Edmund Burke

Based on Wikipedia: Edmund Burke

In 1790, as revolutionary fervor swept through France and crowds celebrated the storming of the Bastille, one prominent British politician saw something different. Where others saw liberation, Edmund Burke saw the seeds of chaos. His prediction proved eerily accurate: within three years, France would descend into the Reign of Terror, and the very revolutionaries who toppled a king would turn their guillotines on each other.

Burke didn't have a crystal ball. He had a philosophy—one that would make him the unlikely godfather of modern conservatism.

The Outsider Who Shaped British Politics

Edmund Burke was born in Dublin on January 12, 1729, into a household that straddled Ireland's religious divide. His father Richard was an Anglican solicitor, a profession that required membership in the established Church of Ireland. His mother Mary came from a Catholic family in County Cork, cousin to Nano Nagle, who would become one of Ireland's most beloved educators.

This split mattered enormously in eighteenth-century Ireland. Catholics faced what were called the Penal Laws—a web of restrictions that barred them from voting, holding office, owning substantial property, or practicing law. Burke followed his father's faith, remaining Anglican throughout his life. But his enemies would forever whisper that he harbored secret Catholic sympathies, accusing him of having been secretly educated at a Jesuit college in France.

The accusations were false. Burke himself noted the irony: though he'd visited Paris twice, he'd never even passed through the town where this alleged Catholic education supposedly took place.

What Burke did receive was an education in multiple worlds. He spent childhood summers away from Dublin's polluted air, staying with his mother's Catholic relatives in County Cork. His formal schooling began at a Quaker school in Ballitore, about forty miles from Dublin, where he formed a lifelong friendship with Mary Leadbeater, the headmaster's daughter. Then came Trinity College Dublin, the Protestant establishment that didn't even allow Catholics to take degrees until 1793.

The Writer Becomes a Politician

Burke's father wanted him to become a lawyer. So in 1750, the young Irishman dutifully traveled to London and enrolled at the Middle Temple, one of the Inns of Court where aspiring barristers trained. He promptly abandoned legal study to travel through Continental Europe instead.

What followed was a literary career that would have satisfied most ambitious writers. In 1756, Burke published his first work—a satirical piece called "A Vindication of Natural Society." The book mocked the late Lord Bolingbroke, a philosopher who had championed what was called deistic rationalism, essentially the idea that human reason alone, without religious revelation, could discover all necessary truths about God and morality.

Burke found this ridiculous. So he wrote a devastating parody, imitating Bolingbroke's style so perfectly that several prominent readers, including Lord Chesterfield, initially believed Bolingbroke himself had written it from beyond the grave. Burke had to add a preface to the second edition explaining that yes, it was satire.

The following year brought Burke's only purely philosophical work: "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful." This treatise on aesthetics—the philosophy of beauty and artistic experience—caught the attention of major European thinkers, including Denis Diderot in France and Immanuel Kant in Germany. When friends asked Burke to expand it thirty years later, he declined. He was no longer fit for abstract speculation, he said. Politics had claimed him.

Burke also launched the Annual Register, a publication that reviewed the previous year's international political events. He served as chief editor until at least 1789, though determining exactly how much he personally wrote remains difficult.

Into the Arena

In December 1765, Burke entered Parliament as Member for Wendover, a pocket borough in Buckinghamshire. A pocket borough was a parliamentary constituency controlled by a single patron—in this case, Lord Fermanagh. The patron essentially chose who would "represent" the district, regardless of what ordinary residents might think.

Burke's maiden speech made an immediate impression. William Pitt the Elder, one of the era's dominant political figures, declared that Burke had "spoken in such a manner as to stop the mouths of all Europe" and that the House of Commons should congratulate itself on acquiring such a member.

The new parliamentarian quickly attracted controversy. He purchased Gregories, a six-hundred-acre estate near Beaconsfield, mostly with borrowed money. The estate included artwork by Titian but proved financially ruinous. Burke never managed to pay off the purchase price. Meanwhile, his speeches and writings had made him famous enough that some suspected him of secretly authoring the Letters of Junius, a series of anonymous political attacks that scandalized London society.

Burke denied authorship—correctly, as far as historians can determine—but he couldn't escape the celebrity. He joined the circle of intellectuals surrounding Samuel Johnson, the era's literary lion, whose friends also included the actor David Garrick, the poet Oliver Goldsmith, and the painter Joshua Reynolds. The historian Edward Gibbon offered a memorable assessment of Burke: "the most eloquent and rational madman that I ever knew."

Johnson, while admiring Burke's brilliance, found him a dishonest politician. The two men could apparently agree on literature while disagreeing on matters of state.

The American Question

The first great subject Burke tackled was the mounting crisis with the American colonies. His position defied simple categorization. He sympathized with the colonists. He criticized British taxation policies. He believed the colonists had every right to resist metropolitan authority.

