Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke was an Irish-born writer and politician who sat in the British House of Commons for almost thirty years. A Whig who defended the American colonists and attacked the abuses of British rule in Ireland and India, he is remembered above all for his Reflections on the Revolution in France of 1790, a sustained warning against rebuilding society on abstract principles. That book made him the founding figure of modern conservatism, although his career fits awkwardly into any single party label.

Burke was born in Dublin on 12 January 1729, the date most often given, though even the year has been disputed. His father was a prosperous attorney in the Church of Ireland, who may have converted from Catholicism to keep his profession, and his mother came from a Catholic family in County Cork. Burke himself was raised an Anglican, but his Catholic relatives and the harsh penal laws against Catholics in Ireland shaped his sympathies for life.

After a Quaker boarding school at Ballitore, he studied at Trinity College Dublin from 1744 to 1748, where he founded a debating club. In 1750 he moved to London to train in law at the Middle Temple, but he soon abandoned the law for literature.

His first book, A Vindication of Natural Society of 1756, was a satire mocking the idea that society could be judged and dismissed by pure reason. The next year he published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. It distinguished between beauty, which pleases through smallness, smoothness and harmony, and the sublime, the thrill of awe we feel before vast, dark or dangerous things, such as storms, mountains or great power. The book was widely read across Europe and influenced Romantic art and the aesthetics of Immanuel Kant.

In 1757 he married Jane Nugent, daughter of a Catholic physician, and from 1758 he edited the Annual Register, a yearly survey of politics and literature. He joined the circle of Samuel Johnson and the painter Joshua Reynolds and came to know Adam Smith, with whom he shared a broad support for free trade.

In 1765 Burke became private secretary to the Marquess of Rockingham, leader of a group of Whigs, and entered the House of Commons. In Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents of 1770 he defended political parties as honourable groups of people united by shared principles, at a time when many saw them as mere factions, and criticised the influence of George III's court over Parliament.

During the crisis that led to the American Revolution, Burke urged conciliation. In great speeches on American taxation in 1774 and on conciliation in 1775 he argued that Britain should not insist on its abstract right to tax the colonies when doing so would drive them away; practical wisdom and the colonists' inherited English liberties mattered more than legal theory. Elected for Bristol in 1774, he told the voters that an MP owed them his judgement, not obedience to their instructions, a classic statement of representative government. His support for freer trade with Ireland and relief for Catholics cost him the seat in 1780, and he later sat for Malton.

Burke spent much of the 1780s on the government of India, where the East India Company ruled Bengal and wider territories in India. Convinced that the Company had plundered and oppressed the people in its charge, he led the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the former governor-general of Bengal, before the House of Lords. The trial opened in 1788 with speeches by Burke lasting days, and dragged on until 1795, when Hastings was acquitted. Burke regarded the campaign as the most important work of his life; it rested on his belief that power exercised over other peoples must answer to the same moral law as power at home.

When the French Revolution broke out in 1789, many British Whigs and radicals welcomed it as a French version of England's Glorious Revolution of 1688. Burke disagreed sharply. His Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in November 1790 in response to a sermon by the Dissenting minister Richard Price, argued that 1688 had been a limited act to preserve an inherited constitution, whereas the French were tearing down every institution in the name of abstract rights.

His central idea was that society is a partnership between the living, the dead and those yet to be born. Institutions such as monarchy, the church, property and custom contain the accumulated wisdom of generations, much of it unspoken, and no single generation is clever enough to redesign them from first principles. Reform should be gradual, mending what is broken while keeping what works. Rights, for Burke, are real, but they are the concrete inherited liberties of a particular people rather than universal rules derived by reason. He predicted that the Revolution would destroy liberty, fall into violence and end in military dictatorship, a forecast many readers later thought confirmed by the Terror and the rise of Napoleon. A famous passage lamented the treatment of Marie Antoinette and the passing of the age of chivalry.

The book provoked a flood of replies, the most famous by Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine, whose Rights of Man defended the Revolution and popular sovereignty. Burke broke publicly with his old friend Charles James Fox in the Commons in 1791, and his followers drifted towards the government of William Pitt.

Burke retired from Parliament in 1794. The death of his only son, Richard, that year devastated him. In his final writings, the Letters on a Regicide Peace, he opposed any compromise with revolutionary France. He died at his estate near Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, on 9 July 1797.

Burke was not a systematic philosopher, and scholars still argue over how far his thought hangs together, between the reformer who defended Americans, Irish Catholics and Indians and the opponent of revolution. Many see a common thread in his distrust of arbitrary power, whether of kings, companies or revolutionary assemblies, and his preference for experience over theory. Nineteenth-century liberals such as Gladstone admired him, and twentieth-century conservatives in Britain and the United States adopted him as their intellectual ancestor. Within Enlightenment thought, he stands as its most influential internal critic.