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

• 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

• Edmund Burke: The Psychology of Citizenship

  - Larry Adams, "Edmund Burke: The Psychology of Citizenship," Interpretation, Winter 1973.

• Review of The Social Thought of Rousseau and Burke: A Comparative Study

  - Harvey C. Mansfield, Review of The Social Thought of Rousseau and Burke: A Comparative Study, by David Cameron, Studies in Burke and His Time, vol. 17 (Winter 1976): 64-68.

• 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

• The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate: Savagery, Civilization, and Democracy

  - Daniel O'Neill. The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate: Savagery, Civilization, and Democracy (University Park: Penn State Press, 2007).
  From the publisher: Many modern conservatives and feminists trace the roots of their ideologies, respectively, to Edmund Burke (1729–1797) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), and a proper understanding of these two thinkers is therefore important as a… More

• The Great Debate by Yuval Levin

  - Yuval Levin. 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

• 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