Edmund Burke (January 12, 1729 – July 9, 1797) is known as the “modern founder of political conservatism”. He was a philosopher, an author, an orator, a statesman and served in the House of Commons of Great Britain as a member of the Whig Party for many years. Later, his opposition to the French Revolution led to him becoming the leading figure of the conservative Whigs also known as the “Old Whigs”.

The Great Debate: Edmund Burke vs. Thomas Paine

By |2024-02-08T20:22:39-06:00February 8th, 2024|Categories: Books, Edmund Burke, Timeless Essays|

Yuval Levin’s “The Great Debate” does a valuable service in working toward promoting more reflection in our political debates, by examining the all-too-often unspoken assumptions implicit in our political discourse. The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right, by Yuval Levin (296 pages, Basic Books, 2013) When Russell Kirk [...]

Edmund Burke: Old Whig

By |2024-01-11T18:34:15-06:00January 11th, 2024|Categories: American Founding, Classical Liberalism, Edmund Burke, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

In the Whig view to which Edmund Burke subscribed, the validity of law is independent of its source; who makes a rule, whether the people or a tyrant, is irrelevant. The Old-Whig Burke denied that the exercise of will, whether arbitrary or rational, has anything to do with the determination of law. Edmund Burke, the passionate defender [...]

The End of Literature

By |2024-01-10T18:21:33-06:00January 10th, 2024|Categories: Benjamin Lockerd, Edmund Burke, Education, Featured, Liberal Learning, Timeless Essays|

There have been theories about literature nearly as long as there has been literature, beginning with Plato and Aristotle. But the ancient theorists all assumed that they were thinking about something that had its own functions and ends, which they might help to explain. When the new professors think of theory it is exclusively more [...]

A Requiem for Manners

By |2023-08-30T17:46:50-05:00August 30th, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Conservatism, Culture, Edmund Burke, History, Robert E. Lee, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Timeless Essays, Virtue|

Today the idea that the cultivation of manners should be an essential part of one’s education has been lost almost entirely. Proof of the demise of manners is all around us, and thus one of the main pillars of civilization is crumbling before us. On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee met General Ulysses [...]

Edmund Burke & the English Revolution

By |2023-08-15T18:01:08-05:00August 15th, 2023|Categories: Community, Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Revolution, Timeless Essays|Tags: , |

In his “Reflections,” Edmund Burke constructs a powerful myth of English history, defending the consolidated results of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century. In his poem “Blood and the Moon,” Yeats writes of “haughtier-headed Burke that proved the state a tree.” Edmund Burke would have relished the line, having proved nothing of the sort. [...]

Burke on the Inhumanity of the French Revolution

By |2023-07-13T21:23:13-05:00July 13th, 2023|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Edmund Burke, History, Politics, Revolution, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

Whatever its own stated purposes and desired ends, the French Revolution never sought to better the condition of humanity or even of France. The Revolutionaries, as Edmund Burke stressed, were radicals, seeking civil war not only in France, but also in all of Christendom. The grand Anglo-Irish statesman, Edmund Burke (1729-1797) spent much of his [...]

The Democracy of the Unborn

By |2023-01-30T14:21:36-06:00January 30th, 2023|Categories: Abortion, Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Liberalism, Timeless Essays, Tradition|

Society has been reduced to those living in the present; but in being reduced, it has excluded the democracy of the dead and unborn. We, in the present, must fight for this most obscure of all classes. In the abortion debate, one of the pro-choice arguments is based on the idea of “personhood.” Personhood is [...]

Edmund Burke and the Dignity of the Human Person

By |2023-07-09T01:02:22-05:00January 11th, 2023|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Edmund Burke, Imagination, Moral Imagination, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

Edmund Burke believed that one must see the human being not for what he is, or the worst that is within him, but rather as clothed in the “wardrobe of moral imagination,” a glimpse of what the person could be and is, by God, meant to be. Though we correctly remember Edmund Burke as the [...]

Burke’s “Scattered Hints Concerning Philosophy and Learning”

By |2022-12-05T19:55:35-06:00December 5th, 2022|Categories: Edmund Burke, Education, Philosophy|

Born in 1729, Edmund Burke was in his twenties during the 1750s. Some of his notes from that period were collected in a slim volume called A Note-Book of Edmund Burke, edited by H.V.F. Somerset, published in 1957. An essay in the volume is “Several Scattered Hints Concerning Philosophy and Learning Collected Here from My [...]

On Being Conservative

By |2022-08-23T14:48:35-05:00August 23rd, 2022|Categories: Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Family, Jane Austen, Marriage, Philosophy, Robert Nisbet, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|

To be a conservative is first and foremost to defend or to conserve something good: to protect family, neighborhood, local community, and region. Louis de Bonald Of the many attempts to define conservatism in recent decades, one of the most compelling is Robert Nisbet’s: “The essence of this body of ideas is the protection [...]

Did Edmund Burke Support the American Revolution?

By |2022-07-08T16:52:38-05:00July 8th, 2022|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Bradley J. Birzer, Conservatism, Declaration of Independence, Edmund Burke, History, Independence Day, Robert Nisbet, Russell Kirk, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

Many conservatives have assumed that Edmund Burke was opposed to the American Revolution. It is, to my mind, an erroneous assumption. “Burke broke his agentship and went publicly silent on the American cause once war broke out,” Robert Nisbet claimed in his most definitive analysis of Edmund Burke, written and published in 1985. His fellow [...]

Prudence as Excellence: Edmund Burke, Abraham Lincoln, & the Problem of Greatness

By |2022-03-30T09:12:00-05:00March 29th, 2022|Categories: Abraham Lincoln, Edmund Burke, Virtue|Tags: |

In a democratic age, how can greatness come to be? Edmund Burke offers a way forward: prudence as a form of excellence. Our conference is subtitled “equality and the survival of heroism.” My concern is the survival of prudence amid the longing for heroism—in particular, the misalignment between ambition and circumstance, the persistent pursuit of [...]

Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, & the Birth of Right and Left

By |2022-01-09T15:55:37-06:00January 9th, 2022|Categories: Books, Bruce Frohnen, Edmund Burke, Featured, Timeless Essays|

Do you wish to understand the birth of right and left? Examine the debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine occasioned by the French Revolution. The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left by Yuval Levin, (304 pages, Basic Books, 2014) Those seeking a deeper understanding of the roots of contemporary [...]

The Essence of Conservatism

By |2021-10-19T08:21:07-05:00October 18th, 2021|Categories: Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Essential, History, RAK, Russell Kirk, The Imaginative Conservative, Timeless Essays, Tradition|

Everything worth conserving is menaced in our generation. Mere unthinking negative opposition to the current of events, clutching in despair at what we still retain, will not suffice in this age. A conservatism of instinct must be reinforced by a conservatism of thought and imagination. A friend of mine, whom we shall call Miss Worth, fell [...]

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