Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
The most comprehensive one-volume edition of Burke's writings on politics, history, and culture.

The intellectual wellspring of modern political conservatism, Edmund Burke is also considered a significant figure in aesthetic theory and cultural studies. As a member of the House of Commons during the late eighteenth century, Burke shook Parliament with his powerful defense of the American Revolution and the rights of persecuted Catholics in England and Ireland; his indictment of the English rape of the Indian subcontinent; and, most famously, his denouncement of English Jacobin sympathizers during the French Revolution.

The Portable Edmund Burke is the fullest one-volume survey of Burke's thought, with sections devoted to his writings on history and culture, politics and society, the American Revolution, Ireland, colonialism and India, and the French Revolution. This volume also includes excerpts from his letters and an informative Introduction surveying Burke's life, ideas, and his reception and influence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Broad but emasculated coverage
"The Portable Edmund Burke" is useful in supplying a number of pieces not otherwise easily obtainable.It, like most books in the Viking Portable Library series, is missing the notes and especially the index that many people would have found useful. To make room for the 47 selections, several have been severely abridged."Reflections on the Revolution is France" is whittled to leave only about 30% of it.Anyone needing this should look to a full-length treatment. Good ones include the Yale edition of Frank M. Turner, which has an excellent index, occasional notes, and several first-class essas; and Oxford World's Classic edition of L.G. Mitchell, which also has a helpful index and good notes. The speech on conciliation with America is similar chopped to a mere shadow of itself.The Lamont edition is not easily obtainable, which is a pity,but the notes and index of the Cambridge edition of Ian Harris will do well enough for most students. 'A Vindication of Natural Society' survives better (about half of it survives in this edition), but again the Harris edition is a better choice.

If you want a wide picture of Burke's writing, this text is probably for you.If you want to read any of his important texts, then choose something else.

Amputated rather than edited...
Burke's most important work "Reflections on the Revolution in France" is reduced from nearly 200 pages to 60 pages in this volume.Yet nowhere in the book does the editor describe what he selected or what he dropped, or the basis for his decisions.

Comparing my copy of "Reflections.." to this chopped version I found that Kramnick had dropped passages that were highly insightful.

When I discovered this, I could no longer be confident that the other works were not similarly mangled.I will now search for an anthology of works that is more respectful of the originals (or at least one where the editor is more open about his approach).

Thematic is best
Presenting Edmund Burke thematically is perhaps the only way to really approach Burke, as Conor Cruise O'Brien or Russell Kirk (Burke's best biographers) would probably agree. So unlike `On Empire, Liberty, and Reform,' which is chronological, the portable Edmund Burke instead tackles Burke under the themes of America, Ireland, India, and the French Revolution, and a couple other sub-themes, with invaluable commentary. By the end of the book, Burke is better enveloped here than in most biographies, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED! ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (6)

A Scholarly and Tightly Woven Study
"The Great Melody" by Conor Cruise O'Brien is not your traditional biography; there is little here concerning Burke's personal and family life.Instead, the work concentrates on Burke's political career and thought and, specifically, how they relate to his Irish heritage.The result is a fascinating look into the mind and personality of a man who suffered from a conflict of emotions over his Irish heritage that included his father's conversion to Protestantism while his mother and wife remained Catholic.Burke himself was torn in different directions his entire life; loyalty to Britain and also his Irish ancestors and friends suffering under the Penal Laws, loyalty to the British constitution, but also a deep feeling for the need of justice for the oppressed people at home and abroad.

O'Bien's book takes an in-depth look at Burke's career in parliament and as a member of the Whig party through an extensive analysis of his letters, speeches, political relationships, and writings, specifically, as they relate to his struggle on behalf of the American colonists, the struggle of the Irish Catholics, the people of India suffering at the hands of the rapacious East India Co., and the French Revolution.

