Edmund Burke (; 12 January [NS] 1729The exact year of his birth is the subject of a great deal of controversy; 1728, 1729, and 1730 have been proposed. The month and day of his birth also are subject to question, a problem compounded by the Julian–Gregorian changeover in 1752, during his lifetime. For a fuller treatment of the question, see Lock, F. P., Edmund Burke. Volume I: 1730–1784, Clarendon Press, 1999, pp. 16–17. Conor Cruise O'Brien (2008; p. 14) questions whether Burke's birth took place in Dublin, arguing in favour of Shanballymore, County Cork (in the house of his uncle, James Nagle). – 9 July 1797) was an Anglo-Irish writer, philosopher, and politician who is widely credited as the founder of the cultural and political philosophy of conservatism.Heywood, Andrew. Political Ideologies: An Introduction (third edition), Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, p. 74. Regarded as one of the most influential conservative thinkers and political writers of the 18th century, Burke spent the majority of his career in Great Britain and was elected as a member of Parliament (MP) from 1766 to 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party. His writings played a significant role in influencing public views and opinions in both Great Britain and France following the French Revolution in 1789, and he remains a major figure in modern conservative circles.
Burke was a proponent of underpinning virtues with manners in society and of the importance of religious institutions for the moral stability and good of the state.Bourke, Richard. Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke, Princeton University Press, 2015, pp. 220–221, passim. These views were expressed in his satirical work, A Vindication of Natural Society (1756). He also criticised the actions of the British government towards the American colonies, including its taxation policies. Burke supported the rights of the colonists to resist metropolitan authority, although he opposed the attempt to achieve independence. He is particularly remembered for his long-term support for Catholic emancipation, his opposition to the French Revolution, and leading the attempt at impeachment of Warren Hastings from the East India Company. In 1774, Burke was elected a member of Parliament for Bristol.
In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Burke asserted that the revolution was destroying the fabric of good society and traditional institutions of state and society, and he condemned the persecution of the Catholic Church that resulted from it. This led to him becoming a popular leading figure within the conservative faction of the Whig Party, which he dubbed the Old Whigs as opposed to the pro-French Revolution New Whigs led by Charles James Fox. Burke had a close relation with some of the public intellectuals of his time, including Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, and Joshua Reynolds. In his debates, he often argued against unrestricted ruling power and the importance of political parties having the ability to maintain a principled opposition that was capable of preventing abuse of power.
In the 19th century, Burke was praised by both conservatives and liberals. Subsequently, in the 20th century, he became widely regarded, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom, as the philosophical founder of conservatism,F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke. Volume II: 1784–1797 (Clarendon Press, 2006), p. 585. along with his French ultra-royalist and ultramontanist counterpart Joseph de Maistre. His writings and literary publications influenced British conservative thought to a great extent, and helped establish the earliest foundations for modern conservatism and liberal democracy.
Early life
Burke was born in Dublin, Ireland. His mother Mary, née Nagle, was a Roman Catholic who hailed from a County Cork family and a cousin of the Catholic educator Nano Nagle, whereas his father Richard, a successful solicitor, was a member of the Church of Ireland. It remains unclear whether this is the same Richard Burke who converted from Catholicism.Paul Langford, Burke, Edmund (1729/30–1797) , Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 2004; online edn, January 2008, accessed 18 October 2008. The Burgh (Burke) dynasty descends from the Anglo-Norman knight William de Burgh, who arrived in Ireland in 1185 following Henry II's 1171 invasion of Ireland and is among the "chief Gall or Old English families that assimilated into Gaelic society" (the surname de Burgh (latinised as de Burgo) was gaelicised in Irish as de Búrca or Búrc, which over the centuries became Burke).
Burke adhered to his father's faith and remained a practising Anglican throughout his life, unlike his sister Juliana, who was brought up as and remained a Roman Catholic. Later, his political enemies repeatedly accused him of having been educated at the Jesuit College of St Omer, near Calais, France; and of harbouring secret Catholic sympathies at a time when membership in the Catholic Church would disqualify him from public office per Penal Laws in Ireland. As Burke told Frances Crewe:
Mr. Burke's Enemies often endeavoured to convince the World that he had been bred up in the Catholic Faith, & that his Family were of it, & that he himself had been educated at Saint-Omer—but this was false, as his father was a regular practitioner of the Law at Dublin, which he could not be unless of the Established Church: & it so happened that though Mr. B was twice at Paris, he never happened to go through the Town of Saint-Omer."Extracts from Mr. Burke's Table-talk, at Crewe Hall. Written down by Mrs. Crewe, pp. 62.", Miscellanies of the Philobiblon Society. Volume VII (London: Whittingham and Wilkins, 1862–63), pp. 52–53.
