Edmund Burke (redirected from Right Honourable Edmund Burke)

Burke, Edmund 

Born Jan. 12, 1729, in Dublin; died July 9,1797, in Beaconsfield. British political figure and publicist. One of the leaders of the Whigs.

Burke was a lawyer by education. Beginning in 1766 he was a member of Parliament. His earliest work, A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757; Russian translation in the book A History of Aesthetics: Monuments of World Aesthetic Thought, vol. 2, Moscow, 1964), influenced G. E. Lessing and F. Schiller. Burke’s pamphlet Thought on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), which was directed against the policy of King George III and his ministers, reflected the attitudes of the strata of the English bourgeoisie who opposed the strengthening of royal power.

During the War of Independence in North America (1775–83), Burke advocated a compromise with the rebellious English colonies. However, he was hostile toward the Great French Revolution. Burke’s book Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) expressed the British ruling classes’ fear of the revolutionary events in France. Representing the state as a result of an “organic” development and the creative activity of many centuries, Burke asserted that no generation has the right to break by force the institutions created by the efforts of previous generations. Another work by Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796), also censured the Great French Revolution. These works by Burke anticipated the critique of the Enlightenment and French Revolution by reactionary romantics.

WORKS

The Works, vols. 1–12. Boston, 1865–67.

REFERENCES

Marx, K., and F. Engels. Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 11, p. 609; vol. 23, p. 770.
Parkin, C. The Moral Basis of Burke’s Political Thought. Cambridge, 1956.
Todd, W. B. A Bibliography of E. Burke. London, 1964.
Chapman, G. W. E. Burke: The Practical Imagination. Cambridge, 1967.

E. B. CHERNIAK