The work can be a little dry at times and tends to quote in an overly lengthy manner, but the immense erudition and scholarship and the insightful picture of Burke that emerges more than compensate for this.I do wish, however, that O'Brien had spent more time on "Reflections On The Revolution in France," but he feels that since it is so readily available to the reader there is no need. Finally we see an Edmund Burke as he really was and not the "old reactionary" that is so often depicted.We come to understand that Burke always believed that "the people are the true legislator," that Burke did not want to see Americans in Parliament who were slave holders, that he was a life-long opponent of increased powers for the Crown and the corruption such power entailed, that he was one of the few who consistently fought against injustice toward the American colonials, that he found all authoritaianism abhorrent, and that he opposed commercial monopolies and the abuse of power in all its forms.But, because he opposed the overturning of society and its reengineering on the basis of "metaphysical abstractions," he was often portrayed as a reactionary by later pundits.Lewis Namier and his followers are particularly taken to task by O'Brien for this tendency.In the end we see a Burke who always supported basic human rights, but remained constantly aware that real life circumstances must make social and political change possible if such change is not to lead to chaos and violence.Burke's fear of radicalism based upon abstract theory was real and the destructiveness of the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Nazi bio-racial religion more than sufficiently proves his point.A reading of O'Brien's fine book can only lead the intelligent reader to a renewed respect for a great man, a decent and liberal minded man, and a man of immense vision.

Burke the Cold War Liberal
There is much in O'Brien's book that is interesting, original and insightful.But it suffers from two fatal flaws, one stylistic/structural, one substantive: (1) It is a mess.It is part personal biography, part intellectual biography, part annotated anthology, all mixed together in a confusing and unsatisfactory hodge-podge that may have been deliberate, given Burke's (and therefore O'Brien's) aversion to systems and abstraction.It is as if the author set out with a firm intention to portray Burke a certain way, collected up all the relevant facts, but just couldn't pull it all together in the end.It reads like a work-in-progress, several drafts short of completion and in dire need of a good editor; (2) It seriously overstates its case, and is therefore simply not reliable as an account of Burke's thought.O'Brien's Burke is a pluralist liberal, one of the "good guys" not to be classed among the "reactionaries", as Isaiah Berlin has done.But as Berlin points out--with far too much courtly politeness--in his exchange with O'Brien (reproduced in the appendix), the author has simply turned a blind eye to those aspects of his subject that make him appear illiberal.Most liberals at the time supported the French Revolution, at least in its early phase, and with good reason: it destroyed a confused mass of privilege, injustice and corruption that served the interests of a largely hereditary elite, which Burke vigorously defended.Most liberals since have supported it too.Few (if any) liberals today would hesitate to condemn someone who defended tradition, hereditary privilege and deference to authority as Burke did.To say that Burke was a liberal just doesn't wash.Granted he had SOME liberal tendencies, but he had many other tendencies that liberals have always found repugnant.It is a crude and one-sided portrait.O'Brien subscribes to the old-fashioned Cold War liberalism of Jacob Talmon, who interpreted the struggle between liberal democracy and "totalitarianism" in the 20th Century as a replay of the struggle between liberalism constitutionalism and the Terror.O'Brien's agenda in this book is to accept this dubious and anachronistic framework and to place Burke firmly on the "correct" side in it, with a demonic Rousseau on the other.THE GREAT MELODY was probably out-of-date before O'Brien wrote a word of it, just as much of Burke was when it appeared in the eighteenth century.

Burke is more than a few famous quotes
Everyone knows Edmund Burke's most famous quote: "for evil to triumph, it is only necessary for good men to do nothing". As a former lecturer in political science, I was mainly familiar with Burke as the founder of Anglo-conservatism (infinitely more nuanced and modern than his equivalent in Franco-conservatism, the Count Joseph de Maistre). I had also read an early work, namely "An Enquiry into the nature of the Beautiful and the Sublime", which I thought a brilliant little jewel. But there's much more about Burke than that.

