Edmund Burke

1729-1797 · Irish-British · Constitutional Theory, Political Thought, Aesthetics, Rhetoric

It becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

Edmund Burke arrived in London in 1750 to read law and abandoned it for letters, then politics — an Irish-born outsider, son of a Protestant father and Catholic mother, who became the greatest parliamentary orator of his age and, eventually, the fiercest critic of the French Revolution in the English-speaking world. Before any of that he wrote a strange and brilliant book, "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful" (1757), which tied the sublime to terror, vastness, and obscurity, and the beautiful to smoothness and delicacy.

Topics Edmund Burke addresses

• the French Revolution
• prescription and prescriptive rights
• prejudice as inherited wisdom
• the sublime and the beautiful
• natural rights critique
• the partnership of the living, the dead, and the unborn
• party government and party principle
• spirit of conquest
• manners and civilization
• the East India Company and empire
• the Warren Hastings impeachment
• conciliation with America
• Protestant Ascendancy
• the consistency question
• chivalry and the age of elegance
• mixed government and constitutional balance
• property and prescription
• the social contract critique
• reform versus revolution
• Jacobinism and the regicide republic
• law of nature and nations
• representation and virtual representation
• religious toleration
• the British constitution

Questions to put to Edmund Burke

The French Revolution and Jacobinism

• What did you see in the French Revolution that made you oppose it so fiercely?
• How is the French Revolution different from the American Revolution?
• What do you mean when you call the revolutionaries 'sophisters, economists, and calculators'?
• Why do you think the Revolution couldn't be accommodated through negotiation or reform?
• What's at stake for you in the critique of abstract rights?
• Can you explain your elegy for Marie Antoinette and what chivalry meant to you?

Prescription, Prejudice, and the Partnership of Generations

• What do you mean by prescription, and why do you think it matters more than abstract rights?
• How do you defend using 'prejudice' as a positive term?
• Can you explain your idea of society as a partnership between the living, the dead, and the unborn?
• Why do you think inherited institutions contain more wisdom than individual reason?
• How do prescriptive rights actually work in practice?

Empire, India, and the Law of Nations

• Why did you spend over a decade prosecuting Warren Hastings?
• How do you argue that natural law applies to colonial government?
• What was wrong with the East India Company's administration of Bengal?
• How do you respond to the claim that you're imposing European standards on Indian governance?
• What's the difference between legitimate empire and the spirit of conquest?

America and Constitutional Resistance

• Why did you support the American colonists against Parliament?
• What made the American resistance legitimate in your view?
• How do you distinguish the Americans' constitutional claims from abstract natural rights?
• What did you mean when you called the Americans' liberty 'the spirit of the English constitution'?
• Why did conciliation fail, and what should Britain have done differently?

Ireland, Catholic Emancipation, and the Spirit of Conquest

• How do you see the Popery Laws and Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland?
• Why do you call the Irish Protestant regime a 'spirit of conquest in legal form'?
• What's your argument for Catholic emancipation?
• How do you respond to the claim that extending rights to Catholics would threaten Protestant security?
• Why do you oppose Irish legislative independence?

The Sublime, the Beautiful, and Political Aesthetics

• What's the difference between the sublime and the beautiful in your aesthetics?
• How does terror produce the experience of the sublime?
• Why did you connect the sublime with obscurity and vastness?
• How does your aesthetic theory show up in your political writing?
• What role do manners play in making power tolerable?

Converse with Edmund Burke on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Edmund Burke's own writing, cited to the page.