Now more than ever, we should revisit Edmund Burke’s thinking on political parties, since our modern party system seems to be entering a period of radical reconstruction, the results of which will either reinvigorate liberal democracy or bury it… With excellent timing, as Oxford University Press’s nine-volume edition of Edmund Burke’s writings and speeches reaches [...]
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Ian Crowe as he explores the thought of T.S. Eliot, Edmund Burke on the permanent things. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher For the present is the point at which time touches eternity. —C.S. Lewis[1] It was in 1939, in The Idea of a [...]
Edmund Burke, Volume 1, 1730-1784, by F.P. Lock The Portable Edmund Burke, ed. Isaac Kramnick On Empire, Liberty and Reform: Speeches and Letters, Edmund Burke, ed. David Bromwich F.P. Lock’s Edmund Burke is the best biography of Burke to have come out in recent times, and it is all the more impressive for not trying to be what it [...]
The scholarly journal Studies in Burke and His Time appeared originally, under the title The Burke Newsletter, in 1959. In 2002, the newly established Edmund Burke Society of America decided to revive the title, which had by then been in abeyance for some years, and, since that time, three issues (2005, 2007, and 2011) have [...]
Two hundred and twenty years ago, in January 1794, one of the more illuminating, but also neglected, episodes of the French Revolution was set in motion in the Vendée and surrounding area of west-central France (broadly, the modern-day administrative region of Pays de la Loire). Under the leadership of the Revolutionary general Louis-Marie Turreau, six [...]
Edmund Burke. Volume II: 1784-1797 by F.P. Lock The two volumes of F.P. Lock’s biography of Edmund Burke span more than one thousand pages and, by the author’s own calculation, over twenty years of research. In structure, method, and argument, they constitute a work of extraordinary consistency and erudition, and one that, in its use of [...]
Edmund Burke: The First Conservative, by Jesse Norman In Edmund Burke: The First Conservative, Jesse Norman, a British Conservative party MP and doctoral graduate in philosophy, lays out a bold and engaging case for his subject as “one of the seminal thinkers of the present age”. Owing in part, no doubt, to the author’s profile in [...]
Edmund Burke For the present is the point at which time touches eternity.-C.S. Lewis[1] It was in 1939, in The Idea of a Christian Society, that T.S. Eliot defended what he called “the permanent things” against a world that appeared drunk on the politics of revolution and “change.” Eliot’s purpose was not a [...]
Edmund Burke It took Edmund Burke a very little time to decide that French Revolutionary philosophy posed a massive threat to civilization and social stability throughout Europe. By the end of his life, eight years after the storming of the Bastille, his fears of Jacobin contagion had led him to ask for a [...]