O'Brien, the great man of Irish diplomacy, shows in this extraordinary book that Burke, whom recently history has shown as a fawning servant to the political leaders of his time (Rockingham and Pitt), was at the heart of the great fight between George III's royal absolutism and the emerging English democracy. Burke was on the right side of virtually all the fights he picked. He advocated equality before the law for the Irish subjects of the king, first tolerance and then freedom for the American colonies, the end of the colonialist abuses of the East India company, and a quarantine on the infectious ideas of the French Revolution. The later one is still a contentious affair. Zhou En Lai famously opined that it was still too early (in the 1970s) to judge the French Revolution. Burke would have had none of that. As early as 1790, in the "benign" initial phase of the revolution, he foresaw the Terror, the execution of the Royal Family, the Consulate and the Empire, and the French banner covering all of the Europe, in the name of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity".

O'Brien shows the extraordinary situation of an Irish Protestant (always accused of crypto-Catholicism) having great informal influence on the politics of Great Britain, while holding menial offices or representing various "rotten boroughs" in Parliament (this is no aspersion on Burke's memory- that's how politics was done at the time, and anything that gave Burke a pulpit couldn't have been all bad). The "Great Melody" of the title provides the underlying themes around which O'Brien organizes the public part of Burke's life. Far from tiresome, this is a useful device that provides unity and coherence to Burke's thoughts and actions. O'Brien's attacks on mid-century historiography are perfectly adequate, given that much of what was written as that period was designed to regress Burke into irrelevancy, as a sycophant and a lackey. He never was that. He was a good and a great man, and O'Brien does him justice in his book. Perhaps the only fault that I could find in it is a tendency to assume the reader's prior knowledge of the arcanes of Irish history. But these are quibbles. If you can stomach a history of ideas, full of events and studded with memorable characters, this is the book for you.

An excellent biography, highly readable, and bold in thesis.
An excellent biography, highly readable, a bold and ultimately persuasive thesis - that Burke was not only a major political thinker but that he shaped much of the late 18th century.From a fascinating introductionshowing how modern scholars had successfully destroyed and obscured Burke'strue legacy to its brilliant organizing principle (a line from Yeats), thisis a great book.This book should be required reading for every senator,congressman, and presidential candidate - if only to improve the level ofdiscourse by reading Burke's great speeches.Yeats' lines on Burke:"American colonies, Ireland, France, and India/ Harried, and Burke'sgreat melody against it."O'Brien shows how much one great man can doagainst tyranny, and how little.The book falls short on two counts: one,inadequate bios of Rockingham, Fox, Portland, Pitt the Younger, and hisrelation to Sam Johnson and Joshua Reynolds. Two, Burke the man does notwalk these pages as Johnson does Boswell's book.True, O'Brien hasorganized the book around Yeats' lines, but the domestic Burke, the friendof Johnson and Reynolds could have been amplified.These are minor faults. This biography is excellent in so many ways that it compares veryfavorably with Boswell's Johnson and indeed excels it on many fronts.

Masterful Weaving of Political History and Theory
O'Brien does a masterful job of bringing to life a neglected and misunderstood politician and political theorist.Those whose knowledge of Burke is limited to "Reflections" are in for an awakening.By book's end the reader will feel much like I. Berlin (whose correspondence with CCOB is in the appendix) and recant previously held stereotypes of Burke as a reactionary.A thorough detailing of Burke's writings and speeches makes clear that he was far from the two dimensional figure derided in political theory seminars.

O'Brien makes old political controversies regarding Ireland, India, America and revolutionary France fresh and engaging.An initial puzzle of this book is O'Brien's passionate refutations of the Namierite view of Burke.Yet, Burke continues to be a bogeyman to the academic left for good reason.Burke hated tyranny in any form and virtually alone among his contemporaries recognized that recasting society in the name of an idea promised the worst form of tyranny.Devotees of the French Revolution detest Burke whose credentials as a champion of the oppressed in Ireland, India and America were beyond reproof.