But he opposed American independence.

This wasn't contradiction—it was consistency. Burke believed in traditional liberties and gradual reform, not radical breaks with the past. He wanted Britain to treat the colonies justly, within the existing framework of empire. Severing that framework entirely was precisely the kind of revolutionary rupture he distrusted.

In 1769, surveying French finances in a pamphlet responding to critics, Burke predicted "some extraordinary convulsion in that whole system." Twenty years later, that convulsion would arrive and transform his political legacy.

Bristol and the Meaning of Representation

In November 1774, Burke won election as Member for Bristol—at the time England's second city, with a genuine electoral contest rather than a pocket borough's predetermined outcome. His acceptance speech became a landmark in political philosophy.

The question was simple: what does a representative owe his constituents? One view held that a member of Parliament should vote however his constituents instructed him—what Burke called the "constituent-imperative form of democracy." Burke rejected this completely.

A representative, he argued, owes constituents his judgment, not merely his obedience. Parliament should be a deliberative assembly for the whole nation, not a congress of ambassadors from hostile districts, each advocating only for local interests. A representative who sacrificed his judgment to constituent opinion didn't serve them—he betrayed them.

Four years later, Burke demonstrated he meant it. When Bristol's merchants demanded he oppose free trade with Ireland—a position that would benefit Bristol at Ireland's expense—Burke refused. If this cost him their votes, he told them, then let it stand as an example "that one man at least had dared to resist the desires of his constituents when his judgment directed him otherwise."

It did cost him. Burke lost the 1780 election.

The Constitutional Fights

Throughout the 1770s, Burke took leading roles in debates over royal power and constitutional limits. His central argument: unchecked power was dangerous regardless of who wielded it. Kings could abuse their authority. So could parliamentary factions. The solution was political parties maintaining principled opposition, capable of blocking abuses from any quarter.

His 1770 pamphlet "Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents" identified what he called the "Double Cabinet"—a system of secret influence by a neo-Tory group Burke labeled "the king's friends." Britain needed, he argued, a party with "an unshaken adherence to principle, and attachment to connexion, against every allurement of interest."

Party divisions, Burke insisted, "whether operating for good or evil, are things inseparable from free government."

This was not the conventional wisdom of his era. Many eighteenth-century thinkers viewed political parties as corrupt factions—threats to good government rather than essential components of it. Burke helped establish the idea that organized political opposition was legitimate, even necessary.

He also fought for free markets in at least one domain: corn. Speaking in Parliament in November 1770, Burke argued against restricting grain exports. "There are no such things as a high, & a low price that is encouraging, & discouraging," he said. "There is nothing but a natural price, which grain brings at an universal market." Two years later, he helped pass legislation repealing old laws that restricted grain dealers.

Ireland, India, and Catholic Emancipation

Burke never forgot his Irish roots, even as he represented English constituencies. He supported Catholic emancipation—the removal of those Penal Laws that barred Catholics from political life—throughout his career. Given the whispers about his own supposed secret Catholicism, this required courage. Every speech for Catholic rights fed his enemies' suspicions.

His position on Ireland echoed his American stance: colonial subjects deserved justice and traditional liberties, but within existing structures. Reform, not revolution. Gradual improvement, not sudden rupture.

India presented a different challenge. Burke spent years pursuing the impeachment of Warren Hastings, Governor-General of Bengal and the most powerful figure in the British East India Company's operations in South Asia. Burke believed Hastings had committed systematic abuses—extortion, corruption, mistreatment of Indian subjects. The impeachment trial, one of the longest in British history, ultimately ended in acquittal. But Burke had established a principle: British power abroad carried moral obligations.

The Revolution Changes Everything

Then came 1789.

When the French Revolution erupted, British opinion initially divided along predictable lines. Liberals and radicals celebrated. Here was the great experiment—a nation throwing off tyranny, embracing the rights of man, building a new society on rational principles.

Burke saw catastrophe.

His "Reflections on the Revolution in France," published in 1790, became the founding document of modern conservatism. The revolution, Burke argued, wasn't liberating France. It was destroying the fabric of society—the traditional institutions, the inherited wisdom, the gradual accumulations of centuries that made civilized life possible.

The French revolutionaries, intoxicated by abstract principles, were dismantling the Catholic Church, stripping the monarchy of all authority, and replacing organic social bonds with theoretical constructs designed by intellectuals who had never governed anything. Burke predicted this would end in bloodshed and tyranny.

You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you. You set up your trade without a capital.

The capital Burke meant was tradition—the accumulated experience of generations, the unwritten rules and inherited institutions that constrained power and channeled human passions. The French, Burke argued, had thrown it all away in favor of abstract theory. They would learn the cost.

