Commentary

• Conservatism Revisited

  - Peter Viereck. Conservatism Revisited (New York: The Free Press, 1962 [1949]).
  Excerpt from 1962 edition: …it is imprecise to call conservative those counter-revolutionary ideologues of the right who defy the conservative principles of continuity with the past by trying to wrench American life out of its liberal and New Deal past.… More

• 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

• 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

• A Vindication of Edmund Burke

  - Conor Cruise O'Brien, "A Vindication of Edmund Burke," National Review (December 17, 1990).
  Excerpt: What we have been witnessing in 1989-90, in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, is the bankruptcy of the greatest experiment in social and political innovation ever made. What stronger vindication could there be of the principles laid down, and… More

• Wollstonecraft as a Critic of Burke

  - David Bromwich, "Wollstonecraft as a Critic of Burke," Political Theory, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Nov., 1995), pp. 617-634.
  Excerpt: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men was the first published reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Later replies from the radical side challenged and in a measure qualified Burke’s report… More

• Liberty and Revolution in Burke’s Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol

  - Mark Kremer, "Liberty and Revolution in Burke's Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol," Interpretation, Fall 1998.

• Edmund Burke: The Political Actor Thinking

  - Frank M. Turner. "Edmund Burke: The Political Actor Thinking," introduction to Reflections on the Revolution in France (Yale University Press, 2003).
  Excerpt: The value of Burke’s analysis … does not really lie in what many from the 1790s onward have regarded as its prophetic insights into the eventual judicial murder of the French royal family, further terror against French citizens from all… More

• The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments

  - Gertrude Himmelfarb. The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (New York: Knopf, 2004).
  Excerpt: Burke’s views on economics suggest that there may be something like an “Edmund Burke Problem”- a “two Burkes” phenomenon comparable to the “Adam Smith Problem.” Just as the altruistic principles of the Theory… More

• Reactionary Prophet

  - Christopher Hitchens, "Reactionary Prophet," The Atlantic Monthly (April 2004).
  Excerpt: It is a frequent vice of radical polemic to assert, and even to believe, that once you have found the lowest motive for an antagonist, you have identified the correct one. And such reductionism makes a sort of rough partnership with the simplistic… 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