Edmund Burke

Biography: Edmund Burke

The British statesman Edmund Burke (1729-1797) was a noted political theorist and philosophical writer. He was born in Ireland, spent most of his active life in English politics, and died the political oracle of conservative Europe.

Edmund Burke's view of society was hierarchical and authoritarian, yet one of his noblest characteristics was his repeated defense of those who were too weak to defend themselves. Outstanding in 18th-century British politics for intellect, oratory, and drive, he lacked the ability either to lead or to conciliate men and never exerted an influence commensurate with his capabilities. His career as a practical politician was a failure; his political theories found favor only with posterity.

Burke was born on Jan. 12, 1729, in Dublin of middleclass parents. His mother suffered from what Burke called "a cruel nervous disorder," and his relations with his authoritarian father, a Dublin attorney, were unhappy. After attending Trinity College, Dublin, Burke in 1750 crossed to England to study law at the Middle Temple. But he unconsciously resisted his father's plans for him and made little progress in the law. Indecision marked his life at this time: he described himself as "a runaway son" and his "manner of life" as "chequered with various designs." In 1755 he considered applying for a post in the Colonies but dropped the idea when his father objected.

In 1756 Burke published two philosophical treatises, A Vindication of Natural Society and A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. In the Vindication Burke exposed the futility of demanding a reason for moral and social institutions and, with the foresight which was one of the most remarkable of his gifts, distinguished the coming attack of rationalistic criticism on the established order. The Enquiry, which he had begun when only 19, was considered by Samuel Johnson to be "an example of true criticism." These works were followed in 1757 by An Account of the European Settlement in America, to which Burke, although he denied authorship, clearly contributed a great deal. The early sheets of The Abridgement of the History of England were also printed in 1757, although the book itself was not published until after Burke's death. These works introduced Burke's name into London literary circles and seemed to open up a reputable career.

Family unity, which he had never known as a boy, became an article of Burke's adult philosophy. In 1757 he married the daughter of his physician and settled into family life with his father-in-law, his brother Richard, and his so-called cousin William. With them he found a domestic harmony he had never known in his father's home.

Early Political Career

Financial security, however, was elusive, and Burke was forced to take a minor secretarial post in the government establishment in Ireland. But contact with the depressed and persecuted Irish Catholics unsettled him, and early in 1765 he resigned his position. Necessity now led Burke into politics. In July 1765, when the Whig administration of Lord Rockingham was being formed, he was recommended to Rockingham, who took him on as his private secretary. In December, Burke entered Parliament as member for the Buckinghamshire constituency of Wendover.

Burke's subsequent political career was bound inextricably to the fortunes of the Rockingham group. Emotional and hysterical by nature, without a profession or a secure income, he found stability and independence through his attachment to the Whig aristocrats. When Rockingham lost the premiership in 1766, Burke, though offered employment under the new administration, followed him into opposition. "I believe in any body of men in England I should have been in the minority," he later said. "I have always been in the minority." Certainly the dominant characteristic of his political career was an overwhelming impulse to argue and oppose; to that was added enormous persistence, courage, concentration, and energy. Endowed with many of the qualities of leadership, he lacked the sensitivity to gauge and respect the feelings and opinions of others. Hence his political life was a series of negative crusades - against the American war, Warren Hastings, and the French Revolution - and his reputation as a statesman rests on his wisdom in opposition, not on his achievements in office.

Burke's theory of government was essentially conservative. He profoundly distrusted the people and believed in the divine right of the aristocracy to govern. "All direction of public humour and opinion must originate in a few," he wrote in 1775. "God and nature never meant [the people] to think or act without guidance or direction." Yet all Burke's writings, despite their rather narrow propaganda purpose, include valuable generalizations on human conduct.

Views on America and Ireland

Burke found difficulty in applying his political philosophy to practical issues. He was one of the first to realize the implications of Britain's problems with colonial America. He saw the British Empire as a family, with the parent exercising a benevolent authority over the children. Perhaps influenced by his own upbringing, he believed the British government to have been harsh and tyrannical when it should have been lenient. "When any community is subordinately connected with another," he wrote, "the great danger of the connexion is the extreme pride and self-complacency of the superior."

In 1774 Burke argued against retaining the tea duty on the Colonies in his celebrated Speech on American Taxation, and twice in 1775 he proposed conciliation with the Colonies. His conception of the British Empire as an "aggregate of many states under one common head" came as near as was possible in the 18th century to reconciling British authority with colonial autonomy. Yet at the same time he repeatedly declared his belief in the legislative supremacy of the British Parliament. Thus the American war split Burke in two. He could face neither American independence nor the prospect of a British victory. "I do not know," he wrote in August 1776, "how to wish success to those whose victory is to separate us from a large and noble part of our empire. Still less do I wish success to injustice, oppression, and absurdity … No good can come of any event in this war to any virtuous interest."

In Ireland, Burke's sympathies were with the persecuted Roman Catholics, who were "reduced to beasts of burden" and asked only for that elementary justice all subjects had a right to expect from their government. He preferred their cause to that of the Protestant Anglo-Irish, who were striving to throw off the authority of the British Parliament. With Irish nationalism and its constitutional grievances he had little sympathy. "I am sure the people ought to eat whether they have septennial Parliaments or not," he wrote in 1766. As on the American problem, Burke always counseled moderation in Ireland. "I believe," he said only 2 months before his death, "there are very few cases which will justify a revolt against the established government of a country, let its constitution be what it will."

Hastings Incident

On the formation of the short-lived Rockingham ministry in March 1782, Burke was appointed paymaster general. But now, when he seemed on the threshold of political achievement, everything seemed to go wrong for Burke. In particular, his conduct at this time showed signs of mental disturbance, a tendency aggravated by the death of Rockingham in July 1782. James Boswell told Samuel Johnson in 1783 that Burke had been represented as "actually mad"; to which Johnson replied, "If a man will appear extravagant as he does, and cry, can he wonder that he is represented as mad?" A series of intemperate speeches in the Commons branded Burke as politically unreliable, an impression confirmed by his conduct in the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the governor general of Bengal, in 1790.

Ever since Rockingham had taken office, the punishment of those accused of corruption in India had been uppermost in Burke's mind. His strong aggressive instincts, sharpened by public and private disappointments, needed an enemy against which they could concentrate. Always inclined to favor the unfortunate, he became convinced that Hastings was the principal source of misrule in India and that one striking example of retribution would deter other potential offenders. In Burke's disordered mind, Hastings appeared as a monster of iniquity; he listened uncritically to any complaint against him; and the vehemence with which he prosecuted the impeachment indicates the depth of his emotions. His violent language and intemperate charges alienated independent men and convinced his own party that he was a political liability.

Last Years

Disappointment and nostalgia colored Burke's later years. He was the first to appreciate the significance of the French Revolution and to apply it to English conditions. In February 1790 he warned the Commons: "In France a cruel, blind, and ferocious democracy had carried all before them; their conduct, marked with the most savage and unfeeling barbarity, had manifested no other system than a determination to destroy all order, subvert all arrangement, and reduce every rank and description of men to one common level."

Burke had England and his own disappointments in mind when he published Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings of Certain Societies in London in 1790. "You seem in everything to have strayed out of the high road of nature," he wrote. "The property of France does not govern it"; and in the Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796) he defined Jacobinism as "the revolt of the enterprising talents of a country against its property." If England, following the French example, was not to be governed by property, what would become of Burke's most cherished principles? In part the Reflections is also Burke's apologia for his devotion to Rockingham. For Rockingham's cause Burke had sacrificed his material interests through 16 long years of profitless opposition, and when his party at last came to power he failed to obtain any lasting advantage for himself or his family. In the famous passage on Marie Antoinette in the Reflections, Burke, lamenting the passing of the "age of chivalry," perhaps unconsciously described his own relations with the Whig aristocrats: "Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom."

For the last 5 years of his life Burke occupied a unique position. "He is," remarked a contemporary, "a sort of power in Europe, though totally without any of those means … which give or maintain power in other men." He corresponded with Louis XVIII and the French royalists and counseled Stanislaus of Poland to pursue a liberal policy. The Irish Catholics regarded him as their champion. As each succeeding act of revolution became more bloody, his foresight was praised more widely. He urged the necessity of war with France, and the declaration of hostilities further increased his prestige. On the last day of his life he spoke of his hatred for the revolutionary spirit in France and of his belief that the war was for the good of humanity. He died on July 9, 1797, and in accordance with his wishes was buried in the parish church of Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire.

Further Reading

There are many editions of Burke's writings. The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, edited by Thomas W. Copeland and others (8 vols., 1958-1969), is the definitive edition of Burke's letters. Of the smaller collections, Speeches and Letters on American Affairs, with an introduction by Peter McKevitt (1961), is of particular interest. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, edited by J. T. Boulton (1958), and Reflections on the Revolution in France, edited by William B. Todd (1965), are definitive editions of two major works. See also Walter J. Bate, ed., Selected Works (1960).

Thomas E. Utley, Edmund Burke (1957), is the most useful modern biography. Studies of Burke's political philosophy include Charles W. Parkin, The Moral Basis of Burke's Political Thought: An Essay (1956); Francis P. Canavan, The Political Reason of Edmund Burke (1960); Peter J. Stanlis, ed., The Relevance of Edmund Burke (1964) and his own Edmund Burke and the Natural Law (1958); Gerald W. Chapman, Edmund Burke: The Practical Imagination (1967); and Burleigh T. Wilkins, The Problem of Burke's Political Philosophy (1967). Of the many works setting Burke in the context of the 18th century, the most useful are Carl B. Cone, Burke and the Nature of Politics (2 vols., 1957-1964); Alfred Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the 18th Century (2d ed. 1960); and R. R. Fennessy, Burke, Paine and the Rights of Man (1963).

Additional Sources

Ayling, Stanley Edward, Edmund Burke: his life and opinions, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988.

Kirk, Russell, Edmund Burke: a genius reconsidered, Peru, Ill.: Sherwood Sugden, 1988.

Kramnick, Isaac, comp., Edmund Burke, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974.

Macpherson, C. B. (Crawford Brough), Burke, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Miller, Alice P., Edmund Burke: a biography, New York: Allwyn Press, 1976.

Miller, Alice P., Edmund Burke and his world, Old Greenwich, Conn.: Devin-Adair Co., 1979.

Morley, John, Edmund Burke, Belfast: Athol Books, 1993.

Search unanswered questions...

Enter a word or phrase...

5min Related Video: Edmund Burke

Top

Political Dictionary: Edmund Burke

(1729-97) Whig politician who sat in parliament, apart from a brief interlude, from 1766 until his death. He espoused the cause of his native Ireland in many ways, by opposing absentee landlordism, by pressing the case of Ireland's commercial rights, and by advocating steps towards Catholic emancipation. He was also sympathetic to the cause of the American colonies, being London agent of the state of New York and writing on the injustice of the taxation of the colonies and in favour of reconciliation with them. As a supporter of Lord Rockingham, he opposed the revival of the influence of the King, George III, in Parliament. He was also concerned with maladministration by the East India Company and was involved in the impeachment of Warren Hastings.

