Edmund Burke

Lore & Background

Burke was a proponent of underpinning virtues with manners in society and of the importance of religious institutions for the moral stability and good of the state. These views were expressed in his satirical work, A Vindication of Natural Society (1756). He also criticised the actions of the British government towards the American colonies, including its taxation policies. Burke supported the rights of the colonists to resist metropolitan authority, although he opposed the attempt to achieve independence. He is particularly remembered for his long-term support for Catholic emancipation, his opposition to the French Revolution, and leading the attempt at impeachment of Warren Hastings from the East India Company. In 1774, Burke was elected a member of Parliament for Bristol. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Burke asserted that the revolution was destroying the fabric of good society and traditional institutions of state and society, and he condemned the persecution of the Catholic Church that resulted from it. This led to him becoming a popular leading figure within the conservative faction of the Whig Party, which he dubbed the Old Whigs as opposed to the pro-French Revolution New Whigs led by Charles James Fox. Burke had a close relation with some of the public intellectuals of his time, including Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, and Joshua Reynolds. In his debates, he often argued against unrestricted ruling power and the importance of political parties having the ability to maintain a principled opposition that was capable of preventing abuse of power. In the 19th century, Burke was praised by both conservatives and liberals. Subsequently, in the 20th century, he became widely regarded, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom, as the philosophical founder of conservatism, along with his French ultra-royalist and ultramontanist counterpart Joseph de Maistre.

Reader's Guide

Burke was born in Dublin, Ireland. His mother Mary, née Nagle, was a Roman Catholic who hailed from a County Cork family and a cousin of the Catholic educator Nano Nagle, whereas his father Richard, a successful solicitor, was a member of the Church of Ireland. It remains unclear whether this is the same Richard Burke who converted from Catholicism. Burke adhered to his father's faith and remained a practising Anglican throughout his life, unlike his sister Juliana, who was brought up as and remained a Roman Catholic. Later, his political enemies repeatedly accused him of having been educated at the Jesuit College of St Omer, near Calais, France; and of harbouring secret Catholic sympathies at a time when membership in the Catholic Church would disqualify him from public office per Penal Laws in Ireland. As Burke told Frances Crewe, this was false. After being elected to the House of Commons, Burke took the required oath of allegiance and abjuration, the oath of supremacy and the declaration against transubstantiation. As a child, Burke sometimes spent time away from the unhealthy air of Dublin with his mother's family near Killavullen in the Blackwater Valley in County Cork. He received his early education at a Quaker school in Ballitore, County Kildare, and possibly like his cousin Nano Nagle at a hedge school near Killavullen. In 1744, Burke started at Trinity College Dublin, a Protestant establishment which up until 1793 did not permit Catholics to take degrees. In 1747, he set up a debating society, Edmund Burke's Club, which in 1770 merged with Trinity's Historical Club to form the College Historical Society. Burke graduated from Trinity in 1748. Burke's father wanted him to read Law and with this in mind, he went to London in 1750, where he entered the Middle Temple, before soon giving up legal study to travel in Continental Europe. After eschewing the Law, he pursued a livelihood through writing. His first published work was A Vindication of Natural Society (1756). In 1757, Burke published a treatise on aesthetics titled A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. On 25 February 1757, Burke signed a contract with Robert Dodsley to write a history of England, but he completed the work only to the year 1216 and stopped; it was not published until after Burke's death. During the year following that contract, Burke

Did You Know?

• Burke was elected a member of Parliament for Bristol in 1774.
• The Annual Register was first published in 1758.
• Burke's first published work was A Vindication of Natural Society (1756), a satire of Bolingbroke's deistic arguments.
• Burke led the attempt at impeachment of Warren Hastings from the East India Company.

Notable Quotes (Wikiquote)

"The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own." — Edmund Burke "A definition may be very exact, and yet go but a very little way towards informing us of the nature of the thing defined." — Edmund Burke "The first and the simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind is Curiosity." — Edmund Burke "The person who grieves, suffers his passion to grow upon him; he indulges it, he loves it; but this never happens in the case of actual pain, which no man ever willingly endured for any considerable time." — Edmund Burke