O'Brien himself, however, was curiously un-Burkean during his political career as it related to the Cold War.Burke correctly recognized that the French Revolution was a proto-totalitarian movement.He saved his most withering scorn for his former allies who viewed the revolution as a net benefit for the French and the world.In contrast, O'Brien in his UN days urged that Ireland follow the "decent" countries such as Sweden and stay above the US-Soviet fray.One wishes that O'Brien, now in his eighties, would have come to grips with his past as a neutral in the struggle between freedom and the successors of the French Revolution. ... Read more

Book Description
This collection of essays shifts the focus of scholarly debate away from the themes that have traditionally dominated the study of Edmund Burke. In the past, largely ideology-based or highly textual studies have tended to paint Burke as a "prophet" or "precursor" of movements as diverse as conservatism, political pragmatism, and romanticism. In contrast, these essays address prominent issues in contemporary society-multiculturalism, the impact of postmodern and relativist methodologies, the boundaries of state-church relationships, and religious tolerance in modern societies-by emphasizing Burke's earlier career and writings and focusing on his position on historiography, moral philosophy, jurisprudence, aesthetics, and philosophical skepticism. ... Read more

Book Description
By any reasonable judgment, Burke has to be considered one of the world's outstanding thinkers on politics.-- Peter J. Stanlis, from his Preface ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A Classical Regnery Anthology of a Conservative Luminary
~Edmund Burke: Selected Writings and Speeches~ is a great anthology of conservative luminary Edmund Burke's political and social writings. Burke is considered by many to be the godfather of conservatism. The Irish-born British conservative entered Trinity College at Dublin in 1744 and later moved to London in 1750. In 1770, in his tract entitled the 'Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents,' he scolded George III for his efforts at undoing the hard-won liberties that were thought to have been secured by the Glorious Revolution. Burke was a champion of the rule of law, and surmised that prerogatives of the king may not usurp that law, and that even the magistrates are to be constrained by the law. He defended the constraining hand of Parliament against the king's usurpations and cronyism in political appointments. He supported principled, calm, deliberative criticism of royal prerogatives by Parliamentarians, which he held to be a vital link in the preservation of the British constitution and ordered liberty.

Burke was an Old Whig, and on the Right side of the political spectrum and had no rosy delusions about human nature. His contemporaries on the Left like Jean-Jacques Rousseau had a positive and a optimistic view of human nature, and in his eyes humanity merely needed to be liberated from the decadent enslaving institutions of civil society. On the other hand, Burke recognized man's sinful nature and innate depravity and incorporated the Augustinian-Christian doctrine of original sin into his political philosophy. "Whatever disunites man from God, also disunites man from man," declares Burke. What is more, Burke does not see equality as self-evident, but he astutely observes that inequality is part of the natural order of things. The ideal equality to strive for was equality before the law, not equality of condition or even opportunity. Burke recognized that the illusive search for equality was in fact destructive of the liberty that was to accompany it because egalitarian ideology was fundamentally at odds with human nature.For this reason, Burke was opposed to the French Revolution and scolded the Jacobin rebellion for its barbarity, its egalitarian tyranny, and the unattainable antinomy of absolute freedom that was sought after. He likewise abhorred the initial English enthusiasm for the events across the sea in France and lamented that such an upheaval would never afflict England. Yet Burke, an Old Whig was a champion of the Rights of the Englishmen, and spoke out on behalf of the American, Irish and the Indian colonials. "Good order is the foundation of all things," quipped Burke in his Reflections on the French Revolution. Burke offered much prescriptive wisdom about reforming and bettering civil society while conserving the vital remnants and traditions so vitally requisite to the continuity of civil society. He yielded his acquiescence of support to the American Cause of 1776 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Burke assailed the abuses perpetrated against American colonials in exploitative taxation, arbitrary suspension of the rights of colonials and an overall condescending attitude of contempt that pervaded the attitude of government towards the colonial subjects therein. Burke worked tirelessly for conciliation between British and American colonials, though the Tories prevailed and their efforts to spite and to subjugate the colonials only led to the American colonials' victorious secession by force of arms. Furthermore, Burke was opposed to the aggrandizing of power and the corruption of the law, and recognized that ordered liberty must be upheld. Burke observed, "Bad law is the worst sort of tyranny." He was practical and pragmatic to the extent needed without discarding first principles, as he accepted that, "All government-indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act-is founded on compromise and barter." Yet Burke was mistrustful of concentrated power and observed, "Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, never can willingly abandon it. They may be distressed in the midst of all their power; but they will never look to anything but power for their relief."