Old Whigs and New Whigs

Burke's attack on the French Revolution split his own party. The Whigs had traditionally opposed royal tyranny and supported constitutional limits on power. Charles James Fox, Burke's longtime ally, saw the revolution as exactly that: another blow against tyranny, this time in France.

Burke saw something entirely different. The French weren't limiting power—they were unleashing it. By destroying all traditional restraints, they had created conditions for the worst tyranny of all: mob rule followed by military dictatorship. The old French monarchy, whatever its faults, had been constrained by church, nobility, regional traditions, and centuries of custom. Revolutionary France had no constraints at all.

The two men broke permanently. Burke dubbed his faction the "Old Whigs"—defenders of traditional English liberty, gradual reform, and inherited institutions. Fox's supporters became the "New Whigs," sympathetic to revolutionary France.

Events vindicated Burke with terrible precision. The Reign of Terror began in 1793. Revolutionary tribunals sent thousands to the guillotine. The revolution devoured its own children, executing the very leaders who had launched it. And in the end, France got exactly what Burke predicted: a military dictator named Napoleon Bonaparte.

The Conservative's Conservative

Burke died on July 9, 1797, having lived long enough to see his French predictions begin coming true but not long enough to witness Napoleon's empire.

His reputation has fluctuated since. In the nineteenth century, both conservatives and liberals claimed him—conservatives for his defense of tradition, liberals for his earlier support of American colonial rights and Irish Catholic emancipation. The twentieth century settled on a clearer verdict: Burke was the philosophical founder of conservatism, at least in the English-speaking world.

His French counterpart in this founding role was Joseph de Maistre, an ultra-royalist who drew even more radical conclusions from the revolutionary chaos. Where Burke wanted to preserve traditional liberties within reformed institutions, de Maistre wanted to restore absolute monarchy and papal authority. The two men shared a horror of revolutionary rationalism but differed on nearly everything else.

What Burke offered, and what modern conservatives still draw upon, was not a defense of any particular institution. It was a method of political reasoning. Distrust abstract principles. Respect inherited wisdom. Remember that society is more complex than any theory can capture. Reform gradually. Never assume you're smarter than centuries of accumulated experience.

The Paradox of Burke

There's something paradoxical about celebrating Burke as conservatism's founder. He spent his career attacking abuses of power—royal overreach in Britain, colonial exploitation in America and India, religious persecution in Ireland. He supported free markets against trade restrictions. He championed political parties against the fiction of nonpartisan government.

Much of this sounds liberal, not conservative.

The resolution lies in understanding what Burke conserved. Not any particular arrangement of power. Not the interests of kings or aristocrats. What Burke defended was the principle of gradual change within traditional frameworks—reform that preserved continuity, improvement that respected inherited institutions.

The French Revolution horrified him precisely because it rejected this principle. The revolutionaries didn't want reform. They wanted Year Zero—a complete break with the past, society redesigned from scratch according to rational principles. Burke saw that this path led to chaos, then tyranny, then the very despotism it claimed to oppose.

He was right about France. Whether his broader philosophy holds true in all circumstances remains debated. But the questions he raised—about the limits of rational planning, the value of inherited institutions, the dangers of revolutionary enthusiasm—remain as urgent now as they were in 1790.

The Circle of Brilliance

One footnote to Burke's life deserves mention: his social world. The London intellectual circle that included Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, and Joshua Reynolds represented perhaps the most concentrated gathering of literary and artistic talent in eighteenth-century Britain.

Burke held his own in this company. Johnson, who didn't suffer fools and frequently said so, acknowledged Burke's brilliance even while questioning his political honesty. Reynolds painted his portrait. Goldsmith and Garrick were friends. Gibbon called him simultaneously eloquent, rational, and mad—the kind of assessment that suggests Burke was never boring.

This matters because Burke was not merely a politician who wrote. He was a genuine intellectual who happened to enter Parliament. His philosophical treatise on beauty and sublimity influenced Kant. His satire fooled sophisticated readers. His speeches set the standard for parliamentary eloquence.

When he turned that intellectual power toward political philosophy, he produced ideas that still shape how conservatives think—and how their opponents respond.

Why Burke Still Matters

Two and a quarter centuries after his death, Burke remains the thinker conservatives invoke when they want to sound thoughtful. This isn't always fair to Burke, whose specific positions often resist simple left-right categorization. But his core insight endures.

Society is not a machine to be redesigned at will. It's an inheritance from countless generations, embodying more accumulated wisdom than any individual or committee can comprehend. Change it, yes—but carefully, gradually, with respect for what exists. Radical transformation destroys more than it creates.

The French revolutionaries learned this through terror and war. Whether later revolutionaries have learned it remains an open question.

Burke would probably say they haven't.