Major Works

• Reflections on the Revolution in France

  - Recommended edition: Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Indianapolis, Hackett, 1987). Originally published 1790.
  Excerpt: It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating… More

Commentary

• The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot

  - Russell Kirk. The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1960). First edition originally published 1953.
  Excerpt: Conscious conservatism, in the modern sense, did not manifest itself until 1790, with the publication of Reflections on the Revolution in France. In that year the prophetic powers of Burke fixed in the public consciousness, for the first time, the… More

• Edmund Burke’s View of History

  - John C. Weston, Jr., "Edmund Burke's View of History," The Review of Politics, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Apr., 1961), pp. 203-229.
  Excerpt: Most analyses of views of history resolve themselves into considerations of progress. We ask, does a particular man believe in progress? And since most modem thinkers do believe in some form of progress, the answer acquires significance for its… More

• The Concept of Representation

  - Hanna Pitkin. The Concept of Representation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967).  
  Excerpt: What happens to the idea of representation when a writer concentrates on the representing of unattached abstractions is nowhere shown more clearly than in the thought of Edmund Burke. For Burke, political representation is the representation of… More

• Burke and Machiavelli on Principles in Politics

  - Harvey C. Mansfield, "Burke and Machiavelli on Principles in Politics," Edmund Burke: The Enlightenment and the Modern World, P.H. Stanlis, ed., University of Detroit Press, 1967, pp. 49-79.

• Edmund Burke and the American Constitution by Morton Frisch

  - Morton J. Frisch, "Edmund Burke and the American Constitution," Interpretation, Fall 1989.
  Frisch examines Burke’s opinion on the American Constitution and why Burke supported the American Revolution even as he would later oppose the French Revolution.

• Man’s Second Disobedience: a Vindication of Burke

  - Roger Scruton, "Man’s Second Disobedience: a Vindication of Burke" in Ceri Crossley and Ian Small (eds.), The French Revolution and British Culture (Oxford University Press, 1989).
  Excerpt: Tocqueville remarked that there is the greatest difference between a ‘revolution’ (such as that of 1688, or that which founded the United States of America) through which law and adjudication continue undisturbed and which has the… More