Edmund Burke (1729–97) Dublin-born UK statesman and political theorist. Burke is often seen as the father of the Anglo-American conservative tradition. Although he was a Whig politician, and expressed sympathetic towards the American Revolution of 1776, he earned his reputation though the staunch criticism of the 1789 French Revolution that he developed in Reflections on the Revolution in France ([1790] 1968).
The central themes in Burke’s writings are a distrust of abstract principle and the need for political action to be rooted in tradition and experience. He was deeply opposed to the attempt to recast French politics in accordance with the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity, arguing that wisdom resides largely in history and, in particular, in institutions and practices that have survived though time. Burke was nevertheless not a reactionary: he held that the French monarchy had been partly responsible for its own fate, as it had refuse to ’change in order to conserve’, a core feature of the pragmatic conservatism with which he is associated. He had a gloomy view of government, recognizing that, although it may prevent evil, it rarely promotes good. He also supported the classical economics of Adam Smith (see p. 338), regarding market forces as an example of ’natural law’, and supported a principle of representation that stresses the need for representatives to use their own mature judgement. Burke’s political views were further developed in works such as An Appeal from New to Old Whigs (1791) and Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796–7).
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