Edmund Burke (January 12, 1729 – July 9, 1797) is known as the “modern founder of political conservatism”. He was a philosopher, an author, an orator, a statesman and served in the House of Commons of Great Britain as a member of the Whig Party for many years. Later, his opposition to the French Revolution led to him becoming the leading figure of the conservative Whigs also known as the “Old Whigs”.

Harry Jaffa and the Demise of the Old Republic

By |2019-04-07T10:50:06-05:00October 31st, 2017|Categories: American Republic, Conservatism, Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Edmund Burke, Featured, Foreign Affairs, History, Political Philosophy, Politics, Tradition|

Harry Jaffa’s constitutional history of America’s late-eighteenth-century is not credible nor, in keeping with many of his own pronouncements, is it conservative… The writing of history, as we have learned from authors as diverse as Thucydides, Voltaire, Nietzsche, Butterfield, Collingwood, and Oakeshott can and has been done in strikingly different ways while serving radically different [...]

Edmund Burke: Champion of Ordered Liberty

By |2020-01-09T10:37:21-06:00October 23rd, 2017|Categories: Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Liberty|Tags: |

Edmund Burke’s greatest service to liberty was to remind the world that freedom is anchored in a transcendent moral order and that for liberty to flourish, social and per­sonal order and morality must exist, and radical innovations must be shunned… Edmund Burke (1729-1797) is rightly renowned as the father of conservatism. In this bicentennial year of [...]

The Spirit of American Constitutionalism

By |2021-04-29T10:15:11-05:00September 24th, 2017|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Constitution, Edmund Burke, Featured, Federalist Papers, John Dickinson, Timeless Essays|

The Constitution described by the Letters of Fabius is a model of prudence and moderation, based not primarily on theoretical arguments, but on experience and an extensive knowledge of history. Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Gregory S. Ahern as he explores how John Dickinson’s Fabius Letters influenced the Constitutional Convention. —W. [...]

Edmund Burke and the Principle of Order

By |2023-04-13T12:06:37-05:00September 8th, 2017|Categories: Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Essential, Featured, Ordered Liberty, RAK, Russell Kirk|

Edmund Burke’s principle of order is an anticipatory refutation of utilitarianism, positivism, and pragmatism, an affirmation of that reverential view of society which may be traced through Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, the Roman jurisconsults, the Schoolmen, Richard Hooker, and lesser thinkers. It is this; but it is more. What Matthew Arnold called “an epoch of concentration” [...]

Edmund Burke Dispassionately Considered

By |2021-05-25T16:07:56-05:00August 23rd, 2017|Categories: Books, Edmund Burke, Featured, RAK, Russell Kirk|

Edmund Burke transcends party struggles and the questions of his hour; and, though suspicious from first to last of abstract doctrine and theoretic dogma, he will endure not for what he did, but for what he perceived. Burke and the Nature of Politics: The Age of the French Revolution by Carl B. Cone (527 pages, University [...]

Edmund Burke: Old Whig

By |2021-04-22T19:27:21-05:00August 13th, 2017|Categories: American Founding, Christian Humanism, Classical Liberalism, Edmund Burke, Philosophy, Timeless Essays|

Edmund Burke, like his Whig forebears, believed in the existence of a higher moral law to which all valid positive law must conform, a universal law which manifests itself in diverse concrete forms, in the great variety of legal codes and customs that constitute particular cultural traditions. Edmund Burke, the passionate defender of the “ancient [...]

What If? The Moral Imagination of Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast”

By |2017-08-31T12:02:36-05:00July 27th, 2017|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Charity, Christianity, Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Film, Moral Imagination, Senior Contributors|

The story of Beauty and the Beast is the oldest story in the Christian world. It’s the story about love, sacrifice, and redemption… Several nights ago, I reluctantly watched Disney’s 2017 live version of Beauty and the Beast. I must admit three things before I get into the heart of this essay. First, I’ve never [...]

Europe’s Immigration Crisis & the Vindication of Edmund Burke

By |2019-09-12T13:52:00-05:00July 2nd, 2017|Categories: Edmund Burke, Europe, History, Immigration, Muslim|

Edmund Burke believed in change, knowing that a nation unwilling or unable to change would collapse. However, he believed in prudence, moderation, moral restraint, and gradual implementation with reflective assessment. Had modern Europeans believed in the same things, they would not be in this predicament now… “All circumstances taken together, the French Revolution is the [...]

“Revisions and Dissents”: Touching Upon Present and Past

By |2021-05-27T16:05:09-05:00June 27th, 2017|Categories: Books, Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Featured, Paul Gottfried, Russell Kirk|

As Paul Gottfried explains in “Revisions and Dissents,” the real division between right and left cuts not between finance capitalists and welfare statists, but “between those who wish to preserve inherited communities and their sources of authority and those who wish to ‘reform’ or abolish these arrangements.” Complaints about Donald Trump’s “divisiveness” strike Paul Gottfried [...]

Newman & Dawson Against Liberalism

By |2021-05-24T16:03:42-05:00June 2nd, 2017|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Edmund Burke, Liberalism, St. John Henry Newman|

Christopher Dawson greatly admired John Henry Newman, for he understood more clearly than any of his contemporaries the coming war of the Church against the ideologues bred by the French Revolution, utilitarianism, and secularization. As Christopher Dawson attempted to discover the sources of the ideological disruptions of the twentieth-century as well as solutions to the [...]

The French Revolution: Did Edmund Burke Lose His Mind?

By |2022-07-13T18:29:49-05:00May 24th, 2017|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Edmund Burke, Edmund Burke series by Bradley Birzer, History, Liberty, Revolution|

Thomas Paine and others charged that Edmund Burke unhesitatingly defended the French monarchy, monarchy in general, corruption in the Church, and oppressive governments, as long as they provided stability. But is this true? When challenging the “coffee-house” radicals who were so gleefully leading the French into generations of ruin through their mad abstractions, Edmund Burke [...]

Conservatism and Ideological Politics

By |2021-05-27T16:27:13-05:00May 14th, 2017|Categories: Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Featured, Russell Kirk, Timeless Essays|

The genuine conservative is not motivated by fear, avarice, or power. The very constitution of his being is directed toward the perfection of his soul. Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Glen A. Sproviero as he explores the distinction between genuine conservatism and ideology.  —W. Winston Elliott III, [...]

Russell Kirk on the Variety and Mystery of Human Existence

By |2022-06-20T20:06:12-05:00May 10th, 2017|Categories: Alexis de Tocqueville, American Founding, Edmund Burke, John Adams, Russell Kirk, Ted McAllister, The Conservative Mind, Tradition|Tags: |

Too often the public conversation about universal truths divides along rather sterile ideological lines. Russell Kirk’s great warning is that this is not really a battle of ideas, understood abstractly, but a battle of sentiments or affections… Since the nation’s founding, a salutary tension has informed American political thought—a tension between the abstract, universal truths [...]

Europe in Eclipse?

By |2017-04-20T21:32:52-05:00April 20th, 2017|Categories: Edmund Burke, Europe, Foreign Affairs, Politics|

Having cast off Christianity, Europe now lacks a spiritual identity and united purpose. Absent these essential characteristics, a culture becomes stale and decadent, and turns to political institutions as the sole guarantor of peace, welfare, and security… The British government’s invocation of Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty on March 29, formally began the United [...]

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