The reductionism and sophistry of modern critics casts conservatives as knaves who nostalgically seek preservation of the status quo irrespective of whatever tyrannies and social pathologies afflict the people. However, Burke above all shows that classical conservatism is not quixotic sentimentalism about tradition but rather a desire to conserve those vital remnants so necessary to continuation of ordered liberty while improving civil society through patient, contemplative, informed and calmly deliberative political dialogue. Sometimes standing up to sheer tyranny through resistance and civil disobedience is in order. Though, "Our patience will achieve more than our force," avowed Burke. Burke justly condemned the barbarity of the French Revolution and no doubt considers the interposition of the lesser magistrates as requisite in combating the usurpations of higher magistrates, ministers, and leaders.

All things considered, this brilliant anthology of Burke's more renowned works is certainly a great introduction to the perennial conservative.

conservatism's bard
What a heady time were the late 1700's.For hundreds, even thousands, of years, Western man hadbeen saddled with monarchy; kings who were said to rule by divine right.But by the end of the 18thcentury, Martin Luther, John Locke and Adam Smith had propounded the essential framework formodern liberal capitalist democracy and the Revolution in America had launched a grand experimentbased on those ideas.Then came the French Revolution and it was blithely assumed that here againLiberty was on the march.When suddenly, rising to meet the tide of history, came Edmund Burke toexcoriate the Jacobins and denounce the Revolution.In so doing, he not only did mankind a greatservice, by sounding the alarms against unchecked liberty, he also basically gave birth to modernConservatism.Today, after a long period in the wilderness, particularly during the Cold War, EdmundBurke has come roaring back into fashion.In a sense, he has finally won his argument with thedefenders of the French Revolution, two hundred years after the fact, and is reaping the spoils.

For two centuries a controversy has raged over Burke's political philosophy, in particular whether thegreat defender of American, Irish and Indian rights was inconsistent in opposing the FrenchRevolution.The very existence and the stubborn persistence of this controversy seem to demonstrateeither a complete misunderstanding or a willful misrepresentation of Burke's basic arguments.Onesuspects it's a bit of both.The greatness of Burke lies in the fact that he was among the first, andcertainly the most eloquent, defenders of democracy to recognize the dangers it entails; that power inthe hands of the masses is just as great a threat to liberty as when it lies in the hand of a dictator orking.This point had been amply demonstrated in France, where the revolutionists had quicklyabandoned any concern for personal freedom and had moved on to a bloody demand forequality--freedom's enemy.

It is here that we arrive at the key point that divides the modern Left and Right.The Left believes (a laRousseau) that man is by nature "good" and all men are born with equal abilities, but thatenvironmental factors and corrupt institutions warp individuals, making some evil and keeping othersfrom realizing their full potentials; which if realized would make them equal to other men.The goalof the Left is therefore to remove, by any means necessary, these environmental and institutionalimpediments and return to an imagined state of nature where all men are good and are equally able;where Man will be governed by pure reason.

