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'''Edmund Burke''' an Irish statesman, orator and political writer (1729-1797), who served for many years in the British Parliament and became the most influential defender of ordered liberty and gradual reform against the claims of revolutionary politics. His Reflections on the Revolution in France is a founding text of modern conservative thought.

== Early Life and Letters ==
Edmund Burke was born in Dublin on 12 January 1729, the son of a Protestant attorney and a Catholic mother, a mixed inheritance that gave him a lifelong sympathy for the claims of religious minorities and a practical understanding of the dangers of intolerance. He was educated at a Quaker school at Ballitore and then at Trinity College, Dublin, where he distinguished himself in classics, history and oratory. In 1750 he moved to London to study law at the Middle Temple, but he soon abandoned the profession of the bar for the uncertain life of letters that suited his talents far better.

His first major work, A Vindication of Natural Society, appeared in 1756 and was read by many as a serious argument while actually being a satire upon the reasoning of Lord Bolingbroke, whose deism and political scepticism Burke wished to undermine by carrying them to absurd conclusions. In the same year he published his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, a treatise on aesthetics that influenced later thinking about taste and the emotions and won him a place among the writers of his age.

He married Jane Nugent in 1756 and began a career of literary work and political connection that would occupy the rest of his life. He edited the Annual Register, a yearly survey of public affairs that required him to master the events of Europe and America, and he became private secretary to the Marquess of Rockingham, a Whig leader whose patronage opened the way to a seat in Parliament, which he obtained in 1765 for the borough of Wendover and held, with intervals, for nearly three decades of turbulent and memorable public service.

== Parliamentary Career ==
Burke entered the House of Commons at a time of conflict over the American colonies, and he soon established himself as a formidable debater and a master of the great political questions of the day. He argued for conciliation with America, holding that the colonists were entitled to the traditional rights of Englishmen and that the attempt to tax them without their consent was both unjust and imprudent, and he warned that the policy of coercion would drive them toward a separation from the mother country that no subsequent measure could repair.

In his speeches on American taxation and on conciliation with the colonies he set out a philosophy of empire founded upon consent and commercial interest rather than mere force. He maintained that the prosperity of the empire depended upon the willing attachment of its parts, and that the art of government lay in adapting its measures to the temper and circumstances of a people rather than in imposing a uniform rule upon them from London. His warnings went unheeded, and the war that followed ended in the loss of the American colonies and in a lasting lesson upon the limits of force.

He later took up the cause of Ireland, where he sought relief for Catholic disabilities and an end to the corrupt management of that kingdom, and the cause of India, where he conducted a long and celebrated impeachment of Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of Bengal, on charges of corruption and abuse of power. The trial occupied years and ended in acquittal, but Burke's speeches on the subject remain among the most powerful indictments of imperial misgovernment ever delivered and shaped the later language of colonial responsibility and of the duties of a ruling power toward those it governs.

== Reflections on the Revolution ==
The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 provoked Burke to write the work for which he is chiefly remembered. Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, attacked the revolutionary experiment at its foundations, before the worst excesses of the Terror had supplied his critics with their strongest arguments. He denied that a nation could be rebuilt at will upon abstract principles, and he defended the inherited arrangements of a society as the product of long experience and accumulated practical wisdom that no single generation could safely discard.

He argued that society is a partnership not only between the living but between the dead, the living and those yet to be born, and that rights are bound up with duties and with the particular circumstances of a people. He predicted that the confiscation of property and the assault upon religion would lead not to liberty but to military despotism, a prophecy whose fulfilment during the Terror lent his book extraordinary authority and made it a text studied by statesmen of every later generation and a warning against the seductions of abstract and uncompromising political theory.

The Reflections provoked a pamphlet war, and among the most notable replies were those of Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, who defended the principles of natural right that Burke had derided. His book was read throughout Europe and helped to crystallise the division between those who saw the Revolution as the dawn of reason and those who saw it as a threat to civilisation. It gave to later conservatism much of its vocabulary, its temper and its sense of the value of prescription, inheritance and the settled customs of a people.

== The Sublime, the Beautiful and the Moral Order ==
Burke's early treatise on aesthetics distinguished the sublime from the beautiful and traced both to the operation of the passions. The sublime he associated with terror, vastness, obscurity and power, and the beautiful with smallness, smoothness, delicacy and the pleasure of social affection, and he argued that these two principles govern the whole of our response to art and to nature. This analysis of the emotions influenced the romantic movement and the theory of art for generations, and it remains a landmark in the philosophical study of taste and feeling.

His moral and political philosophy rested upon a belief in a providential order and in the value of prescription, the claim of long usage. He held that political wisdom consists less in the discovery of abstract rights than in the prudent application of general principles to the circumstances of time and place, and that the statesman must reckon with the habits, the prejudices and the settled sentiments of the people he governs, since these are the ground upon which any lasting reform must build and the soil in which alone it can take root.

He combined a deep respect for tradition with a practical zeal for reform, and he insisted that the two were not enemies but partners in the improvement of society. He worked for the abolition of the slave trade, for the relief of oppressed religious minorities, for economy in the management of the royal household and for the purification of the administration, showing by his own career that a defender of established order could also be an energetic and compassionate advocate of humane measures and of the claims of the poor and the powerless.

== Influence and Reputation ==
Burke died at Beaconsfield on 9 July 1797, leaving behind a body of speeches and writings that shaped the political thought of the English-speaking world. His speeches were admired as models of oratory, and his pamphlets were read by statesmen and students of politics in Britain, America and the continent. He had declined to be a mere party man, and he sometimes stood apart from his friends and his constituents when principle required it, giving to the theory of representation a dignity that outlasted his own day and a conception of the legislator as a trustee rather than a delegate.

His ideas proved fertile in many traditions. Liberals found in him a defence of constitutional government, of the rights of free citizens and of the accountability of power, while conservatives found in him a profound statement of the value of tradition, order and gradual reform. His warning against the pursuit of abstract perfection in politics has been invoked in every generation since his death, and his name has become a shorthand for a certain sober and unsentimental wisdom that prefers the tried to the untried and the possible to the perfect.

He is remembered as one of the greatest political thinkers and orators in the English language, and as the founder of a tradition of reflection upon the limits of reason in politics. His eloquence, his learning and his moral seriousness gave to the cause of ordered liberty a permanent statement that continues to be studied and contested, and his name remains inseparable from the defence of society against the excesses of revolution and despotism alike, a defence that he conducted with courage and with a profound sympathy for the weak and the oppressed.

== See also ==
* Reflections on the Revolution in France
* Whig party
* French Revolution
* Political conservatism

== References ==

<ref name="r1">Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, J. Dodsley, 1790.</ref>
<ref name="r2">Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, R. and J. Dodsley, 1757.</ref>
<ref name="r3">Conor Cruise O'Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke, University of Chicago Press, 1992.</ref>
<ref name="r4">F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke, Oxford University Press, 1998-2006.</ref>

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[[Category:Political science]]
[[Category:Philosophy]]
[[Category:England]]

Edmund Burke - Revision history

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