The eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish MP and philosopher offers his opinion on the early days of the French Revolution and his expectations of its outcome. The French Revolution began in 1789. In the following year, Edmund Burke, a member of Great Britain’s House of Commons, wrote one of the most famous arguments against the rebellion. The work started off as a letter to a friend of Burke’s family who had asked for his opinion on whether France’s new ruling class would succeed in establishing a better order. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke presents his reply on a much larger scale. He offers “a dire warning of the consequences that would follow the mismanagement of change.” He contends the French Revolution would fail due to its foundation being constructed upon individualism and ignoring human nature and society. With thoroughness, rhetorical skill, and literary power, Burke ultimately makes his case for monarchy, aristocracy, private property, the order of succession, and wisdom. A founding philosophical work of the conservative movement, Reflections was a favorite of Britain’s King George III.

A selected collection of Burke's later writings on the French Revolution, illuminating important dimensions of Burke's political and social philosophy beyond his Reflections on the revolution in France.

This is a collection of essays on Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. The contributors consider its reception, its legacy to English and Irish writers and its impact within contemporary cultural and critical theory.

Reissued here is one of the most influential works of Western political thought and rhetoric, first published in 1790.

Reflections on the Revolution in France - An Intellectual Attacks against the French Revolution - The proceedings in certain societies in London relative to that event: in a letter intended to have been sent to a Gentleman in Paris by Edmund Burke... Reflections on the Revolution in France is a political pamphlet written by the Irish statesman Edmund Burke and published in November 1790. One of the best-known intellectual attacks against the French Revolution, Reflections is a defining tract of modern conservatism as well as an important contribution to international theory. Above all else, it has been one of the defining efforts of Edmund Burke's transformation of "traditionalism into a self-conscious and fully conceived political philosophy of conservatism". It may not be unnecessary to inform the reader that the following Reflections had their origin in a correspondence between the author and a very young gentleman at Paris, who did him the honor of desiring his opinion upon the important transactions which then, and ever since have, so much occupied the attention of all men. An answer was written some time in the month of October, 1789; but it was kept back upon prudential considerations. That letter is alluded to in the beginning of the following sheets. It has been since forwarded to the person to whom it was addressed. The reasons for the delay in sending it were assigned in a short letter to the same gentleman. This produced on his part a new and pressing application for the author's sentiments. The author began a second and more full discussion on the subject. This he had some thoughts of publishing early in the last spring; but the matter gaining upon him, he found that what he had undertaken not only far exceeded the measure of a letter, but that its importance required rather a more detailed consideration than at that time he had any leisure to bestow upon it. However, having thrown down his first thoughts in the form of a letter, and, indeed, when he sat down to write, having intended it for a private letter, he found it difficult to change the form of address, when his sentiments had grown into a greater extent and had received another direction. A different plan, he is sensible, might be more favorable to a commodious division and distribution of his matter.