage, Burke entered Parliament in 1766 as member for Wendover. He held a parliamentary seat — for Wendover, then Bristol (1774–80), then Malton — continuously for the next twenty-eight years, until 1794, three years before his death.
The Rockingham connection defined the political position. The Rockingham Whigs were the heir to the older Whig tradition: aristocratic, constitutionalist, attached to the parliamentary settlement of 1688, opposed to the personal influence of George III and the secret royal patronage that Burke regarded as a corruption of the constitution. The political program Burke articulated in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770) made the systematic defense of party itself — a coordinated group of statesmen acting on shared principles — against the older view of party as a disreputable faction.
The parliamentary work for the next two decades addressed the four great questions of the period: American policy (Burke advocated conciliation in the famous speeches on American Taxation, 1774, and Conciliation with the Colonies, 1775); Irish trade and Catholic relief (Burke supported relaxation of trade restrictions and removal of Catholic legal disabilities, positions costly to him politically); the East India Company and the conduct of British power in India (Burke led the prosecution of Warren Hastings, the former Governor-General of Bengal, in the impeachment trial that lasted from 1788 to 1795, during which Burke composed some of his most sustained moral oratory on the abuse of power); and parliamentary economic reform (Burke succeeded in 1782 in reducing the corrupting patronage of the crown by reorganizing the civil list and abolishing certain sinecures).
The French Revolution broke out in summer 1789. Most of Burke's Whig colleagues and friends — Charles James Fox, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the younger Pitt — initially welcomed it as a French version of the English Revolution of 1688. Burke, almost alone among English politicians, immediately read the events as fundamentally different in character and direction. The break came publicly with the publication of Reflections on the Revolution in France in November 1790, which split the Whig party permanently and ended Burke's close friendships with Fox and others.
The last years were marked by Burke's increasing intensity on the French question, the death of his only son Richard in 1794 (an emotional loss Burke never recovered from), and the political agitation of his late Letters on a Regicide Peace (1795–97) against the proposed accommodation with the French Directory. He died on 9 July 1797 at his estate at Beaconsfield, aged 68, of stomach cancer.
The Reflections
Reflections on the Revolution in France was prompted by a Unitarian minister, Richard Price, who in a November 1789 sermon at the Old Jewry meeting house had celebrated the French Revolution as an extension of English liberties and proposed three principles — the right to choose our governors, to cashier them for misconduct, and to frame a government for ourselves — as English constitutional rights validated by both 1688 and 1789. Burke wrote initially as a letter to a French correspondent, expanded the manuscript through 1790, and published the finished work on 1 November 1790. It sold 30,000 copies within a year, generated the largest political controversy of the decade in England, and provoked the most replies that defined modern radical political thought — Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1791–92) and Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) most notably.
The argument of the Reflections proceeds on several lines. Burke rejects Price's reading of 1688 as the establishment of any general right to choose governors; he reads the English Revolution as a careful conservative restoration of inherited liberties through hereditary succession. He attacks the French revolutionary doctrine of natural rights abstractly conceived — not because Burke denies natural rights (he does not), but because abstract rights detached from political tradition, social attachment, and prudential judgment cannot inform actual politics. "The rights of men in governments are their advantages," Burke writes, "and these are often in balances between differences of good, in compromises sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil."
The positive doctrine: political community is the inheritance of generations, an entail upon descendants from ancestors. "Society is indeed a contract," Burke writes in the famous passage, "but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco... It is to be looked on with other reverence, because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."
The critique of revolutionary politics that follows is sustained: revolutions destroy in moments what generations have built and cannot be reconstructed quickly; the destruction of the clergy, nobility, and inherited corporate bodies leaves the individual face to face with the abstract state; the assignats and confiscations destabilize property and credit; the philosophes who supplied the intellectual ammunition lacked the practical political experience to anticipate consequences; the revolution will end in military despotism. The last prediction — published in 1790, when the Bourbon monarchy was still nominally functioning — was largely vindicated by the rise of Napoleon nine years later.
The Political Thought
Burke's political thought, dispersed across speeches and writings rather than concentrated in a treatise, has been reconstructed by modern scholarship into the systematic position now called Burkean conservatism (an anachronistic label, since Burke was a Whig and never used "conservative" as a party designation, but a substantively defensible one).
