Edmund Burke
Anglo-Irish statesman, political philosopher and writer (1729–1797), born in Dublin into a family of mixed religion — a Protestant father, a Catholic mother — educated at Trinity College Dublin before moving to London to study law and eventually devoting nearly three decades to politics as a member of the British House of Commons, where he was noted for an exceptional oratorical eloquence placed at the service of a series of apparently disparate causes united by a coherent underlying political philosophy: the limitation of arbitrary power, both colonial and metropolitan. He passionately championed the cause of the American colonists in the run-up to independence, arguing that intransigent British policy was violating their traditional constitutional rights as English subjects; for years he led the challenge against the abuses of the British East India Company in India, spearheading the impeachment proceedings against Governor-General Warren Hastings; and he harshly criticised the slave trade and colonial corruption. Burke is remembered above all, however, as the intellectual father of modern political conservatism thanks to his most influential work, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), written with prophetic urgency when the Revolution had only just begun, in which he predicted with striking accuracy its drift toward Terror and dictatorship, and in which he developed a profound philosophical critique of revolutionary abstract rationalism: rather than designing societies from scratch according to abstract principles of pure reason, Burke argued that legitimate political institutions must grow organically out of tradition, custom and the 'accumulated wisdom' of successive generations, and that political rights are not universal abstractions but concrete historical privileges inherited and gradually improved. This defence of gradual, prudent change respectful of institutional continuity, opposed both to revolutionary radicalism and to reactionary immobilism, makes Burke an obligatory foundational reference point for the whole of the later liberal-conservative tradition.