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

• 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

• 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 Value-Centered Historicism of Edmund Burke

  - Joseph Baldacchino, "The Value-Centered Historicism of Edmund Burke," Modern Age 27, no. 2 (1983).
  Excerpt: As he opposed the notion of a “geographical” morality, so, too, did Burke denounce the idea that man’s moral duty changes with the passage of time. “We know that we have made no discoveries,” he writes, “and we… More

• Strauss’s Three Burkes: The Problem of Edmund Burke in Natural Right and History

  - Steven J. Lenzer, "Strauss's Three Burkes: The Problem of Edmund Burke in Natural Right and History," Political Theory, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Aug., 1991), pp. 364-390.
  Excerpt: Although Leo Strauss’s critique of Edmund Burke’s political theory in Natural Right and History is not the most famous ever written (it suffices to mention Paine’s Rights of Man), it is doubtless the most challenging. In part, this… More

• Liberty, Authority, and Trust in Burke’s Idea of Empire

  - Richard Bourke, "Liberty, Authority, and Trust in Burke's Idea of Empire," Journal of the History of Ideas 61.3 (2000), 453-471.
  When Edmund Burke first embarked upon a parliamentary career, British political life was in the process of adapting to a series of critical reorientations in both the dynamics of party affiliation and the direction of imperial policy. During the period of the… 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

• 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 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

• Edmund Burke for Our Time: Moral Imagination, Meaning, and Politics

  - William F. Byrne. Edmund Burke for Our Time: Moral Imagination, Meaning, and Politics (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011)
  Excerpt: Although the term “moral imagination” originated with Edmund Burke, much Burke scholarship fails to mention it. Two notable early and mid-twentieth-century thinkers, Irving Babbitt and Russell Kirk, do pick up on Burke’s concept and… More

• Strauss, Voegelin, and Burke: A Tale of Three Conservatives

  - Robert P. Kraynak, "Strauss, Voegelin, and Burke: A Tale of Three Conservatives," Modern Age, Fall 2011, Vol. 53 Issue 4.
  Abstract: The article explores the political beliefs of twentieth-century philosophers Leo Strauss, Eric Vogelin, and eighteenth-century British politician Edmund Burke. It considers the books “New Science of Politics” by Vogelin and… More

• Burke Between Liberty and Tradition by Peter Berkowitz

  - Berkowitz, Peter. "Burke Between Liberty and Tradition." Policy Review, December 2012.
  Excerpt: “Feuding among American conservatives for the title True Conservative is nothing new. Ever since conservatism in America crystallized as a recognizable school in the 1950s, more than a few limited-government conservatives, or libertarians as… 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

• Burke and the American Tradition of Ordered Liberty

  - Ian Crowe, "Burke and the American Tradition of Ordered Liberty," 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