The Right, on the other hand, recognizes that man is inately "evil"; that is, evil in the sense that he isself centered and will generally act in his own interest not the interest of others.Moreover, men areinherently unequal; in the state of nature, the able will tyrannize the less able.It is for these reasonsthat men form governments in the first place; to protect themselves from one another.The goal of theRight is to provide each individual with the greatest personal freedom and utmost opportunity to realizehis potential, consistent with the basic safety concerns that gave birth to the state in the first instance. Conservatives realize that pure reason will not lead men to treat each other with justice, by nature, menwill always seek advantage over one another.The State and other institutions safeguard us against thiseventuality.

This fundamental difference can not be overstated.Prior to the 18th century, the Left would haveincluded all democrats, while the Right would have been made up of monarchists and supporters ofaristocracy.But beginning with the French Revolution, this fissure separated the regnant liberal forcesinto two competing camps, setting the stage for the two century long contest that ended in the early1990's with the fall of the Soviet Union.Both sides would produce great men, original theorists,brilliant writers and magnificent orators, but none of them would ever surpass Burke and his mastery ofall these fields.Rare are the men who so clearly perceive the fundamental issues that confrontmankind.They seem at times to be travelers from the future, come to warn us about what horrors theyears to come will hold unless we obey their counsel.Rarer still are the occasions when we heedthem.We can only imagine the millions of lives that would have been saved had people followedBurke's vision rather that that of Rousseau and Jefferson and Marx.

Happily, here in America, James Madison's Constitution embodies many of the same ideas and protectsagainst many of the concerns which Burke expressed.The adoption of representative, rather thandirect, democracy; the bicameral legislature and tripartite government; the careful system of checks andbalances; the protection of basic rights from government interference: these are all, though we seldomdiscuss them in these terms, intended to protect the individual from the potentially tyrannical effects ofdemocracy.When commentators speak of the genius of the American system, whether they realize itor not, it is to this central fact that they refer.So while critics have struggled to understand a falsedichotomy in Burke's thought, we (and to a lesser extent the Brits) have enjoyed the fruits of a politicalsystem which assumes that his critique of democracy is less theory than received wisdom.Forwhatever reason, it took two hundred years and countless millions of lives before the rest of the worldrecognized what Burke (the bard) and Madison (the draftsman) had known all along; two centuries thatproved them indisputably correct.

GRADE: A+

One of the 25 most important conservative books
If Ronald Reagan is the great communicator, Burke must be theextraordinary communicator. Someone once said that pages of Burke are likesheets of fire.

        During the time he lived, in the 18th century,most political leaders were hereditary aristocrats, but Burke, like Cicero,did not descend from generations of prominent leaders. He earned hisleadership in British politics through the power of his mind, by studyingpolitical principles and applying them to real circumstances. A superficiallook at Burke's career might tempt one to dismiss him as a failure. Most ofthe causes to which he devoted himself were not successful in hislifetime.

        Prior to the American Revolution, he wrote brilliantlyon behalf of conciliation between Britain and the American colonies. Heargued for fair treatment of India by Britain. He argued for fair treatmentof the Irish by the British and for Catholic emancipation in England. Intime these positions won acceptance, but the acceptance came after Burke'sdeath.

        Fortunately, he did live long enough to see the triumph ofthe greatest work of his life: his effort to awaken his country to thefundamentally destructive but superficially attractive nature of the FrenchRevolution. His thorough and, I believe, inspired condemnation of theFrench Revolution swept British majority opinion. To Burke, more than anyother politician of his time, goes the credit for creating the intellectualforce which saved Europe from revolutionary chaos anddictatorship.

