Edmund Burke

Works

• 1757A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

  Distinguishes the beautiful, which pleases through smallness, smoothness and delicacy and arouses love, from the sublime, which arises from obscurity, vastness and power and produces a “delightful horror” rooted in self-preservation.

• 1790Reflections on the Revolution in France

  Written as a letter to a young Frenchman: against the revolution’s “rights of man” Burke defends inheritance, religion, property and “prejudice” as the accumulated wisdom of generations, and predicts that the revolution will end in violence and military rule.

Position

Burke is on the map for two works that shaped different fields. The “Philosophical Enquiry” (1757) gave a new account of aesthetic experience: the beautiful, marked by smallness, smoothness and gentle variation, arouses love; the sublime – vastness, obscurity, power, infinity – arises from terror held at a safe distance, a “delightful horror” connected with self-preservation. Kant discussed it in the “Critique of Judgment” as an empirical, physiological treatment of a subject that he wanted to ground transcendentally. In politics Burke became the classic critic of revolutionary rationalism. The “Reflections” (1790) argued that rights are not abstract possessions of human beings as such but an inheritance, secured by institutions that have grown over generations; society is a partnership “between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”, and “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation”. Prudence, “prejudice” in the sense of inherited judgement, and reform instead of reconstruction are his watchwords. Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine answered at once, Marx dismissed him as a paid apologist of the oligarchy, and Arendt took up his critique of abstract human rights. Burke is regarded as a founder of modern conservatism; his positions on empire, India and slavery are debated and set out under “Context & critique”.

Life & context

Edmund Burke was born in Dublin on 12 January 1729 (some sources give 1730), the son of a Protestant attorney and a Catholic mother. He studied at Trinity College Dublin and in 1750 went to London to read law at the Middle Temple, but turned to writing. His “Philosophical Enquiry” into the sublime and the beautiful appeared in 1757, and from 1758 he edited the Annual Register. In 1765 he became private secretary to the Marquess of Rockingham and entered Parliament, where he sat for almost thirty years as a leading Whig. He spoke for conciliation with the American colonies and for relief of Irish Catholics, and against abuses in the rule of the East India Company, leading the impeachment of the former governor-general Warren Hastings from 1786 to 1795. His “Reflections on the Revolution in France” (1790) split the Whigs. He died at his estate near Beaconsfield on 9 July 1797.

Further main works

• A Vindication of Natural Society (1756)
• Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770)
• Speech on Conciliation with America (1775)
• An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791)
• Letters on a Regicide Peace (1795–97)