It is a great irony that a Whig politician and one who might (anachronistically) be said to be associated with a variety of progressive causes, should come to be regarded as one of the supreme articulators of conservative thought and sentiment, producing what some have seen as the definitive statement of such thought. The reason for Burke's status in this respect lies in his reaction to the events of 1789 in France, contained in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Burke was most of all opposed to the assumption by the revolutionaries that they could redesign a system of government on abstract and universal principles. His book was directly stimulated by the support of one of his old adversaries, Richard Price, for the principles of revolution.

In opposing the Declaration of the Rights of Man, Burke drew upon arguments about social practice and political constitutions which he had developed in relation to other issues. Custom and practice define society; they have developed over a long period and can be changed only slowly. Law comes out of custom and must be in tune with it. Reform of all sorts is possible, but it must preserve and extend the harmony between established social practice and policy. Revolution, in the sense of a new system of government and social relations, based on principles not well founded in the society in question, can only end in chaos or tyranny. Real rights are prescriptive: that is, they are established by the laws of a society and based on its customs. ‘Natural’ rights, based on abstract principles about the human condition, are nonsensical and dangerous.

Burke sounds his most reactionary in bemoaning the fate of France in general and Marie Antoinette in particular: ‘The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded: and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.’ Tom Paine commented, ‘He pities the plumage, but sees not the dying bird’ and Mary Wollstonecraft beseeched him to acknowledge that if he were a Frenchman he would be a revolutionary. After all, he was not a supporter of absolutist, unparliamentary, and inefficient government in Britain and its colonies, so it was perverse to be sentimental about the ancien régime.

These reactionary sentiments were probably real, but certainly untypical. Burke believed in a commercial society. He thought government rested ultimately on popular sovereignty and should seek to maximize the general well-being. However, these beliefs are doubly obscured in his writings. First, he was much more politician than philosopher, concerned more to develop his arguments in a passionate rhetorical style and to a practical purpose than to examine their premisses. Second, he believed in the obfuscation of principles, because he thought that principles like popular sovereignty and utility might prove dangerous and counterproductive if made too explicit; he was a kind of ‘blinded utilitarian’ who thought that custom and our sense of moderation were better guides to utility than the (abstract) principle of utility itself.

One important application of these principles was Burke's theory of the role and duties of a parliamentary representative, most famously expressed in a speech at Bristol when he was elected there in November 1774. He intended, he said, to put ‘great weight’ on the wishes of his constituents and accord their opinions ‘high respect’. Even so, he did not intend to be instructed by them, but by his reason and conscience, for ‘Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement’. Only to a limited degree was it a representative's job to protect the interests of his constituents; the more important role was to play a part in ‘a deliberative assembly of one nation with one interest, that of the whole’ (Burke's italics). This ‘Burkean’ doctrine of representation has had resonance wherever there have been elected parliaments and has had supporters and opponents inside parties of the ‘left’ as well as those of the ‘right’.

It may be ironic that Burke is seen as definitively conservative, but the perception is also accurate and revealing. Burke's stance against the French Revolution and the ‘abstract’ ideas arising out of the Enlightenment is prototypically conservative; the importance he attributed to local and national traditions, his capacity to support reform, and his belief in putting custom and moderation before absolute principle, have all contributed to the style and outlook of conservatism.

— Lincoln Allison

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Edmund Burke

Top

(born January 12?, 1729, Dublin, Ire. — died July 9, 1797, Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, Eng.) British parliamentarian, orator, and political philosopher. The son of a lawyer, he began legal studies but lost interest, became estranged from his father, and spent some time wandering about England and France. Essays he published in 1757 – 58 gained the attention of Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, and Gotthold Lessing, and he was hired to edit a yearly survey of world affairs (1758 – 88). He entered politics (1765) as secretary to a Whig leader and soon became involved in the controversy over whether Parliament or the monarch controlled the executive. He argued (1770) that George III's efforts to reassert a more active role for the crown violated the constitution's spirit. Elected to Parliament (1774 – 80), he contended that its members should exercise judgment rather than merely follow their constituents' desires. Although a strong constitutionalist, he was not a supporter of pure democracy; although a conservative, he eloquently championed the cause of the American colonists, whom he regarded as badly governed, and he supported the abolition of the international slave trade. He tried unsuccessfully to legislate relief for Ireland and to reform the governance of India. He disapproved of the French Revolution for its leaders' precipitous actions and its antiaristocratic bloodshed. He is often regarded as the founder of modern conservatism.

For more information on Edmund Burke, visit Britannica.com.

British History: Edmund Burke

Top

Burke, Edmund (1729-97). Whig politician and conservative political philosopher. Burke was born in Ireland to a catholic mother and protestant father. Brought up as a protestant, he was sent to Trinity College, Dublin. He studied law in London, but quickly turned his attention to writing. He became a member of Parliament in 1766 and remained an MP for virtually the rest of his life. Burke had an unrivalled gift for portraying the issues of the day in terms of general principles, and as a result many of his speeches contain disquisitions on political philosophy.

Burke has often been accused of inconsistency. His stance on the plight of catholics in Ireland—he deplored their savage treatment by the protestant ascendancy—and of Indians in Bengal is contrasted with his rejection of the idea of natural rights advanced by the French revolutionaries. Similarly, Burke's sympathy for the American colonists appears to contradict his insistence on the sovereign authority of Parliament. However, if we bear in mind the organizing ideas of his political philosophy, we can See that there is an underlying coherence in his writing. In his defence of the Irish catholics, the Bengali Indians, and the American colonists, Burke was not arguing that they had natural rights to determine their own destiny, but that there had been abuse of legitimate (i.e. traditional) authority. Similarly, we can See consistency in Burke's apparently contradictory endorsement of the 1688/9 Whig revolution in England, yet denunciation of the 1789 revolution in France. In both cases he sought to defend traditional modes of political authority. The Whig revolution in England was a revolution averted, in that it preserved the established Anglican state from an unconstitutional conversion by James II into a Roman catholic polity. By contrast the French Revolution was a real revolution, perpetrated against the wholesome foundations of a ‘noble and venerable castle’, the traditional and settled French state. His Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) is generally regarded as the epitome of conservatism, defending traditional political cultures. However, he recognized that some change was inevitable—indeed he held that a state without the means of change was without the means of its own conservation.

As a practising politician and statesman, Burke also left his mark. His impassioned defence of the formation of political parties as a means of resisting the unconstitutional influence of the crown was an important step in legitimizing party politics in Britain. Moreover, although he only held minor office (that of paymaster-general) for two short spells, Burke exerted considerable influence on the government. His vehement condemnation of the revolution in France helped to stiffen anti-French policy in Britain. Similarly the sympathetic tone he adopted toward the American colonists contributed towards the rapprochement which was eventually reached by the British government. Finally Burke's obsessive pursuit of the impeachment of Warren Hastings in the House of Lords for his rule as governor-general of Bengal succeeded in creating an irresistible momentum for the reform of the East India Company.

Architecture and Landscaping: Edmund Burke

Top

(1729–97)

British statesman and writer. His A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756) was of enormous importance in creating a move from Classicism to Romanticism, and in the history of aesthetics greatly influenced German philosophers of the Enlightenment, notably Immanuel Kant. His discussion of the aesthetic categories of the Beautiful and the Sublime were especially significant.

Bibliography

E. Burke (1757)
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

Irish Literature Companion: Edmund Burke

Top

Burke, Edmund (1729-1797), political philosopher; born at Arran Quay, Dublin, the son of a Protestant lawyer and a Catholic mother, Mary Nagle from Co. Cork. He spent some years in Co. Cork with his mother's people, then joined the Quaker School in Ballitore, Co. Kildare, before going to TCD. He studied law at the Middle Temple in London. A Vindication of Natural Society (1756) was a defence of the established social order. In 1757 he married Jane Nugent, a Catholic, and in the same year published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, his treatise on aesthetics. In 1758 he began to edit the newly-established Annual Register, a yearly digest of politics, history, and the arts. In 1765 Burke became private secretary to Lord Rockingham, the Prime Minister, and was returned as MP for Wendover, throwing himself into Commons activity. Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770) grew out of his anger at the failure of the Rockingham ministry to control George III's interventionist approach to Parliament. In 1773 Burke spent a month in Paris; there he encountered Diderot, one of the French philosophes whom he would later attack in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, and also met Louis XV, the Dauphin, and the Dauphine Marie Antoinette at Versailles. In April 1774, by which time he was the Rockingham spokesman on American affairs, he delivered his Speech on American Taxation in the Commons, arguing vehemently against the imposition of a tea tax. In this year he also became MP for Bristol. Around this time he became a close friend of Charles James Fox. He invested in the East India Company and began to take an interest in Indian affairs. Burke was the driving force behind a Commons select committee on India, whose Ninth Report (1782) gave a detailed account of mismanagement and corruption in the East India Company. He attacked Warren Hastings, Governor-General of Bengal, whose impeachment was to occupy him on and off from 1786 to 1795, when Hastings was finally acquitted. On the centenary of the Glorious Revolution (4 November 1788) Dr Richard Price, a Dissenting minister, gave a speech in London welcoming the events unfolding in France, Burke read the speech in early 1789 and immediately began writing his Reflections. A powerful defence of English constitutional liberty, it developed and expanded the central tenets of his political thought. Burke's Appeal from the Old to the New Whigs (1791) warned against the tyranny of government by democratic majority. Fearful that revolutionary principles would find a ready audience in Ireland, Burke supported the Catholic Committee in Dublin then campaigning for relief measures [see Catholic Emancipation]. His Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792) argued the necessity of representation for Catholics. Letters on a Regicide Peace (1795/6) urged Britain to defend the established order in Europe. In a Letter to a Noble Lord (1796) he defended himself against an insult in the House of Lords regarding his civil-list pension, offering a dignified appraisal of his own career in the service of constitutional freedom. Although dying of stomach cancer, he continued to attack French expansionism and to excoriate the Protestant ascendancy in the Dublin Parliament for their intransigence on the Catholic question. Burke was the architect of modern British conservative thought, the leading principles of which he shaped in his reflections upon the great questions of his time.

Bibliography

Paul Langford (ed.), The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (1981- ); and Conor Cruise O'Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (1992).

Philosophy Dictionary: Edmund Burke

Top

Burke, Edmund (1729-97) Irish thinker and politician. After his education at Trinity College, Dublin, Burke lived by writing in London, until becoming a Member of Parliament in 1766. His first important work, Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756), marked a very early Romantic turn away from the 18th-century aesthetic of clarity and order, in favour of the imaginative power of the unbounded and infinite, and the unstated and unknown. Although he supported both Irish and American revolution, his later work Reflections on the Revolution in France is a masterly attack on the danger of airy political abstractions, and a defence of the preservation of traditional aristocratic liberties, rights, and privileges.