After being elected to the House of Commons, Burke took the required oath of allegiance and abjuration, the oath of supremacy and the declaration against transubstantiation.
As a child, Burke sometimes spent time away from the unhealthy air of Dublin with his mother's family near Killavullen in the Blackwater Valley in County Cork. He received his early education at a Quaker school in Ballitore, County Kildare, some from Dublin; and possibly like his cousin Nano Nagle at a hedge school near Killavullen. He remained in correspondence with his schoolmate from there, Mary Leadbeater, the daughter of the school's owner, throughout his life.
In 1744, Burke started at Trinity College Dublin,"Alumni Dublinenses: a register of the students, graduates, professors and provosts of Trinity College in the University of Dublin (1593–1860) George Dames Burtchaell/Thomas Ulick Sadleir p. 114: Dublin, Alex Thom and Co, 1935 a Protestant establishment which up until 1793 did not permit Catholics to take degrees. In 1747, he set up a debating society, Edmund Burke's Club, which in 1770 merged with Trinity's Historical Club to form the College Historical Society, the oldest undergraduate society in the world. The minutes of the meetings of Burke's Club remain in the collection of the Historical Society. Burke graduated from Trinity in 1748. Burke's father wanted him to read Law and with this in mind, he went to London in 1750, where he entered the Middle Temple, before soon giving up legal study to travel in Continental Europe. After eschewing the Law, he pursued a livelihood through writing.
Early writing The late Lord Bolingbroke's Letters on the Study and Use of History was published in 1752 and his collected works appeared in 1754. This provoked Burke into writing his first published work, A Vindication of Natural Society: A View of the Miseries and Evils Arising to Mankind, appearing in Spring 1756. Burke imitated Bolingbroke's style and ideas in a reductio ad absurdum of his arguments for deistic rationalism in order to demonstrate their absurdity.Prior, p. 45.Jim McCue, Edmund Burke and Our Present Discontents (The Claridge Press, 1997), p. 14.
Burke stated that Bolingbroke's arguments against revealed religion could apply to all social and civil institutions as well. Lord Chesterfield and Bishop Warburton as well as others initially thought that the work was genuinely by Bolingbroke rather than a satire.McCue, p. 145. All the reviews of the work were positive, with critics especially appreciative of Burke's quality of writing. Some reviewers failed to notice the ironic nature of the book which led to Burke stating in the preface to the second edition (1757) that it was a satire.Lock, Burke. Vol. I, p. 85.
Richard Hurd believed that Burke's imitation was near-perfect and that this defeated his purpose, arguing that an ironist "should take care by a constant exaggeration to make the ridicule shine through the Imitation. Whereas this Vindication is everywhere enforc'd, not only in the language, and on the principles of L. Bol., but with so apparent, or rather so real an earnestness, that half his purpose is sacrificed to the other". A minority of scholars have taken the position that in fact Burke did write the Vindication in earnest, later disowning it only for political reasons.Sobran, Joseph, Anarchism, Reason, and History : "Oddly enough, the great conservative Edmund Burke began his career with an anarchist tract, arguing that the state was naturally and historically destructive of human society, life, and liberty. Later he explained that he'd intended his argument ironically, but many have doubted this. His argument for anarchy was too powerful, passionate, and cogent to be a joke. Later, as a professional politician, Burke seems to have come to terms with the state, believing that no matter how bloody its origins, it could be tamed and civilized, as in Europe, by "the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion". But even as he wrote, the old order he loved was already breaking down."
In 1757, Burke published a treatise on aesthetics titled A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful that attracted the attention of prominent Continental thinkers such as Denis Diderot and Immanuel Kant. It was his only purely philosophical work, completed in 1753.Lock, vol 1, p. 92. When asked by Sir Joshua Reynolds and French Laurence to expand it thirty years later, Burke replied that he was no longer fit for abstract speculation.Prior, p. 47.
On 25 February 1757, Burke signed a contract with Robert Dodsley to write a "history of England from the time of Julius Caesar to the end of the reign of Queen Anne", its length being eighty quarto sheets (640 pages), nearly 400,000 words. It was to be submitted for publication by Christmas 1758.Lock, Burke. Vol. I, p. 143. Burke completed the work to the year 1216 and stopped; it was not published until after Burke's death, in an 1812 collection of his works, An Essay Towards an Abridgement of the English History. G. M. Young did not value Burke's history and claimed that it was "demonstrably a translation from the French".G. M. Young, 'Burke', Proceedings of the British Academy, XXIX (London, 1943), p. 6. On commenting on the story that Burke stopped his history because David Hume published his, Lord Acton said "it is ever to be regretted that the reverse did not occur".Herbert Butterfield, Man on His Past (Cambridge, 1955), p. 69.