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

• Conservatism as an Ideology

  - Samuel P. Huntington, "Conservatism as an Ideology" American Political Science Review, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Jun., 1957), pp. 454-473.
  Excerpt: Most writers agree, and it is assumed here, that Burke is properly called a conservative. The question, consequently, is: can Burke best be understood as the spokesman for the feudal aristocratic order, the expounder of values and ideals universally… More

• Conservatism: Dream and Reality

  - Robert Nisbet. Conservatism: Dream and Reality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
  From Amazon: Nisbet holds that although political philosophers are often conceived in terms of their views of the individual and the state, a more useful approach adds the factor of social groups or communities mediating between the individual and the state.… More

• Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke, and Rousseau on the Transformation of the Family

  - Eileen Hunt Botting. Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke, and Rousseau on the Transformation of the Family (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006).
  From the publisher: Family Feuds is the first sustained comparative study of the place of the family in the political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Edmund Burke, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Eileen Hunt Botting argues that Wollstonecraft recognized both… More

• Patriotism and Public Spirit: Edmund Burke and the Role of the Critic in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain

  - Ian Crowe. Patriotism and Public Spirit: Edmund Burke and the Role of the Critic in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford University Press, 2012).
  Excerpt: l h e picture ofBurke that emerges from this book is intended to capture those dominant personal and intellectual influences that have been marginalized by current historiographical and methodological orthodoxies. It will stress, in particular, the… More

• The Great Debate by Yuval Levin

  - Levin, Yuval. The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left. New York: Basic Books, 2013.
  Excerpt: “This book seeks to examine Burke and Paine’s disagreement and to learn from it about both their era’s politics and ours. Using not only their dispute about the French Revolution but also the two men’s larger bodies of writing and… More