Columbia Encyclopedia: Edmund Burke

Top

Burke, Edmund, 1729–97, British political writer and statesman, b. Dublin, Ireland.

Early Writings

After graduating (1748) from Trinity College, Dublin, he began the study of law in London but abandoned it to devote himself to writing. His satirical Vindication of Natural Society (1756) attacked the political rationalism and religious skepticism of Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, and his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) was a study in aesthetics. In 1759 he founded the Annual Register, a periodical to which he contributed until 1788. Burke was a member of Samuel Johnson's intimate circle.

Political Career and Later Writings

Burke's political career began in 1765 when he became private secretary to the marquess of Rockingham, then prime minister, and formed a lifelong friendship with that leader. He also entered Parliament in 1765 and there strove for a wiser treatment of the American colonies. In 1766 he spoke in favor of the repeal of the Stamp Act, although he also supported the Declaratory Act, asserting Britain's constitutional right to tax the colonists. In his famous later speeches on American taxation (1774) and on conciliation with the colonies (1775), he did not abandon that position; rather he urged the imprudence of exercising such theoretical rights.

At a time when political allegiances were based largely on family connections and patronage and political opposition was generally regarded as factionalism, Burke, in his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), became the first political philosopher to argue the value of political parties. He called for a limitation of crown patronage (so-called economical reform) and as paymaster of the forces (1782–83) in the second Rockingham ministry was able to enact some of his proposals.

He was also interested in reform of the East India Company and drafted the East India Bill presented (1783) by Charles James Fox. Influenced by Sir Philip Francis, he instigated the impeachment and long trial of Warren Hastings. Hastings was acquitted, but Burke's speeches created some new awareness of the responsibilities of empire and of the injustices perpetrated in India and previously unpublicized in England.

Although he championed many liberal and reform causes, Burke believed that political, social, and religious institutions represented the wisdom of the ages; he feared political reform beyond limitations on the power of the crown. Consequently, his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) made him the spokesman of European conservatives. His stand against the French Revolution—and, by implication, against parliamentary reform—caused him to break with Fox and his Whigs in 1791. Burke's Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791) shows how closely he approached the Tory position of the younger William Pitt. He withdrew from political life in 1795.

Influence

Burke left, in his many and diverse writings, a monumental construction of British political thought that had far-reaching influence in England, America, and France for many years. He held unrestricted rationalism in human affairs to be destructive. He affirmed the utility of habit and prejudice and the importance of continuity in political experience. The son of a Protestant father and a Roman Catholic mother and himself a Protestant, he never ceased to criticize the English administration in Ireland and the galling discrimination against Catholics.

Bibliography

See his correspondence (9 vol., 1958–70); selections ed. by W. J. Bate (1960); biographies by P. M. Magnus (1939, repr. 1973) and S. Ayling (1988); studies by T. W. Copeland (1949, repr. 1970), C. Parkin (1956, repr. 1968), C. B. Cone (2 vol., 1957–64), P. J. Stanlis (1958, repr. 1986), G. W. Chapman (1967), R. Kirk (1967), B. T. Wilkins (1967), and C. C. O'Brien (1992).

History 1450-1789: Edmund Burke

Top

Burke, Edmund (1729–1797), British statesman and orator. Born in Arran Quay, Dublin, Edmund Burke was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and studied law briefly at the Inns of Court in London. He published two early books, A Vindication of Natural Society (1756) and A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757; expanded 1759), which caught the eye of David Hume, Samuel Johnson, and other illustrious contemporaries and established him as an author. Burke had shown from the first a strong interest in politics, informed by copious knowledge, and this led to his appointment in 1759 as private secretary to a member of Parliament, William Gerard Hamilton. He found a new position in 1765 as secretary to the marquess of Rockingham, the leader of a group of Whigs then pressing the House of Commons to assert its independence from the king. Given a seat in Parliament as the representative from Wendover, Burke distinguished himself as a strategist for the Rockingham administration of 1765–1766 and substantially assisted in its major achievement, the repeal of the stamp tax on the American colonies.

In the late 1760s an attempt by the king's ministers to prevent John Wilkes from taking his seat in Parliament led Burke and his party to concert a policy against the aggrandizement of the crown. Burke's reading of the constitution at this crisis emerged in his first major political work, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), a full-scale defense of the idea of a political party. An organized opposition, says Burke, is an indispensable bulwark of liberty, and the reasons for forming such a party are plain: "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

Whatever might change in his stance, Burke would continue to speak for political association against the privilege of court favorites or the unchecked power of the people. He once said that he believed the principles of politics were only the principles of morality enlarged. Accordingly, Burke was skeptical of theories of the social contract that codified the rights of citizens. In the 1770s and 1780s, most of his energy was given to enlarging the liberty of the people by increasing the protections against monarchical abuse of power, and yet he was never a believer in popular government: statesmanship always carried for him a sense of the dignity and ceremony that should accompany great enterprises. Elected in 1774 as a member of Parliament from Bristol, Burke soon pleaded for a sympathetic reception of the American protests against taxation. His speech on conciliation with the American colonies (1775) urged a policy of concession to the point of disclaiming any further intention to tax the colonists. The three-hour speech has been considered from that day to this one of the greatest orations in the language. "An Englishman," Burke told his listeners, "is the unfittest person on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery." The right use of the American colonists, he asserted, was to cherish them as equal partners in trade and as allies in time of war. "Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together." He concluded that anything the colonists gave beyond their friendship should be freely given.

During his Bristol years, from 1774 to 1780, Burke stood out as a defender of free trade with Ireland, liberalization of the laws controlling imprisonment for debt, and the repeal of Catholic disabilities—all unpopular positions in a Protestant and mercantile city. When threatened with loss of his constituency in 1780, he gave an unswerving defense of his actions in his speech at Bristol guildhall: "I did not obey your instructions. No. I conformed to the instructions of truth and Nature, and maintained your interest, against your opinions, with a constancy that became me." Before reentering the House of Commons as the representative from Malton, he found the cause that would occupy the rest of his career: exposure of the injustices of the East India Company ("a government in the disguise of a merchant") and impeachment of the governor-general of Bengal, Warren Hastings.

Burke's own practical proposal, ventured in his speech on Fox's East India Bill (1783), was to reorganize the company and place its officers under the direct control of Parliament. Rejection of this plan by the House of Commons precipitated the fall of the Fox-North coalition, with whose prospects Burke's own political fortunes were bound up. Nevertheless, he chose to pursue Hastings as a manager of his impeachment by the House of Commons in proceedings that lasted from 1788 to 1795. The process ended in acquittal. Yet Burke looked on his efforts to reform British India as his major accomplishment, "my monument."

A securer fame in his lifetime would come from his criticism of the French Revolution in a series of pamphlets of the 1790s, above all Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Burke warned against a great change in the spirit of society, from aristocratic to democratic manners and from the authority of an ancient landed nobility to that of a mobile commercial class. He speaks as a believer in precedent and prescription and a defender of natural feelings such as reverence for an established church and a hereditary nobility. Against the promise of a society based on contract, he offers his vision of a society based on trust—"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 onset of democracy, Burke supposed, would destroy that partnership. A democracy would be unable to correct the errors that a crowd in power would commit on a new and terrifying scale.

In 1794 Burke was awarded a pension by William Pitt and George III and retired to his estate in Beaconsfield. His final writings, the Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796–1797), were a sustained attempt to persuade England to fight a counterrevolutionary war against France. He died in 1797, ending as he began, in isolation. Burke's greatest political legacy may be the example of a statesman who uses his freedom of conscience to extend the public debate of public matters. In literature his influence has been deeper, though harder to trace. He was a historian and a prophet of the powers of sympathy and imagination by which people can be awakened to generous action.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Burke, Edmund. The Works of Edmund Burke. 9 vols. Boston, 1839.

——. The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke. 9 vols. Oxford and New York, 1981.

Secondary Sources

Blakemore, Steven. Burke and the Fall of Language. Hanover, N.H., 1988.

Cobban, Alfred. Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century: A Study of the Political and Social Thinking of Burke, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. London, 1929.

Cone, Carl B. Burke and the Nature of Politics. 2 vols. Lexington, Ky., 1957–1964.

Lock, F. P. Edmund Burke. Oxford and New York, 1998.

O'Brien, Conor Cruise. The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke. Chicago, 1992.

Parkin, Charles W. The Moral Basis of Burke's Political Thought, an Essay. Cambridge, U.K., 1956.

—DAVID BROMWICH

History Dictionary: Burke, Edmund

Top

An Irish political leader and author of the eighteenth century who spent his career in England. A member of the British Parliament and an exceptional speaker, he sympathized with the American Revolutionary War as a defense of existing rights of citizens. He opposed the French Revolution, however, saying that it was a complete and unjustified break with tradition. (See Thomas Paine.)

Legal Encyclopedia: Burke, Edmund

Top

Edmund Burke was an orator, philosophical writer, political theorist, and member of Parliament who helped shape political thought in England and the United States during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Burke was born January 12, 1729, in Dublin, Ireland, to a Protestant father and a Roman Catholic mother. His father, a prosperous Dublin attorney, was cold and authoritarian, and the two did not enjoy a close relationship. After graduating from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1750, Burke traveled to England to study law in accord with his father's wishes. However, he did not progress in his legal studies, and he eventually abandoned the law in favor of a literary career.

In 1756 Burke published two philosophical treatises, A Vindication of Natural Society and A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. These and other works launched Burke's career as a critic of social and political issues. Burke became a member of the literary circle headed by Samuel Johnson, the English author, scholar, and critic. In 1759, Burke founded the Annual Register, a yearly survey of world affairs to which he contributed until 1788.

Realizing that the literary life would not pay enough to support a family, Burke entered politics. In 1765, he was appointed private secretary to the Marquis of Rockingham, England's prime minister and a member of the Whig party, marking the beginning of a lifelong alliance between Burke and Rockingham and the Whigs. Burke was also elected to Parliament in 1765. In 1766, Rockingham lost the premiership. Burke was offered employment with the new administration, but chose to remain with the Whig opposition. "I believe in any body of men in England I should have been in the minority," he said. "I have always been in the minority."

Burke believed strongly in opposition politics. Having a party that acts as a watchdog for the incumbent party is the best way, he felt, to avoid corruption and abuse of power. As a member of the opposition, Burke could do what he did best: criticize the government for what he considered unjust or unwise policies. He disagreed with England's policies in North America and urged the government to abolish the tea duty imposed on the colonies. "All government—indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act—is founded on compromise and barter," he said in 1775, in his Speech on Conciliation with America. However, despite his dissatisfaction with English policy, he did not support the American revolutionaries. Although he believed that the British had been overly harsh and tyrannical, he also believed in the legislative superiority of the British Parliament over the colonies. In August, 1776, he expressed his despair over the conflict between England and its North American colonies: "I do not know how to wish success to those whose victory is to separate us from a large and noble part of our empire," he wrote. "Still less do I wish success to injustice, oppression, and absurdity. … No good can come of any event in this war to any virtuous interest."

