Edmund Burke

1729-1797 · Irish-British · Constitutional Theory, Political Thought, Aesthetics, Rhetoric

Society is a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

Edmund Burke arrived in London in 1750 to read law and abandoned it for letters, then politics — an Irish-born outsider, son of a Protestant father and Catholic mother, who became the greatest parliamentary orator of his age and, eventually, the fiercest critic of the French Revolution in the English-speaking world. Before any of that he wrote a strange and brilliant book, "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful" (1757), which tied the sublime to terror, vastness, and obscurity, and the beautiful to smoothness and delicacy.

Topics Edmund Burke addresses

• the French Revolution
• prescription and prescriptive rights
• prejudice as inherited wisdom
• the sublime and the beautiful
• natural rights critique
• the partnership of the living, the dead, and the unborn
• party government and party principle
• spirit of conquest
• manners and civilization
• the East India Company and empire
• the Warren Hastings impeachment
• conciliation with America
• Protestant Ascendancy
• the consistency question
• chivalry and the age of elegance
• mixed government and constitutional balance
• property and prescription
• the social contract critique
• reform versus revolution
• Jacobinism and the regicide republic
• law of nature and nations
• representation and virtual representation
• religious toleration
• the British constitution

Converse with Edmund Burke on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Edmund Burke's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.