BURKE, EDMUND. — Born in Dublin in 1729, died at Beaconsfield in 1797. He was among the most notable figures of the Whig party; in 1765 he became secretary to Prime Minister Rockingham: his political career then began, and both in government and in the House of Commons he maintained his anti-Tory line of conduct. In 1778 he supported the abolition of the restrictions imposed on English and Irish Catholics; from 1772 to 1795 he was fiercely opposed to the slave policy that England pursued in India.
His fame is due above all, among his various writings, to his battle cry of 1790, Reflections on the Revolution in France. In his work as a political writer he fought on two fronts, both against Enlightenment rationalism and against pre-Romantic individualism, in the strenuous defense he offered of the concept of an organic-collective society: for B., the foundation and seed of every sound political sentiment lie precisely in adherence to the social category and in affection for the small group of which the individual is a part within the more general totality. Against the abstractionism of the French Revolution he posited a no less abstract conservative method: his historicism, wholly directed toward the exaltation of the perfect form of government (the English constitutional one), prevented him from seeing the political and social substratum of the French revolutionary movement.
Exalted and hated, he was spiritual nourishment for the writers of the Restoration, who took from him respect for the moral and political traditions that cannot be destroyed by revolutionary fury. His opposition to the philosophy of Bolingbroke, and his constant anti-atheistic polemic (for him, atheism is opposed not only to reason but also to human instinct) would provide remarkably powerful leaven for European religious Romanticism.