Burke vociferously criticized the British government's policies in Ireland as well, and decried the poverty and persecution of Catholics there. Yet, although his sympathies were clearly with the oppressed and powerless in Ireland, he again opposed revolution and urged moderation on both sides. "I believe there are very few cases which will justify a revolt against the established government of a country, let its constitution be what it will, " he said.

Burke's support for established order, even where it meant support for inequalities, was most evident in his harsh criticism of the French Revolution. "[T]he age of chivalry is gone," he wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France. "That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is gone forever." According to Burke, the French revolutionaries' only purpose was to destroy all traditional authority and property rights. The result, he predicted, would be anarchy and the emergence of an autocratic ruler whose reign would be worse than any the revolutionaries had seen before. Burke's prediction proved accurate: the revolution in France led to the Reign of Terror and the regime of Napoleon.

In his condemnation of the French Revolution, Burke presaged American thought on the importance of private property to the preservation of societal harmony. Stephen B. Presser, associate dean and professor at Northwestern University School of Law, wrote that

Burke's attacks on the French, and his spirited defense of private property as a guarantee of order, stability, and prosperity have echoed through the arguments of American judges and statesmen.

Burke's strongest criticism of British policy came in the 1780s when he instigated impeachment proceedings against Warren Hastings, governor-general of India. Burke attacked the British East India Company as unjust and oppressive in its treatment of the Indian people. In his Speech on Opening the Articles of Impeachment of Warren Hastings (1788), Burke asserted his belief that the exercise of arbitrary political power is never justified. "My Lords … the King has no arbitrary power to give him [Hastings], your Lordships have not, nor the commons, nor the whole Legislature. We have no arbitrary power to give, because arbitrary power is a thing, which neither any man can hold nor any man can give." Burke's view that political power is held in trust for the benefit of the people is reflected in the basic tenets of U.S. democracy and is at the core of the United States' republican form of government.

Burke has been claimed as a champion of both liberals and conservatives. His denunciation of oppression in India, Ireland, and North America and his staunch opposition to the exercise of arbitrary power endeared him to libertarians and proponents of individual rights. However, his strong faith in established political, religious, and social institutions, and his fear of reform beyond limitations on sovereign power, reverberate in contemporary conservatism. Likewise, his support for civil rights was tempered with a strong belief in the necessity of individual responsibility. In 1791, he wrote, in A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly,

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves.

Burke was firmly opposed to the substitution of government assistance for individual initiative. In Thoughts and Details on Scarcity (1795), he cautioned against "attempts to feed the people out of the hands of the magistrates." He seemed to predict the modern quagmire of welfare dependency when he wrote, "and having looked to government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them. To avoid that evil, government will redouble the causes of it; and then it will become inveterate and incurable."

The last few years of Burke's life were marred by the death of his only son, Richard Burke, in 1794. With his wife, Jane Nugent Burke, whom he had married in 1757, Burke had established the harmonious family life he had never known as a child. The premature loss of his son, and the concomitant demise of Burke's dreams and plans for the young man's future, left Burke disconsolate. Although he continued his activities in politics, particularly in the formation of the Irish government, his personal life was clouded with disappointment and bitterness. Burke died three years after his son, on July 9, 1797; yet two hundred years after his death, his philosophies continued to resonate on both sides of the Atlantic.

Quotes By: Edmund Burke

Top

Quotes:

"Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair."

"Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times, and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations -- wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco."

"Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy."

"Frugality is founded on the principal that all riches have limits."

"When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people."

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

See more famous quotes by Edmund Burke

Wikipedia: Edmund Burke

Top

For other individuals named Edmund Burke see Edmund Burke (disambiguation).

"Burkean" redirects here. For usage in literary theory, see Kenneth Burke.

Edmund Burke
Western Philosophy 18th century philosophy
Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke
Full name	Edmund Burke
School/tradition	Old Whig, Liberal conservatism
Main interests	Social and political philosophy
Influenced by Aristotle, Cicero, Richard Hooker, Edward Coke, Montesquieu, William Blackstone
Influenced Robert Peel, Immanuel Kant, Lord Acton, William Gladstone, Russell Kirk, Karl Popper, Roger Scruton, Joseph de Maistre, Hannah Arendt, William F. Buckley, Alexander Brunk,Bhimrao Ambedkar

Edmund Burke (12 January 1729^[1] – 9 July 1797) was an Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist, and philosopher who, after relocating to England, served for many years in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom as a member of the Whig party. He is mainly remembered for his opposition to the French Revolution. It led to his becoming the leading figure within the conservative faction of the Whig party, which he dubbed the "Old Whigs", in opposition to the pro-French-Revolution "New Whigs" led by Charles James Fox. He is generally viewed as the philosophical founder of modern conservatism.^[2]

1 Early life
2 Member of Parliament
3 American Revolution
4 Paymaster of the Forces
5 India and the Impeachment of Warren Hastings
6 French Revolution: 1688 versus 1789
7 Later life
8 Legacy
9 Summary
10 See also
11 Notes
12 References
13 External links

Early life

Burke was born in Dublin to a prosperous solicitor father (Richard; d. 1761) who was a member of the Protestant Church of Ireland. It is unclear if this is the same Richard Burke who converted from Catholicism.^[3]^[4] His mother Mary (c. 1702–1770), whose maiden name was Nagle, belonged to the Roman Catholic Church and came from an impoverished but genteel County Cork family. (The name Burke is the Gaelic version of the Norman name Burgh or de Burgh, who settled in Ireland following the Norman invasion of Ireland by Henry II of England in 1172.^[5]) Burke was raised in his father's faith and remained throughout his life a practising Anglican, unlike his sister Juliana who was brought up as and remained a Roman Catholic. His political enemies would later repeatedly accuse him of being educated at the Jesuit seminary of St. Omer's and of harbouring secret Catholic sympathies at a time when membership of the Catholic Church would have disqualified him from public office (see Penal Laws in Ireland). As Burke told Mrs. Crewe:

Mr. Burke's Enemies often endeavoured to convince the World that he had been bred up in the Catholic Faith, & that his Family were of it, & that he himself had been educated at St. Omer—but this was false, as his father was a regular practitioner of the Law at Dublin, which he could not be unless of the Established Church: & it so happened that though Mr. B— was twice at Paris, he never happened to go through the Town of St. Omer.^[6]

Once an MP, Burke was required to take the oath of allegiance and abjuration, the oath of supremacy, and declare against transubstantiation. No Catholic is known to have done so in the eighteenth century.^[7] Although never denying his Irishness, Burke often described himself as "an Englishman". This was in an age "before 'Celtic nationalism' sought to make Irishness and Englishness incompatible".^[8]

As a child he sometimes spent time away from the unhealthy air of Dublin with his mother's family in the Blackwater Valley. He received his early education at a Quaker school in Ballitore, some 30 miles (48 km) from Dublin, and remained in correspondence with his schoolmate Mary Leadbeater, the daughter of the school's owner, throughout his life.

In 1744 he proceeded to Trinity College, Dublin. In 1747, he set up a Debating Club, known as Edmund Burke's Club, which in 1770 merged with the Historical Club to form the College Historical Society, now the oldest undergraduate society in the world. The minutes of the meetings of Burke's club remain in the collection of the Historical Society. He graduated in 1748. Burke's father wished him to study for the law, and with this object he went to London in 1750 and entered the Middle Temple, but soon thereafter he gave up his legal studies in order to travel in Continental Europe. After giving up law, he attempted to earn his livelihood through writing.

"The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own." A Vindication of Natural Society

Burke's first published work, A Vindication of Natural Society: A View of the Miseries and Evils Arising to Mankind, appeared in Spring 1756. Burke imitated Lord Bolingbroke's style and ideas in a reductio ad absurdum of his arguments for atheistic rationalism, demonstrating their absurdity.^[9]^[10] Burke claimed that Bolingbroke's arguments against revealed religion could apply to all social and civil institutions. Lord Chesterfield and Bishop Warburton (and others) initially thought that the work was genuinely by Bolingbroke rather than a satire.^[11]^[12]

In 1757 Burke published a treatise on aesthetics, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which attracted the attention of prominent Continental thinkers such as Denis Diderot and Immanuel Kant. It was his only purely philosophical work, and when asked by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Dr. Laurence to expand it thirty years later, Burke replied that he was no longer fit for abstract speculation (Burke had written it before he was 19).^[13]

The following year, with Robert Dodsley, he created the influential Annual Register, a publication in which various authors evaluated the international political events of the previous year.^[14] The extent to which Burke personally contributed to the Annual Register is contested.^[15] Robert Murray in his biography of Burke quotes the Register as evidence of Burke's opinions yet Philip Magnus in his biography does not directly cite it as a reference.^[16] Burke remained its chief editor until at least 1789 and there is no evidence that any other writer contributed to it before 1766.^[17]

In London, Burke knew many of the leading intellectuals and artists, including Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, and Joshua Reynolds. Edward Gibbon described him as, 'the most eloquent and rational madman that I ever knew.'^[18]

On 12 March 1757 he married Jane Mary Nugent (1734–1812), daughter of a Catholic physician who had treated him at Bath. His son Richard was born on 9 February 1758. Another son, Christopher, died in infancy.

At about this same time, Burke was introduced to William Gerard Hamilton (known as "Single-speech Hamilton"). When Hamilton was appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland, Burke accompanied him to Dublin as his private secretary, a position he maintained for three years. In 1765 Burke became private secretary to liberal Whig statesman Charles Watson-Wentworth, the Marquess of Rockingham, at the time Prime Minister of Great Britain, who remained Burke's close friend and associate until his premature death in 1782.

Member of Parliament

A literary party at Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1781, depicting Burke and other members of "The Club" – place the cursor on the person to identify.

In December 1765 Burke entered the British Parliament as a member of the House of Commons for Wendover, a pocket borough in the control of Lord Fermanagh, later 2nd Earl Verney, a close political ally of Rockingham. After Burke's maiden speech, William Pitt the Elder said Burke had "spoken in such a manner as to stop the mouths of all Europe" and that the Commons should congratulate itself on acquiring such a member.^[19]

In 1769 Burke published, in reply to George Grenville, his pamphlet on The Present State of the Nation. In the same year he purchased the small estate of Gregories near Beaconsfield. The 600-acre (2.4 km²) estate was purchased with mostly borrowed money, and though it contained an art collection that included works by Titian, Gregories nevertheless would prove to be a heavy financial burden on the MP in the following decades. Burke was never able to fully pay for the estate. His speeches and writings had now made him famous, and among other effects had brought about the suggestion that he was the author of the Letters of Junius.