        Modern-day conservatives are also profoundly in hisdebt, as his writings against the French revolution provided thephilosophical foundation for anti-communism in particular and orderedliberty in general. Read Burke. All his writings on government and politicsare a rich ore, studded with gems of wisdom. ... Read more

Book Description
The most enduring work of its time, Reflections on the Revolution in France was written in 1790 and has remained in print ever since. Edmund Burke's analysis of revolutionary change established him as the chief framer of modern European conservative political thought. This outstanding new edition of the Reflections presents Burke's famous text along with a historical introduction by Frank M. Turner and four lively critical essays by leading scholars.The volume sets the Reflections in the context of Western political thought, highlights its ongoing relevance to contemporary debates, and provides abundant critical notes, a glossary, and a glossary-index to ensure its accessibility. Contributors to the book examine various provocative aspects of Burke's thought. Conor Cruise O'Brien explores Burke's hostility to "theory," Darrin McMahon considers Burke's characterization of the French Enlightenment, Jack Rakove contrasts the views of Burke and American constitutional framers on the process of drawing up constitutions, and Alan Wolfe investigates Burke, the social sciences, and liberal democracy. ... Read more

Book Description
A classic of modern aesthetics that remains both influential and engaging, by the politician many consider the father of modern conservatism.

From the awesome thrill of the sublime to the delightful perfection of the beautiful, Edmund Burke gives an involving account of our sensory, imaginative, and judgmental process and its relation to artistic pleasure--it is a text that influenced the writers of the Romantic period. This edition also features several of Burke's early political works, which illustrate that, despite his later opposition to the Revolution in France, he took a liberal and humane view of society and government. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful includes Burke's political parody, "A Vindication of Natural Society," and his essays on the American colony--"Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents," "Speech on American Taxation," "Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies," and "Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol on the Affairs of America." This authoritative edition has securely established texts, and in his illuminating Introduction, David Womersley clearly reveals the cross-pollination of Burke's aesthetic and political thinking: the power exercised by art and the art of exercising power. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Real Statesman
This is a good book by the articulate (very quotable) and profound philosopher-legislator Edmund Burke, who served in the English Parliament around the time of the American Revolution.Burke (1729-97) also authored the famous and controversial (at least at the time) work, "Reflections on the Revolution in France" (1790).

Of course, the main work in the Penguin Classics edition featured here is "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful".It was notably influential on many of Burke's contemporaries, as well as on later literary artists such as William Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold.

However, some of the minor works appended to this edition, such as the 1777 "Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol on the Affairs of America" (which is like a long, eloquent letter home to constituents) should not be overlooked.Indeed, while perusing this latter piece (and others included here, such as "Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents"), I couldn't help thinking how beneficial it would be to have a few sensible Edmund Burke-types serving in Congress or the White House right now as America deals with its global military adventures.America's Revolutionary War might even have been avoided if stubborn, indignent, autocratic, and belligerent King George III would have listened more closely to and followed Burke's reasoned advice.

It's a bit hilarious and ironic to think that, today, Burke is typically thought of as a political "conservative".Read this stuff, and you will likely agree that, in many respects, he was much more a thoughtful, humane liberal. ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description

Book Description
This volume of The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke continues the story of Edmund Burke, the Rockingham party in British politics, and the American crisis. By 1774 Burke was already recognized as a master of parliamentary debate and an accomplished writer. By 1780, however, his reputation was to have risen substantially.Probably the most important single reason was his Speech on Conciliation with America, which was presented to the House of Commons in March 1775, published, and circulated to a wide audience on both sides of the Atlantic. In that speech, Burke used the full force of his intellect and eloquence to set out the Rockinghams' first comprehensive plan for achieving lasting peace in the Empire. The public commendation he received helped him to gain recognition for offerings such as his second conciliation proposal in November 1775, and his Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol in 1777. It also gave him some of the confidence he needed to announce the Whig party's historic conversion to a moderate reform programme in his celebrated speeches on economical reform in 1779 and 1780.Numerous writings and speeches in this volume are transcriptions of previously unpublished manuscripts from the collections at Sheffield and Northampton. These allow the reader new insights into the workings of Burke's mind not just in relation to the major political issues, but also to a multitude of engaging subjects such as education, capital punishment, religious dissent, and the return of the Rockingham Whigs to government power, ... Read more