BURKE, EDMUND

British statesman and author whose writings are a main source of modern Anglo-Saxon political thought; b. Dublin, probably Jan. 12, 1729, N.S.; d. Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, July 8, 1797. As children of a Protestant attorney father and a Catholic mother, Edmund and his brothers were raised as Anglicans, their sister as a Catholic. Jane Nugent, whom Burke married in 1756, may have been a Catholic like her father; she conformed to the Church of England on marrying Burke.

Burke attended Trinity College, Dublin, from 1744 to 1750. He began to study law at the Middle Temple in London in 1750, but soon abandoned it to follow a literary career. In 1756 he published two works that attracted attention: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful expressed a rather crudely sensistic psychology, but had an influence on aesthetic theory in England and on the Continent; A Vindication of Natural Society was a parody of Bolingbroke satirizing the individualistic rationalism that Burke was to combat all his life. In 1757 he became editor of Dodsley's Annual Register, a review of the outstanding events of each year.

In 1765 the Marquis of Rockingham, who had become first lord of the treasury, made Burke his private secretary. In the same year Burke got a seat in the Commons from Lord Verney's pocket borough of Wendover. For almost 30 years he sat in Parliament, almost always in opposition after 1766, since the Rockingham Whigs were not in favor with George III. He was elected from Bristol in 1774, an occasion he used in his Speech to the Electors at Bristol to expound a theory of representation that has become classic. Feeling that an attempt at reelection in 1780 was useless, he withdrew and was then made member for Rockingham's nomination borough of Malton. He held that seat until his retirement in 1794.

Position in British politics. Burke was the philosopher and spokesman for the Whig aristocracy. His

Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770) exposed what the Whigs regarded as a dangerous increase in the royal power. His administrative reform plan, which he introduced in 1780, was designed to reduce crown influence in Parliament by eliminating part of the royal patronage. The East India Bill of 1783, of which Burke was at least part author, had the same object among its purposes. At the same time, Burke opposed reform of the representation in the House of Commons. Centuries of failure to reapportion representation had produced a system that allowed decayed villages to continue sending two members to Parliament while thriving new towns had none. Burke saw any change as a threat to his ideal of a constitution that maintained a careful balance among the crown, the great landowners, and a random sample of the gentry and merchants. The natural-rights ideology in terms of which parliamentary reform was usually advocated did nothing to commend reform to him, as can be seen in his Speech on the Reform of the Representation in the House of Commons (1782).

Generally, however, Burke was a moderate reformer who advocated criminal law reform, relaxation of the penal laws against Catholics and debtors, and the gradual abolition of the slave trade. He never favored the dissolution of the British Empire. Rather, he sought to bind the American colonies and the Kingdom of Ireland to Britain by ties of fair treatment and mutual interest. In his great speeches on American Taxation (1774) and Conciliation with the Colonies (1775) he upheld Britain's right to tax the colonies but denounced the attempt to exercise that right as folly. Burke's policy in regard to India was influenced by considerations of party politics and by the financial interests of his relatives. But a genuine moral indignation grew in him as he delved more deeply into Indian affairs. The impeachment of the governor-general of India, Warren Hastings, with Burke as chief prosecutor, failed. But Burke's flaming oratory inspired the British public's concern for the fate of colonial peoples in the 19th century.

Opposition to the French Revolution. Burke showed his philosophical position most fully in his attack on the french revolution, which he distrusted almost from its beginning. His masterpiece, Reflections on the Revolution in France, appeared in February 1790. That work and the subsequent Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791) contain the heart of Burke's philosophy. Together with Thoughts on French Affairs (1791), Remarks on the Policy of the Allies (1793), and Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796–97), they made him a leader not only of British but also of European public opinion against the Revolution. Burke saw the Revolution less as a revolt against intolerable conditions than as the overthrow of the social and political order by the doctrinaire devotees of an abstract theory of the rights of man. But for all his denunciations of "theory" and "metaphysics" in politics, Burke had a social and political theory and it implied a metaphysic.

Political philosophy. His conception of a divinely founded universal order, of which the state is a part, sprang from a basically Catholic philosophy. He received the medieval doctrine of natural law through the Anglican tradition. But he insisted that although principles are necessary, they are not enough; they must be applied by prudence. Here Burke's thought is strikingly similar to the Aristotelian and Thomistic doctrine of practical reason.

He was also keenly aware of history. A good constitution cannot be struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man. According to Burke, "it is made by the peculiar circumstances, occasions, tempers, dispositions, and moral, civil and social habitudes of the people, which disclose themselves only in a long space of time" ["Speech on the Reform of the Representation …," Works (London 1812) 10.97]. This idea is said to have influenced the historical school in Germany and to have made Burke a forerunner of G. W. F. hegel.

Burke saw human nature as realizing itself through an evolving and organic social order (a concept with which his laissez-faire economic theory seems inconsistent). Society, government, law, and rights satisfy natural human needs. But in themselves they are products of convention, framed not according to a blueprint furnished by an abstract law of nature but by practical reasoning and long experience. Once established, however, they have a prescriptive force and may not be abolished by appealing to a radically individualistic theory of popular sovereignty. Reform, therefore, must be accomplished by the gradual adjustment of a complex social organism to new situations, not by social revolution and only in extreme cases by political revolution.

Burke's writings are magnificent examples of the great period of British political rhetoric. Sir Philip Magnus has called them "the finest school of statecraft which exists." The frequency with which they are still quoted today is evidence both of Burke's wisdom and of his style.

Bibliography: Works, 12 v. (Boston 1901); Speeches of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, 4 v. (London 1816); The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. t. w. copeland et al., 10 v. (Chicago 1958–), 5 v. pub. to date. a. p. i. samuels, The Early Life, Correspondence and Writings of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke (Cambridge, Eng. 1924). Literature. d. bryant, Edmund Burke and His Literary Friends (St. Louis 1939). f. p. canavan, The Political Reason of Edmund Burke (Durham, N.C. 1960). c. b. cone, Burke and the Nature of Politics, 2 v. (Lexington, Ky. 1957–64). t. w. copeland, Our Eminent Friend Edmund Burke (New Haven 1949). r. j. s. hoffmann, Edmund Burke, New York Agent (Philadelphia 1956). j. maccunn, The Political Philosophy of Edmund Burke (London 1913). t. h. d. mahoney, Edmund Burke and Ireland (Cambridge, Mass. 1960). j. morley, Burke (New York 1879; repr. 1928). p. j. stanlis, Edmund Burke and the Natural Law (Ann Arbor 1958). The best source of complete and recent bibliographical information is The Burke Newsletter (Detroit 1959–). h. c. mansfield, Statesmanship and Party Government: A Study of Burke and Bolingbroke (Chicago 1965).

[f. p. canavan]