Burke took a leading role in the debate over the constitutional limits to the executive authority of the King. He argued strongly against unrestrained royal power and for the role of political parties in maintaining a principled opposition capable of preventing abuses by the monarch or by specific factions within the government. His most important publication in this regard was his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents of May 1770.^[20] In this work, Burke opposed the influence of the Court and defended party connections.^[21] During 1771 Burke wrote a Bill which would, if passed, have given juries the right to determine what was libel. Burke spoke in favour of the Bill but it was opposed by some, including Charles James Fox, and was not passed. Fox, when introducing his own Bill in 1791, repeated almost verbatim the text of Burke's Bill without acknowledgment.^[22] Burke was also prominent in securing the right to publish debates held in Parliament.^[23]

In the Annual Register for 1772 (published in July 1773) Burke condemned the Partition of Poland. He saw it as "the first very great breach in the modern political system of Europe" and upsetting the balance of power in Europe.^[24]

In 1774 he was elected member for Bristol, at the time "England's second city" and a large constituency with a genuine electoral contest. His Speech to the Electors at Bristol at the Conclusion of the Poll was noted for its defence of the principles of representative democracy against the notion that elected officials should be delegates:

...it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.^[25]

In May 1778 Burke supported a motion in Parliament to revise the restrictions on Irish trade. However his constituents in Bristol, a great trading city, urged Burke to oppose free trade with Ireland. Burke resisted these demands and said: "If, from this conduct, I shall forfeit their suffrages at an ensuing election, it will stand on record an example to future representatives of the Commons of England, that one man at least had dared to resist the desires of his constituents when his judgment assured him they were wrong".^[26] Burke published Two Letters to Gentlemen of Bristol on the Bills relative to the Trade of Ireland in which he espoused "some of the chief principles of commerce; such as the advantage of free intercourse between all parts of the same kingdom...the evils attending restriction and monopoly...and that the gain of others is not necessarily our loss, but on the contrary an advantage by causing a greater demand for such wares as we have for sale".^[27]

Burke also supported Sir George Savile's attempts to repeal some of the penal laws against Catholics.^[28]

This support for unpopular causes, notably free trade with Ireland and Catholic emancipation, led to Burke losing his seat in 1780. He also called capital punishment "the Butchery which we call justice" in 1776 and in 1780 Burke condemned the use of the pillory for two men convicted for attempting to practice sodomy.^[29]

For the remainder of his parliamentary career, Burke sat for Malton, another pocket borough controlled by Rockingham.

American Revolution

Burke expressed his support for the grievances of the American colonies under the government of King George III and his appointed representatives. On 19 April 1774 Burke made a speech (published in January 1775) on a motion to repeal the tea duty:

Again and again, revert to your old principles—seek peace and ensue it; leave America, if she has taxable matter in her, to tax herself. I am not here going into the distinctions of rights, nor attempting to mark their boundaries. I do not enter into these metaphysical distinctions; I hate the very sound of them. Leave the Americans as they anciently stood, and these distinctions, born of our unhappy contest, will die along with it...Be content to bind America by laws of trade; you have always done it...Do not burthen them with taxes...But if intemperately, unwisely, fatally, you sophisticate and poison the very source of government by urging subtle deductions, and consequences odious to those you govern, from the unlimited and illimitable nature of supreme sovereignty, you will teach them by these means to call that sovereignty itself in question...If that sovereignty and their freedom cannot be reconciled, which will they take? They will cast your sovereignty in your face. No body of men will be argued into slavery. Sir, let the gentlemen on the other side...tell me, what one character of liberty the Americans have, and what one brand of slavery they are free from, if they are bound in their property and industry by all the restraints you can imagine on commerce, and at the same time are made pack-horses of every tax you choose to impose, without the least share in granting them. When they bear the burthens of unlimited monopoly, will you bring them to bear the burthens of unlimited revenue too? The Englishman in America will feel that this is slavery; that it is legal slavery, will be no compensation either to his feelings or to his understandings.^[30]

On 22 March 1775 Burke gave a speech (published in May 1775) on conciliation with America:

...the people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen...They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas and on English principles. The people are Protestants...a persuasion not only favourable to liberty, but built upon it...My hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government,—they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it be once understood that your government may be one thing and their privileges another, that these two things may exist without any mutual relation,—the cement is gone, the cohesion is loosened, and everything hastens to decay and dissolution. As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces towards you. The more they multiply, the more friends you will have; the more ardently they love liberty, the more perfect will be their obedience. Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil. They may have it from Spain, they may have it from Prussia. But, until you become lost to all feeling of your true interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but you.^[31]

The Tory administration of Lord North (1770-1782) tried to defeat the colonists' rebellion by military force. British and American forces clashed in 1775 and in 1776 came the American Declaration of Independence. Burke was appalled by celebrations in Britain of the defeat of the Americans at New York and Pennsylvania. He claimed the English national character was being changed by this authoritarianism.^[32] In Burke's view the British government was fighting "the American English" ("our English Brethren in the Colonies"), with a German-descended King employing "the hireling sword of German boors and vassals" to destroy the colonists' English liberties.^[33]

Paymaster of the Forces

In Cincinnatus in Retirement (1782), James Gillray caricatured Burke's support of rights for Catholics.

The fall of North led to Rockingham being recalled to power in March 1782. Burke became Paymaster of the Forces and a Privy Councillor, but without a seat in the Cabinet. Rockingham's unexpected death in July of 1782 and his replacement as Prime Minister by Shelburne put an end to his administration after only a few months. However Burke did manage to pass two Acts. The Paymaster General Act 1782 ended the post as a lucrative sinecure. Previously, Paymasters had been able to draw on money from the Treasury at their discretion. Now they were to put the money they had requested to withdraw from the Treasury into the Bank of England, from where it was to be withdrawn for specific purposes. The Treasury would receive monthly statements of the Paymaster's balance at the Bank. This Act was repealed by Shelburne's administration but the Act which replaced it repeated verbatim almost the whole text of Burke's Act.^[34] The Civil List and Secret Service Money Act 1782 was a watered down version of Burke's original intentions as outlined in his famous Speech on Economical Reform of 11 February 1780. However he managed to abolish 134 offices in the royal household and civil administration.^[35] The third Secretary of State and the Board of Trade were abolished and pensions were limited and regulated. The Act was projected to save £72,368 a year.^[36] In February 1783 Burke resumed the post of Paymaster of the Forces when Shelburne's government fell and was replaced by a coalition headed by North and including Charles James Fox. The coalition fell in 1783, and was succeeded by the long Tory administration of William Pitt the Younger, which lasted until 1801. Burke was accordingly in opposition for the remainder of his political life.

India and the Impeachment of Warren Hastings

Burke’s interaction with the British dominion of India began well before the Hastings Trial. Previous to the impeachment, Parliament dealt with the Indian issue for two decades, this trial was the pinnacle of years of unrest and deliberation.^[37] In 1781 Burke was first able to delve into the issues surrounding the East India Company when he was appointed Chairman of the Commons’ Select Committee on East Indian Affair – from that point until the end of the trial; India was Burke’s primary concern.^[38] This committee was charged “to investigate alleged injustices in Bengal, the war with Hyder Ali, and other Indian difficulties.”^[39] While Burke and the committee focused their attention on these matters, a second ‘secret’ committee was formed to assess the same issues.^[40] Both committee reports were written by Burke and lead to the reassurance to the Indian princes that Britain would not wage war on them and the demand for the EIC to recall Hastings.^[41] This is Burke’s first call for real, significant change of the imperial practices. When addressing the whole House of Commons in regards to the committee’s report, Burke would describe the Indian issue as one that “began ‘in commerce’ but ‘ended in empire.’”^[42]

On February 28, 1785 he made his great speech on The Nabob of Arcot's Debts, where he condemned the damage he believed the East India Company had done to India. In the province of the Carnatic the Indians had constructed a system of reservoirs to make the soil fertile in a naturally dry region, and centred their society on the husbandry of water:

These are the monuments of real kings, who were the fathers of their people; testators to a posterity which they embraced as their own. These are the grand sepulchres built by ambition; but by the ambition of an insatiable benevolence, which, not contented with reigning in the dispensation of happiness during the contracted term of human life, had strained, with all the reachings and graspings of a vivacious mind, to extend the dominion of their bounty beyond the limits of nature, and to perpetuate themselves through generations of generations, the guardians, the protectors, the nourishers of mankind.^[43]

Burke held that the advent of British dominion, and in particular the conduct of the East India Company had destroyed much that was good in these traditions and that, as a consequence of this, and the lack of new customs to replace them, the Indians were suffering. He set about establishing a set of British expectations, whose moral foundation would, in his opinion, warrant the empire. ^[44]

On April 4, 1786, twenty-one years after the establishment of the East India Company, Burke presented the Commons with the Article of Charge of High Crimes and Misdemeanors against Warren Hastings, the former Governor General of Bengal. The trial, which did not begin until February 14, 1788, would be the “first major public discursive event of its kind in England,”^[45] bringing the morality and duty of imperialism to the forefront of the public’s perception. Burke was already known for his eloquent rhetorical skills and his involvement in the trial only engrossed its popularity and significance.^[46] For the members of London’s fashionable society, the trial was a spectacle , and was not centered around Hastings’ alleged misconduct and crimes as had been Burke’s intent.^[47] Burke's indictment, fuelled by emotional indignation, called Hastings the 'captain-general of iniquity'; who never dined without 'creating a famine'; his heart was 'gangrened to the core' and he resembled both a 'spider of Hell' and a 'ravenous vulture devouring the carcases of the dead'.^[48] The indictment was such a philippic that, whereas it had previously seemed that Hastings would be found guilty, it actually provoked public sympathy; however, although Hastings was acquitted, the trial served to establish the principle that the Empire was a moral undertaking rather than a wholesale looting by either the East India Company or its servants.

French Revolution: 1688 versus 1789

Smelling out a Rat;—or—The Atheistical-Revolutionist disturbed in his Midnight "Calculations" (1790) by Gillray, depicting a caricature of Burke with a long nose and spectacles, holding a crown and a cross. The seated man is Dr. Richard Price, who is writing "On the Benefits of Anarchy Regicide Atheism" beneath a picture of the execution of Charles I of England.

