Major Works

• Reflections on the Revolution in France

  - Recommended edition: Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Edited by 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,… More

Commentary

• Review of Burke, Paine, and the Rights of Man

  - Harvey C. Mansfield, Review of Burke, Paine, and the Rights of Man: A Difference of Political Opinion, by R. R. Fennessy, The Burke Newsletter, vol. 6 (Spring 1965): 443-45.

• Aesthetics and Politics in Edmund Burke

  - Terry Eagleton, "Aesthetics and Politics in Edmund Burke," History Workshop, No. 28 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 53-62.
  Excerpt: What the aesthetic in Burke sets its face most firmly against is the notion of natural rights. It is precisely that dryly theoretic discourse, a revolutionary one in his day, that the appeal to the intimate habits of the body is out to worst. The… More

• Puzzling through Burke

  - Don Herzog, "Puzzling through Burke," Political Theory, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Aug., 1991), pp. 336-363
  Excerpt: There are, I suggest, three major lines of argument in Burke. One is a series of dead ends impossible to spell out coherently; another is sometimes incomplete, sometimes pernicious; the last and best offers a striking political sociology but is… 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

• Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought

  - Uday S. Mehta. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
  From the publisher: We take liberalism to be a set of ideas committed to political rights and self-determination, yet it also served to justify an empire built on political domination. Uday Mehta argues that imperialism, far from contradicting liberal tenets,… More

• 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

• Burke and International Human Rights

  - Bruce Frohnen. "Burke and International Human Rights," in An Imaginative Whig: Reassessing the Life and Thought of Edmund Burke, ed. Ian Crowe (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005).
  Excerpt: … I now focus on the thought of Edmund Burke, a statesman who, faced with a deep conflict of cultures, sought to integrate historical, moral, and political principles so as to combine support for universal rights with a defense of the rights of… 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

Multimedia

• Edmund Burke on Natural Law and Rights Traditions

  - Peter Stanlis, "Edmund Burke on Natural Law and Rights Traditions," Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, Mecosta, Michigan, 31 October 2009.

• The Burkean Outlook

  - Ian Shapiro, "The Burkean Outlook," Open Yale course, 31 March 2010.
  Excerpt: [S]ociety is not subordinate to the individual, which is the most rock-bottom commitment of the workmanship idea. On the contrary, the individual is subordinate to society. Obligations come before rights. We only get rights as a consequence of the… More

• In Our Time: Edmund Burke

  - "In Our Time: Edmund Burke," BBC Radio 4, June 2010.
  Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work of the eighteenth-century philosopher, politician and writer Edmund Burke. With: Karen O’Brien Professor of English at the University of Warwick Richard Bourke Senior Lecturer in History at Queen Mary,… More