Three principles structure the position. Prescription: long-established institutions and rights derive legitimacy from their endurance, on the inference that what has persisted has demonstrated its adequacy to the requirements of human life. The argument is not that what is old is therefore good but that the long survival of an institution is evidence of accumulated wisdom not transparent to any individual examining it from outside.
Prejudice: not in the modern pejorative sense, but the inherited pre-judgments by which ordinary people navigate political and moral life. Burke defends prejudice against the rationalist demand that every belief be reconstructed from first principles by individual reflection; he argues that what reason achieves slowly and uncertainly, prejudice gives in advance and reliably, and that no political society can function on the assumption that its members will reason out their commitments anew.
Prudence: the practical political virtue of judgment in concrete cases, which abstract principles can guide but cannot replace. Burke is a sustained polemicist against the application of geometric or abstract reasoning to politics; the appropriate political knowledge is the practical wisdom of the experienced statesman, working from the historical materials he inherits, attentive to the consequences his measures will actually produce.
The theological coloration is not Catholic (Burke remained Anglican) but recognizably influenced by the natural-law tradition. The constitutional inheritance is providential; political authority derives ultimately from God; the statesman is a trustee of an order he has not made and is bound to transmit. Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind (1953) made the case for Burke as the founder of the Anglo-American conservative tradition; J. G. A. Pocock's Politics, Language, and Time (Cambridge University Press, 1971) and The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton University Press, 1975) located Burke in the longer civic-republican and common-law traditions. Recent significant studies include David Bromwich's The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke (Harvard University Press, 2014) and Yuval Levin's The Great Debate (Basic Books, 2014).
The Speeches
Burke's parliamentary oratory was extensive and is, in collected form, more than half of his surviving writing. The major speeches: on American Taxation (1774), on Conciliation with the Colonies (1775), to the Electors of Bristol (1774, defending the doctrine that the member of parliament represents the nation as a whole rather than his particular constituency), on Mr. Fox's East India Bill (1783), on the Nabob of Arcot's Debts (1785), the opening speech of the impeachment of Warren Hastings (1788, lasting four days). The speech form, characteristic of late eighteenth-century parliamentary practice, allowed sustained argumentative development of issues for an audience of fellow legislators rather than a popular audience — the resulting prose is more deliberative than rhetorical, more closely reasoned than oratorically constructed.
Reception
Burke's reception was sharply divided in his own time and has remained so. The radical and liberal traditions, from Paine through John Stuart Mill, treated him as the great defender of inherited privilege against rational reform. The conservative tradition, taking shape in the early nineteenth century around figures like Joseph de Maistre on the Continent and the British Tories Coleridge, Southey, and later Disraeli, claimed him as a founding patron. The historical-school theorists of the nineteenth century — Friedrich Carl von Savigny in German jurisprudence, the English common-law tradition through Maine — inherited Burke's emphasis on the wisdom embedded in inherited institutions.
In the twentieth century, the rediscovery of Burke as a political philosopher took place in the United States under Russell Kirk, Peter Stanlis, and the conservative intellectual movement of the 1950s, and in the Anglophone academy through Pocock, Conor Cruise O'Brien (whose The Great Melody, 1992, is an extended biographical and political essay), and others. The Liberty Fund edition of Burke's selected writings (12 vols., based on the earlier Bohn and World's Classics editions) and the Oxford Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke under the general editorship of Paul Langford (9 vols. projected, since 1981) are the principal scholarly resources.
Significance
Burke's significance has three dimensions. As founder of modern conservatism, the Reflections provided the foundational text of a political tradition that has continuously developed in Britain, the United States, and continental Europe for over two centuries. As parliamentary orator, he set the standard of moral seriousness in legislative debate against which subsequent practice has been judged. As political theorist of the inherited constitution, he provided the most articulate counter-position to the rationalist political philosophy of the Enlightenment — a counter-position not of throne-and-altar reaction but of constitutional Whiggism integrating natural law, parliamentary practice, and the wisdom of historical institutions.