Burke did not initially condemn the French Revolution. In a letter of 9 August 1789, Burke wrote: "England gazing with astonishment at a French struggle for Liberty and not knowing whether to blame or to applaud! The thing indeed, though I thought I saw something like it in progress for several years, has still something in it paradoxical and Mysterious. The spirit it is impossible not to admire; but the old Parisian ferocity has broken out in a shocking manner".^[49] The events of 5-6 October 1789, in which a mob of Parisian women marched on Versailles to compel King Louis XVI to return to Paris, turned Burke against it. In a letter to his son Richard on 10 October he said: "This day I heard from Laurence who has sent me papers confirming the portentous state of France—where the Elements which compose Human Society seem all to be dissolved, and a world of Monsters to be produced in the place of it—where Mirabeau presides as the Grand Anarch; and the late Grand Monarch makes a figure as ridiculous as pitiable".^[50] On 4 November Charles-Jean-François Depont wrote to Burke, requesting that he endorse the Revolution. Burke replied that any critical language of it by him should be taken "as no more than the expression of doubt" but added: "You may have subverted Monarchy, but not recover'd freedom".^[51] In the same month he described France as "a country undone". Burke's first public condemnation of the Revolution occurred on the debate in Parliament on the Army Estimates on 9 February 1790, provoked by praise of the Revolution by Pitt and Fox:

Reflections on the Revolution in France, And on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event. In a Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Paris. By the Right Honourable Edmund Burke.

Since the House had been prorogued in the summer much work was done in France. The French had shewn themselves the ablest architects of ruin that had hitherto existed in the world. In that very short space of time they had completely pulled down to the ground, their monarchy; their church; their nobility; their law; their revenue; their army; their navy; their commerce; their arts; and their manufactures...[there was a danger of] an imitation of the excesses of an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody and tyrannical democracy...[in religion] the danger of their example is no longer from intolerance, but from Atheism; a foul, unnatural vice, foe to all the dignity and consolation of mankind; which seems in France, for a long time, to have been embodied into a faction, accredited, and almost avowed.^[52]

In January 1790 Burke read Dr. Richard Price's sermon of 4 November 1789 to the Revolution Society, called A Discourse On the Love of our Country.^[53] The Revolution Society was founded to commemorate the Glorious Revolution of 1688. In this sermon Price espoused the philosophy of universal "rights of men". Price argued that love of our country "does not imply any conviction of the superior value of it to other countries, or any particular preference of its laws and constitution of government".^[54] Instead, Englishmen should see themselves "more as citizens of the world than as members of any particular community". The debate between Price and Burke was "the classic moment at which two fundamentally different conceptions of national identity were presented to the English public".^[55] Price claimed that the principles of the Glorious Revolution included "the right to choose our own governors, to cashier them for misconduct, and to frame a government for ourselves". Immediately after reading Price's sermon, Burke wrote a draft of what would eventually become the Reflections on the Revolution in France.^[56] On 13 February 1790 there appeared a notice in the press that Burke would shortly publish a pamphlet on the Revolution and its British supporters, however he spent the year revising and expanding it. On 1 November he finally published the Reflections and it was an immediate best-seller.^[57]^[58] Priced at five shillings, it was more expensive than most political pamphlets but by the end of 1790 it had gone through ten printings and sold approximately 17,500 copies. A French translation appeared on 29 November and on 30 November the translator, Pierre-Gaëton Dupont, wrote to Burke saying 2,500 copies had already been sold. The French translation ran to ten printings by June 1791.^[59]

What the Glorious Revolution had meant was important to Burke and his contemporaries, as it had been for the last one hundred years in British politics.^[60] In the Reflections, Burke argued against Price's interpretation of the Glorious Revolution and instead gave a classic Whig defence of it.^[61] Burke argued against the idea of abstract, metaphysical rights of men and instead advocated national tradition:

The Revolution was made to preserve our antient indisputable laws and liberties, and that antient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty. ... The very idea of the fabrication of a new government, is enough to fill us with disgust and horror. We wished at the period of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers. Upon that body and stock of inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate any cyon alien to the nature of the original plant. ... Our oldest reformation is that of Magna Charta. You will see that Sir Edward Coke, that great oracle of our law, and indeed all the great men who follow him, to Blackstone, are industrious to prove the pedigree of our liberties. They endeavour to prove that the ancient charter...were nothing more than a re-affirmance of the still more ancient standing law of the kingdom. ... In the famous law...called the Petition of Right, the parliament says to the king, “Your subjects have inherited this freedom,” claiming their franchises not on abstract principles “as the rights of men,” but as the rights of Englishmen, and as a patrimony derived from their forefathers.^[62]

Burke put forward that "We fear God, we look up with awe to kings; with affection to parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respect to nobility. Why? Because when such ideas are brought before our minds, it is natural to be so affected".^[63] Burke defended prejudice on the grounds that it is "the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages" and superior to individual reason, which is small in comparison. "Prejudice", Burke claimed, "is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit".^[64] Burke criticised social contract theory by claiming that society is indeed a contract, but "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".^[65]

Louis XVI translated the Reflections "from end to end" into French.^[66] Fellow Whig MPs Richard Sheridan and Charles James Fox disagreed with Burke and split with him. Fox thought the Reflections to be "in very bad taste" and "favouring Tory principles".^[67] Other Whigs such as the Duke of Portland and Earl Fitzwilliam privately agreed with Burke but did not wish for a public breach with their Whig colleagues.^[68] Burke wrote on 29 November 1790: "I have received from the Duke of Portland, Lord Fitzwilliam, the Duke of Devonshire, Lord John Cavendish Montagu and a long et cetera of the old Stamina of the Whiggs a most full approbation of the principles of that work and a kind indulgence to the execution".^[69] King George III at a levee on 3 February 1791 said to Burke: "I know that there is no Man who calls himself a Gentleman that must not think himself obliged to you, for you have supported the cause of the Gentlemen".^[70]

Burke's Reflections sparked a pamphlet war. Thomas Paine penned The Rights of Man in 1791 as a response to Burke; Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Men and James Mackintosh wrote Vindiciae Gallicae. Mackintosh was the first to see the Reflections as "the manifesto of a Counter Revolution". Mackintosh would later come to agree with Burke's views, remarking in December 1796 after meeting him, that Burke was "minutely and accurately informed, to a wonderful exactness, with respect to every fact relating to the French Revolution".^[71] Mackintosh later said: "Burke was one of the first thinkers as well as one of the greatest orators of his time. He is without parallel in any age, excepting perhaps Lord Bacon and Cicero; and his works contain an ampler store of political and moral wisdom than can be found in any other writer whatever".^[72]

In February 1791 Burke published A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly in which he claimed the excesses of the Revolution were not accidents but designed from the beginning. He also denounced Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosophical influence of the Revolution, recalling his visit to Britain in 1766: "I had good opportunities of knowing his proceedings almost from day to day and he left no doubt in my mind that he entertained no principle either to influence his heart or to guide his understanding, but vanity".^[73]

These events, and the disagreements which arose regarding them within the Whig party, led to its breakup and to the rupture of Burke's friendship with Fox. In debate in Parliament on Britain's relations with Russia, Fox praised the principles of the Revolution, though Burke was not able to reply at this time as he was "overpowered by continued cries of question from his own side of the House".^[74] When Parliament was debating the Quebec Bill for a constitution for Canada, Fox praised the Revolution and criticised some of Burke's arguments, such as hereditary power. On 6 May 1791, during another debate in Parliament on the Quebec Bill, Burke used the opportunity to answer Fox and condemn the new French Constitution and "the horrible consequences flowing from the French idea of the rights of man".^[75] Burke asserted that those ideas were the antithesis of both the British and the American constitutions.^[76] Burke was interrupted, and Fox intervened to say that Burke should be allowed to carry on with his speech. However a vote of censure was moved against Burke for noticing the affairs of France, which was moved by Lord Sheffield and seconded by Fox.^[77] Pitt made a speech praising Burke, and Fox made a speech both rebuking and complimenting Burke. He questioned the sincerity of Burke, who seemed to have forgotten the lessons he had taught him, quoting from Burke's speeches of fourteen and fifteen years before. Burke replied:

Charles James Fox.

It certainly was indiscreet at any period, but especially at his time of life, to parade enemies, or give his friends occasion to desert him; yet if his firm and steady adherence to the British constitution placed him in such a dilemma, he would risk all, and, as public duty and public experience taught him, with his last words exclaim, "Fly from the French Constitution".^[78]

At this point Fox whispered that there was "no loss of friendship". "I regret to say there is", Burke said, "I have indeed made a great sacrifice; I have done my duty though I have lost my friend. There is something in the detested French constitution that envenoms every thing it touches".^[79] This provoked a reply from Fox, yet he was unable to give his speech for some time since he was overcome with tears and emotion, he appealed to Burke to remember their inalienable friendship but also repeated his criticisms of Burke and uttered "unusually bitter sarcasms".^[80] This only aggravated the rupture between the two men.

Burke was dismayed that some Whigs, instead of reaffirming the principles of the Whig party he laid out in the Reflections, had rejected them in favour of "French principles" and criticised Burke for abandoning Whig principles. Burke wanted to demonstrate his fidelity to Whig principles and feared that acquiescence to Fox and his followers would allow the Whig party to become a vehicle for Jacobinism. Burke knew that many members of the Whig party did not share Fox's views and wanted to provoke them into condemning the French Revolution. Burke wrote that he wanted to represent the whole Whig party "as tolerating, and by a toleration, countenancing those proceedings" so that he could "stimulate them to a public declaration of what every one of their acquaintance privately knows to be...their sentiments".^[81] Therefore on 3 August 1791 Burke published his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, in which he renewed his criticism of the radical revolutionary programmes inspired by the French Revolution and attacked the Whigs who supported them as holding principles contrary to those traditionally held by the Whig party. Burke owned two copies of what has been called "that practical compendium of Whig political theory", The Tryal of Dr. Henry Sacheverell (1710).^[82] Burke wrote of the trial: "It rarely happens to a party to have the opportunity of a clear, authentic, recorded, declaration of their political tenets upon the subject of a great constitutional event like that of the [Glorious] Revolution".^[83] Writing in the third person, Burke asserted in his Appeal:

...that the foundations laid down by the Commons, on the trial of Doctor Sacheverel, for justifying the revolution of 1688, are the very same laid down in Mr. Burke's Reflections; that is to say,—a breach of the original contract, implied and expressed in the constitution of this country, as a scheme of government fundamentally and inviolably fixed in King, Lords and Commons.—That the fundamental subversion of this antient constitution, by one of its parts, having been attempted, and in effect accomplished, justified the Revolution. That it was justified only upon the necessity of the case; as the only means left for the recovery of that antient constitution, formed by the original contract of the British state; as well as for the future preservation of the same government. These are the points to be proved.^[84]

Although Whig grandees like Portland and Fitzwilliam privately agreed with Burke's Appeal, they wished he had used more moderate language. Burke wrote of the its reception: "Not one word from one of our party. They are secretly galled. They agree with me to a title; but they dare not speak out for fear of hurting Fox. ... They leave me to myself; they see that I can do myself justice".^[85] Burke demonstrated his separation from the party on 5 June 1791 by writing to Fitzwilliam, declining money from him.^[86] Eventually most of the Whigs sided with Burke and voted their support for the conservative government of Pitt, which, in response to France's declaration of war against Britain, declared war on the revolutionary government of France in 1793.

