Showing results for "Edmund Burke" in History

This famous treatise began as a letter to a young French friend who asked Edmund Burke’s opinion on whether France’s new ruling class would succeed in creating a better order. Doubtless the friend expected a favorable reply, but Burke was suspicious of certain tendencies of the Revolution from the start and perceived that the revolutionaries were actually subverting the true "social order". Blending history with principle and graceful imagery with profound practical maxims, this book is one of the most influential political treatises in the history of the world.

Russell Kirk has ingeniously combined into a living whole the private Burke and the public Burke. He gives us a fresh assessment of Burke, a statesman enjoying even greater influence today than in his own time. He lucidly unfolds Burke's philosophy, showing how it revealed itself in concrete historical situations in the 18th century and how Burke, through his philosophy, "speaks to our age".

Written in the form of a letter to a Frenchman, Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is an impassioned attack on the French Revolution and its hasty destruction of the Church, the old elites, and the Crown. Burke tackles the new republic and its allegiance to principles such as liberty and equality, as well as its failure to recognize the complexities of human nature, society, and wisdom accumulated over time, contending that gradual change and adjustment is far better than immediate upheaval.

History is often concentrated into short bursts of change, with long periods of shifting before and waves of alteration afterwards. Nowhere is this more obvious than the thirty year interregnum between the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. In this period, three figures stand tall; Pitt, the elder stateman who saw the need for genuine constitutionalism; Burke, the consummate parliamentarian, speaking for the glory of empire; and Robespierre, the legendary and controversial frontman of the French Revolution.

In eighteenth-century Britain, Edmund Burke and Charles Fox made common political cause for twenty-five years. They supported the rebellious American colonies, attacked the British slave trade, defended religious liberty, and attempted to shield Britain's public credit from the crisis-prone East India Company. The two men did not share social position, a way of life, a political legacy, or even a generation—but improbably, they were friends.

This speech by Edmund Burke was delivered 22 March 1775. He submitted a set of resolutions affirming the principle of autonomy for the American colonies with the view of preventing their defection. Burke concludes the speech by exalting the ties of common descent, common institutions, and common sentiment as the strongest links of empire. The cogency of Burke’s arguments and the depth of his political wisdom were ignored by the House of Commons and his resolutions were defeated.