reflection on revolution in france burke

Such emphases were not unexpected from a writer closely involved with former prime minister David Cameron’s vision of a “Big Society,” and they reappear in the introduction to this volume. Norman’s own study, Edmund Burke: The First Conservative, published in 2013, is noteworthy particularly for how the author’s experience as a scholar and practicing politician drives an analytical shift in the topography of Burke’s thought, sharpening the focus on political parties and representation, and contrasting his subject’s elevating, fundamental conception of the “human self a social self” with the corrosive effects of liberal individualism. This volume, with its sharply focused introduction and impressively thorough chronology, notes, and index, weighs in at a little over one thousand pages, and it is as weighty in conception and scholarship, providing a valuable measure of the strides made in Burke studies over recent decades. With excellent timing, as Oxford University Press’s nine-volume edition of Edmund Burke’s writings and speeches reaches completion after 34 years, Jesse Norman, an academic and member of Parliament for Britain’s Conservative Party, has presented an updated and considerably expanded selection of Burke’s writings for the famous Everyman’s Library. Making a case for upholding established rights and customs, and advocating incremental reform rather than radical revolutionary change, Burke’s writings have profoundly influenced modern democracies up to the present day. He wrote at a time of great change, against the backdrop of the revolt of the American colonies, the expansion of the British Empire, the collapse of Ireland, and the French Revolution. Burke argued passionately in support of the American revolutionaries and in equally impassioned opposition to the horrors of the unfolding French Revolution. Philosopher, statesman, and founder of conservatism, Burke was a dazzling orator and a visionary theorist who spent his long political career fighting abuses of power. Accompanying his influential masterpiece, Reflections on the Revolution in France, is a selection of pamphlets, speeches, public letters, private correspondence and, for the first time, two important and previously uncollected early essays.

The most important works of Edmund Burke, the greatest political thinker of the past three centuries, are gathered here in one comprehensive volume.

Reflection on revolution in france burke