In December 1791 Burke sent government ministers his Thoughts on French Affairs where he put forward three main points: no counter-revolution in France would come about by purely domestic causes; the longer the revolutionary government exists the stronger it becomes; and the revolutionary government's interest and aim is to disturb all the other governments of Europe.^[87] Burke, as a Whig, did not wish to see an absolute monarchy again in France after the extirpation of Jacobinism. Writing to an émigré in 1791, Burke expressed his views against a restoration of the ancient régime:

When such a complete convulsion has shaken the State, and hardly left any thing whatsoever, either in civil arrangements, or in the Characters and disposition of mens minds, exactly where it was, whatever shall be settled although in the former persons and upon old forms, will be in some measure a new thing and will labour under something of the weakness as well as other inconveniences of a Change. My poor opinion is that you mean to establish what you call ‘L'ancien Regime,’ If any one means that system of Court Intrigue miscalled a Government as it stood, at Versailles before the present confusions as the thing to be established, that I believe will be found absolutely impossible; and if you consider the Nature, as well of persons, as of affairs, I flatter myself you must be of my opinion. That was tho' not so violent a State of Anarchy as well as the present. If it were even possible to lay things down exactly as they stood, before the series of experimental politicks began, I am quite sure that they could not long continue in that situation. In one Sense of L'Ancien Regime I am clear that nothing else can reasonably be done.^[88]

On 20 June 1794 Burke received a vote of thanks from the Commons for his services in the Hastings trial and immediately resigned his seat, being replaced by his son Richard. However a terrible blow fell upon Burke in the loss of Richard in August 1794, to whom he was tenderly attached, and in whom he saw signs of promise.^[89] The King, whose favour he had gained by his attitude on the French Revolution, wished to make him Lord Beaconsfield, but the death of his son had deprived such an honour of all its attractions, and the only reward he would accept was a pension of £2,500. This pension was attacked by the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale, to whom Burke replied in the Letter to a Noble Lord (1796).^[90]

Burke spent his final years in strong support of the war against France. His last publications were the Letters on a Regicide Peace (October 1796), called forth by the Pitt government's negotiations for peace with France. Burke regarded this as appeasement, injurious to national dignity and honour.^[91] Burke regarded the war with France as ideological, against an "armed doctrine". He wished that France would not be partitioned due to the effect this would have on the balance of power in Europe, and that the war was not against France but against the revolutionaries governing her.^[92] Burke said: "It is not France extending a foreign empire over other nations: it is a sect aiming at universal empire, and beginning with the conquest of France".^[93]

Later life

In November 1795 there was a debate in Parliament on the high price of corn and Burke wrote a memorandum to Pitt on the subject. In December Samuel Whitbread MP introduced a bill giving magistrates the power to fix minimum wages and Fox said he would vote for it. This debate probably led Burke to editing his memorandum as there appeared a notice that Burke would soon publish a letter on the subject to the Secretary of the Board of Agriculture (Arthur Young), but he failed to complete it. These fragments were inserted into the memorandum after his death and published posthumously in 1800 as Thoughts and Details on Scarcity.^[94] In it, Burke expounded "some of the doctrines of political economists bearing upon agriculture as a trade".^[95] Burke criticised policies such as maximum prices and state regulation of wages, and set out what the limits of government should be:

That the State ought to confine itself to what regards the State, or the creatures of the State, namely, the exterior establishment of its religion; its magistracy; its revenue; its military force by sea and land; the corporations that owe their existence to its fiat; in a word, to every thing that is truly and properly public, to the public peace, to the public safety, to the public order, to the public prosperity.^[96]

The economist Adam Smith remarked that Burke was "the only man I ever knew who thinks on economic subjects exactly as I do, without any previous communications having passed between us".^[97]

For more than a year before his death Burke knew that his stomach was "irrecoverably ruined".^[98] After hearing that Burke was nearing death, Fox wrote to Mrs. Burke enquiring after him. Fox received the reply the next day:

Mrs. Burke presents her compliments to Mr. Fox, and thanks him for his obliging inquiries. Mrs. Burke communicated his letter to Mr. Burke, and by his desire has to inform Mr. Fox that it has cost Mr. Burke the most heart-felt pain to obey the stern voice of his duty in rending asunder a long friendship, but that he deemed this sacrifice necessary; that his principles continue the same; and that in whatever of life may yet remain to him, he conceives that he must live for others and not for himself. Mr. Burke is convinced that the principles which he has endeavoured to maintain are necessary to the welfare and dignity of his country, and that these principles can be enforced only by the general persuasion of his sincerity.^[99]

Burke died in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire on 9 July 1797. He was buried in Beaconsfield alongside his son and brother. His wife survived him by nearly fifteen years.

Legacy

Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France was controversial at the time of its publication. But after his death, it was to become his best-known and most influential work. It is understood to be the manifesto in Conservative thought. In the English-speaking world, Burke is regarded by most political experts as the father of modern anglo-conservatism. His 'liberal' conservatism, which opposed governing based on abstract ideas, and preferred 'organic' reform, can be contrasted with the autocratic conservatism of Continental figures such as Joseph de Maistre.

Burke's ideas placing property at the base of human development and the development of society were radical and new at the time. Burke believed that property was essential to human life. Because of his conviction that people desire to be ruled and controlled, the division of property formed the basis for social structure, helping develop control within a property-based hierarchy. He viewed the social changes brought on by property as the natural order of events that should be taking place as the human race progressed. With the division of property and the class system, he also believed that it kept the monarch in check to the needs of the classes beneath the monarch. Since property largely aligned or defined divisions of social class, class too to was seen as natural - part of a social agreement that the setting of persons into different classes is the mutual benefit of all subjects.

His support for Irish Catholics and Indians often led him to be criticised by Tories.^[100] His opposition to British imperialism in Ireland and India and his opposition to French imperialism and radicalism in Europe, made it difficult for Whig or Tory to wholly accept Burke as their own.^[101] In the nineteenth century Burke was praised by both liberals and conservatives. The Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli "was deeply penetrated with the spirit and sentiment of Burke's later writings".^[102] The Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone considered Burke "a magazine of wisdom on Ireland and America" and in his diary recorded: "Made many extracts from Burke—sometimes almost divine".^[103] The Radical MP and anti-Corn Law activist Richard Cobden often praised Burke's Thoughts and Details on Scarcity.^[104] The Liberal historian Lord Acton considered Burke one of the three greatest liberals, along with William Gladstone and Thomas Babington Macaulay.^[105] Macaulay recorded in his diary: "I have now finished reading again most of Burke's works. Admirable! The greatest man since Milton".^[106] The Gladstonian Liberal MP John Morley published two books on Burke (including a biography) and was influenced by Burke, including his views on prejudice.^[107] The Cobdenite Radical Francis Hirst thought Burke deserved "a place among English libertarians, even though of all lovers of liberty and of all reformers he was the most conservative, the least abstract, always anxious to preserve and renovate rather than to innovate. In politics he resembled the modern architect who would restore an old house instead of pulling it down to construct a new one on the site".^[108]

Two contrasting assessments of Burke were offered long after his death by Karl Marx and Winston Churchill. In Das Kapital Marx wrote:

The sycophant—who in the pay of the English oligarchy played the romantic laudator temporis acti against the French Revolution just as, in the pay of the North American colonies at the beginning of the American troubles, he had played the liberal against the English oligarchy—was an out-and-out vulgar bourgeois.

and Winston Churchill in "Consistency in Politics" wrote:

On the one hand [Burke] is revealed as a foremost apostle of Liberty, on the other as the redoubtable champion of Authority. But a charge of political inconsistency applied to this life appears a mean and petty thing. History easily discerns the reasons and forces which actuated him, and the immense changes in the problems he was facing which evoked from the same profound mind and sincere spirit these entirely contrary manifestations. His soul revolted against tyranny, whether it appeared in the aspect of a domineering Monarch and a corrupt Court and Parliamentary system, or whether, mouthing the watch-words of a non-existent liberty, it towered up against him in the dictation of a brutal mob and wicked sect. No one can read the Burke of Liberty and the Burke of Authority without feeling that here was the same man pursuing the same ends, seeking the same ideals of society and Government, and defending them from assaults, now from one extreme, now from the other.

The historian Piers Brendon asserts that Burke laid the moral foundations for the British Empire, epitomised in the trial of Warren Hastings, that was ultimately to be its undoing: when Burke stated that "The British Empire must be governed on a plan of freedom, for it will be governed by no other",^[109] this was "an ideological bacillus that would prove fatal. This was Edmund Burke's paternalistic doctrine that colonial government was a trust. It was to be so exercised for the benefit of subject people that they would eventually attain their birthright—freedom".^[110] As a consequence of this opinion, Burke objected to the opium trade, which he called a "smuggling adventure" and condemned "the great Disgrace of the British character in India".^[111]

The quotation "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing" although often attributed to Burke does not occur in his works or recorded speeches. It first appeared in the 14th edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1968), which incorrectly sourced it to a letter that did not in fact contain the quote.^[112]

