The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

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

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References in periodicals archive

Ian Crowe is director of the Edmund Burke Society of America, executive editor of Studies in Burke and His Time, and a senior fellow of the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal.

Edmund Burke's idea of party

For more discussion of John Adams, Edmund Burke, and conservatism, visit our online feature Upon Further Review at www.claremont.org/ufr.

Adams, Burke, & conservatism

How would Edmund Burke have reacted, not to the revolution of 1789, but to the revolution of 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and it became clear that Soviet domination of Eastern Europe was no more?

The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

I'm on the other side of the political fence, but I still long for a genuinely conservative Republican party that aspires to the principled, expansive vision of Edmund Burke.

The First Conservative

Moderating the tension between liberty, or doing as you please, and tradition, or doing as has been done in the past, is a hallmark of the speeches and writings of 18th-century British statesman Edmund Burke. While the conservative spirit is enduring and while some have always been more amply endowed with the inclination to preserve inherited ways and others more moved by the impulse to improve or supersede them, the distinctively modern form of conservatism emerged with Burke's 1790 polemic, Reflections on the Revolution in France.

The liberalism of Edmund Burke

I find Francesca Pridding''s quoting of Edmund Burke (Letters, June 22) puzzling.

Negative attitude won't aid education; LETTERS

As Edmund Burke said, if good men do nothing, evil will prevail.

Some questions for our leaders; Yousay IN YOUR OPINION..

COREY ROBIN, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.

Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin

In the 18th century, the storied British conservative Edmund Burke observed that "nine parts in ten of the whole race of mankind drudge through life." Nasar, an economist herself, profiles a long list of notables--from novelist Charles Dickens to Nobelist Amartya Sen--who have applied their prodigious intellectual talents to improving the lot of that lower 90 percent.

Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius

Jim was a huge admirer of Peter's writing, his first book on Edmund Burke especially, and personally very fond of its author.

A grand day out