Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France is one of the major texts in the western intellectual tradition. This book describes Burke’s political and intellectual world, stressing the importance of the idea of ‘property’ in Burke’s thought. It then focuses more closely on Burke’s personal and political situation in the late 1780s to explain how the Reflections came to be written. The central part of the study discusses the meaning and interpretation of the work. In the last part of the book the author surveys the pamphlet controversy which the Reflections generated, paying particular attention to the most famous of the replies, Tom Paine’s Rights of Man. It also examines the subsequent reputation of the Reflections from the 1790s to the modern day, noting how often Burke has fascinated even writers who have disliked his politics.

This abridgement of Reflections on the Revolution in France preserves the dynamism of Edmund Burke’s polemic while excising a number of detail-laden passages that may be of less interest to modern readers. Brian R. Clack’s introduction offers a compelling overview of the text and explores the consistency and coherence of Burke’s views on revolution. Burke’s critique of revolutionary politics is illuminated further by the extensive supplementary materials collected in a number of themed appendices.

First published in 1790 Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France initiated a debate not only about the nature of the unprecedented historical events taking place across the channel, but about the very identity of the British state and its people. It has subsequently been appropriated by a variety of conservative and liberal thinkers and has played a major role in our understanding of the relationship between rhetoric, aesthetics and politics. In this volume, leading Burke scholars offer new and challenging essays which allow us to reconsider the historical context in which Reflections on the Revolution in France was written. The essays consider its reception, its engagements in the discourses of nationalism and toleration, its legacy to English and Irish writers of the Romantic period and its impact within our contemporary cultural and critical theory. The volume demonstrates a range of interdisciplinary critical methods and cultural perspectives from which to read Burke's most famous work. This volume will be the ideal companion to Burke's Reflections for all students of literature, history, politics and Irish studies.

The most important works of Edmund Burke, the greatest political thinker of the past three centuries, are gathered here in one comprehensive volume. Accompanying his influential masterpiece, Reflections on the Revolution in France, is a selection of pamphlets, speeches, public letters, private correspondence and, for the first time, two important and previously uncollected early essays. Philosopher, statesman, and founder of conservatism, Burke was a dazzling orator and a visionary theorist who spent his long political career fighting abuses of power. He wrote at a time of great change, against the backdrop of the revolt of the American colonies, the expansion of the British Empire, the collapse of Ireland, and the French Revolution. Burke argued passionately in support of the American revolutionaries and in equally impassioned opposition to the horrors of the unfolding French Revolution. Making a case for upholding established rights and customs, and advocating incremental reform rather than radical revolutionary change, Burke’s writings have profoundly influenced modern democracies up to the present day. Edited and Introduced by Jesse Norman.