Summary

Notes

^ The exact year of his birth is the subject of a great deal of controversy; 1728, 1729 and 1730 have been proposed. His date of birth is also subject to question, a problem compounded by the Julian-Gregorian changeover in 1752, during his lifetime. For a fuller treatment of the question, see Lock, pp. 16-17. Conor Cruise O'Brien (op. cit., p. 14) questions Burke's birthplace as having been in Dublin, arguing in favour of Shanballymore, Co. Cork (in the house of his uncle, James Nagle).
^ Andrew Heywood, Political Ideologies: An Introduction. Third Edition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 74.
^ J. C. D. Clark (ed.), Reflections on the Revolution in France. A Critical Edition (Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 26, n. 13. Hereafter cited as "Clark".
^ Paul Langford, ‘Burke, Edmund (1729/30–1797)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2008, accessed 18 Oct 2008.
^ James Prior, Life of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke. Fifth Edition (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854), p. 1.
^ 'Extracts from Mr. Burke's Table-talk, at Crewe Hall. Written down by Mrs. Crewe, pp. 62.', Miscellanies of the Philobiblon Society. Volume VII (London: Whittingham and Wilkins, 1862-3), pp. 52-3.
^ Clark, p. 26.
^ Clark, p. 25.
^ Prior, p. 45.
^ Jim McCue, Edmund Burke and Our Present Discontents (The Claridge Press, 1997), p. 14.
^ Prior, p. 45.
^ McCue, p. 145.
^ Prior, p. 47.
^ Prior, pp. 52-3.
^ Thomas Wellsted Copeland, 'Edmund Burke and the Book Reviews in Dodsley's Annual Register', Publications of the Modern Language Association, Vol. 57, No. 2. (Jun., 1942), pp. 446-468.
^ Copeland, p. 446.
^ Copeland, p. 446.
^ Private Letters of Edward Gibbon, II (1896) Prothero, P. (ed.). p.251 cited in The Decline and Fall of the British Empire: 1781 - 1998 (2007) Brendon, Piers. Jonathan Cape, London. p.10 ISBN 978-0-224-06222-0
^ McCue, p. 16.
^ "Burke: Select Works of Edmund Burke, Vol. 1, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents: Library of Economics and Liberty". Econlib.org. http://www.econlib.org/library/LFBooks/Burke/brkSWv1c1.html. Retrieved on 2008-09-04.
^ Prior, pp. 124-5.
^ Prior, p. 127 + pp. 340-2.
^ Prior, p. 127.
^ Brendan Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat. The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714–1783 (Allen Lane, 2007), pp. 569-71.
^ The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke. Volume I (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854), pp. 446-8.
^ Prior, p. 175.
^ Prior, pp. 175-6.
^ Prior, p. 176.
^ Langford.
^ Prior, pp. 142-3.
^ Speech on Moving Resolutions for Conciliation with America, March 22, 1775
^ Langford.
^ Langford.
^ F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke. Volume I: 1730–1784 (Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 511 + n. 65.
^ McCue, p. 21.
^ Lock, pp. 511-2.
^ Siraj Ahmed, “The Theater of the Civilized Self: Edmund Burke and the East India Trials.” Representations 78 (2002): 30.
^ Ibid., 30.
^ Russell Kirk, Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered (Peru, IL: Sherwood, Sugden and Company, 1988), 2.
^ Kirk, Edmund Burke, 108.
^ Ibid., 108.
^ Elizabeth D. Samet, “A Prosecutor and a Gentleman: Edmund Burke’s Idiom of Impeachment,” ELH 68, no. 2 (2001): 402.
^ McCue, p. 155.
^ McCue, p. 156.
^ Mithi Mukherjee, “Justice, War, and the Imperium: India and Britain in Edmund Burke’s Prosecutorial Speeches,” Law and History Review 23, no. 3 (2005): 589.
^ Mukherjee, “Justice, War, and the Imperium,” 590.
^ Elizabeth D. Samet, “A Prosecutor and a Gentleman: Edmund Burke’s Idiom of Impeachment,” ELH 68, no. 2 (2001): 406-407.
^ Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire: 1781 - 1998 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), p. 35. ISBN 978-0-224-06222-0
^ Clark, p. 61.
^ Clark, pp. 61-2.
^ Clark, p. 62.
^ Clark, pp. 66-7.
^ A Discourse On the Love of our Country
^ Clark, p. 63.
^ J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1660–1832 (Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 233.
^ Dreyer, Frederick (1978). "The Genesis of Burke's Reflections". The Journal of Modern History 50: 462. doi:10.1086/241734.
^ Clark, p. 68.
^ Prior, p. 311.
^ F. P. Lock, Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), p. 132.
^ Clark, p. 39.
^ Clark, pp. 24-5, p. 34, p. 43.
^ Clark, pp. 181-3.
^ Clark, pp. 250-1.
^ Clark, pp. 251-2.
^ Clark, p. 261.
^ Prior, pp. 313-4.
^ L. G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox (Penguin, 1997), p. 113.
^ Lock, p. 134.
^ Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke. Volume VI (Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 178.
^ Cobban and Smith (eds.), Correspondence of Edmund Burke. Volume VI, p. 239.
^ Clark, p. 49.
^ Prior, p. 491.
^ Prior, pp. 326-7.
^ Prior, p. 327.
^ McCue, p. 23.
^ Frank 'O'Gorman, The Whig Party and the French Revolution (Macmillan, 1967), p. 65.
^ Prior, p. 328.
^ McCue, p. 23.
^ Prior, p. 329.
^ Prior, p. 329.
^ O'Gorman, p. 74.
^ Clark, p. 40.
^ Clark, p. 40.
^ Clark, p. 40.
^ O'Gorman, p. 75.
^ O'Gorman, p. 75.
^ Prior, pp. 357-8.
^ Cobban and Smith (eds.), Correspondence of Edmund Burke. Volume VI, pp. 479-80.
^ Langford.
^ Prior, pp. 425-6.
^ Prior, pp. 439-40.
^ Prior, pp. 443-4.
^ Langford.
^ Robert Eccleshall, English Conservatism since the Restoration (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), p. 75.
^ Prior, p. 419.
^ Eccleshall, p. 77.
^ E. G. West, Adam Smith (New York: Arlington House, 1969), p. 201.
^ Langford.
^ Prior, p. 456
^ J. J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative. Reaction and orthodoxy in Britain, c. 1760–1832 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 90.
^ Sack, p. 95.
^ William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli. Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume I. 1804–1859 (London: John Murray, 1929), p. 310.
^ John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone. Volume III (1880–1898) (London: Macmillan, 1903), p. 280.
^ John Morley, The Life of Richard Cobden (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905), p. 167.
^ Herbert Paul (ed.), Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone (Macmillan, 1914), p. 44.
^ Sir George Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. Volume II (London: Longmans, 1876), p. 377.
^ D. A. Hamer, John Morley. Liberal Intellectual in Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 65.
^ F. W. Hirst, Liberty and Tyranny (London: Duckworth, 1935), pp. 105-6.
^ K. Brittlebank, Tipu Sultan's Search for Legitimacy (Delhi, 1997), p. 27.
^ Brendon, p. xviii.
^ F. G. Whelan, Edmund Burke and India (Pittsburgh, 1996), p. 96.
^ Origins of the triumph-of-evil quote:
- William Safire (1980-03-09). "The triumph of evil". New York Times: pp. SM2.
- William Safire (1981-04-05). "Standing corrected". New York Times Magazine: pp. 16.
- Paul F. Boller; John George (1990). They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195064690.
- Martin Porter (2002). "Four principles of quotation". http://tartarus.org/~martin/essays/burkequote2.html. Retrieved on 2008-06-21.

References

This article incorporates public domain text from: Cousin, John William (1910). A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London, J. M. Dent & sons; New York, E. P. Dutton.
J. C. D. Clark (ed.), Reflections on the Revolution in France. A Critical Edition (Stanford University Press, 2001).
Thomas Wellsted Copeland, 'Edmund Burke and the Book Reviews in Dodsley's Annual Register', Publications of the Modern Language Association, Vol. 57, No. 2. (Jun., 1942), pp. 446–468.
Ian Crowe, 'The career and political thought of Edmund Burke', Journal of Liberal History, Issue 40, Autumn 2003.
Frederick Dreyer, 'The Genesis of Burke's Reflections', The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 50, No. 3. (Sep., 1978), pp. 462–479.
Robert Eccleshall, English Conservatism since the Restoration (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990).
Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot. Seventh Edition (1992).
F. P. Lock, Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985).
F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke. Volume I: 1730–1784 (Clarendon Press, 1999).
F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke. Volume II: 1784–1797 (Clarendon Press, 2006).
Jim McCue, Edmund Burke and Our Present Discontents (The Claridge Press, 1997).
Conor Cruise O'Brien, The Great Melody. A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke (1992). ISBN 0226616517.
James Prior, Life of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke. Fifth Edition (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854).
J. J. Sack, 'The Memory of Burke and the Memory of Pitt: English Conservatism Confronts Its Past, 1806-1829', The Historical Journal, Vol. 30, No. 3. (Sep., 1987), pp. 623–640.
J. J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative. Reaction and orthodoxy in Britain, c. 1760–1832 (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

External links

Find more about Edmund Burke on Wikipedia's sister projects:

Definitions from Wiktionary

Textbooks from Wikibooks
Quotations from Wikiquote
Source texts from Wikisource
Images and media from Commons
News stories from Wikinews

Learning resources from Wikiversity

Burke's works at The Online Library of Liberty
Edmund Burke entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Ian Harris
Edmund Burke Papers at Gettysburg College
Edmund Burke Quotes ISearchQuotations
Reflections on the Revolution in France
Spanish foundation based on Burke's thoughts
Works by Edmund Burke at Project Gutenberg (including his collected works in 12 volumes)

Political offices
Preceded by Richard Rigby	Paymaster of the Forces 1782	Succeeded by Isaac Barré
Preceded by Isaac Barré	Paymaster of the Forces 1783–1784	Succeeded by William Wyndham Grenville
Academic offices
Preceded by Henry Dundas	Rector of the University of Glasgow 1783 – 1785	Succeeded by Robert Cunninghame-Grahame of Gartmore

Figures in the Age of Enlightenment by country

Notable Figures

British Colonies	Benjamin Franklin · Thomas Jefferson · James Madison · Thomas Paine

Prussia and Saxe-Weimar	Immanuel Kant · Gotthold Ephraim Lessing · Johann Gottfried von Herder · Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · J.C.F. von Schiller · Moses Mendelssohn

England	Edward Gibbon · Samuel Johnson · Mary Wollstonecraft · John Locke · Isaac Newton · Thomas Hobbes

Scotland	Joseph Black · James Boswell · Adam Ferguson · David Hume · Thomas Reid · Adam Smith

France	Montesquieu · François Quesnay · Voltaire · Buffon · Jean-Jacques Rousseau · Denis Diderot · Helvétius · Jean le Rond d'Alembert · Baron d'Holbach · Marquis de Sade · Condorcet · Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

Italy	Cesare Beccaria · Giuseppe Averani · Giambattista Vico

Persondata
NAME	Burke, Edmund
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH	January 12, 1729(1729-01-12)
PLACE OF BIRTH	Dublin, Ireland
DATE OF DEATH	July 9, 1797
PLACE OF DEATH	Beaconsfield, England

		Biography. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved. Read more
		Political Dictionary. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics. Copyright © 1996, 2003 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Read more
		Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more
		British History. A Dictionary of British History. Copyright © 2001, 2004 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Read more
		Architecture and Landscaping. A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Copyright © 1999, 2006 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Read more
		Irish Literature Companion. The Concise Oxford Companion to Irish Literature. Copyright © 1996, 2000, 2003 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Read more
		Philosophy Dictionary. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Copyright © 1994, 1996, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Read more
		Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/ Read more
		History 1450-1789. Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World. Copyright © 2004 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more
		History Dictionary. The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Edited by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil. Copyright © 2002 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved. Read more
		Legal Encyclopedia. West's Encyclopedia of American Law. Copyright © 1998 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more
		Quotes By. Copyright © 2008 QuotationsBook.com. All rights reserved. Read more
		Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Edmund Burke". Read more

	British Colonies: India
	British Colonies: North America
	Constitutionalism

	Was edmund burke a loyalist or patriot? Read answer...
	Why did Edmund Burke say All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing? Read answer...
	What was Edmund Burke's reflections on the affects the french revolution had on the monarchy? Read answer...

	Was edmund burke a sympathetic?
	What was the rationale of Edmund Burke?
	When did edmund burke live?

Edmund Burke

Contents

Early life

Member of Parliament

American Revolution

Paymaster of the Forces

India and the Impeachment of Warren Hastings

French Revolution: 1688 versus 1789

Later life

Legacy

Summary

See also

Notes

References

External links