Edmund Burke

Born in Dublin, Edmund Burke was the son of a Protestant Lawyer and a Catholic mother. He was educated in Classics at a Quaker boarding school and at Trinity College Dublin, he remained a committed Anglican the rest of his life. He considered a national established church a requirement for sound government. In 1750 he went to London to study law but soon left his course. In 1756 he published his first book anonymously A Vindication of Natural Society, a satirical account of the rise of civilization and how it produces unhappiness and distress. A year later he published the Origin of Our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful, his most philosophical work (And also written anonymously). He became editor of The Annual Register, a record of contemporary political events. After serving as private secretary to several senior parliamentarians, Burke was given a seat in 1765 and remained in Parliament for over thirty years. His success as an orator, political writer and party member for the Whigs was extensive although he was never given a particularly high office by his party when it took government, possibly because of his independent streak.

During his political career he campaigned constantly, but unsuccessfully in the short term. He advocated administrative reform of the royal household and to increase the power of the crown so as to reward its supporters; He supported the elimination of anti-Catholic laws in Ireland and the controls on trade with that island.; He was in favour of generous treatment to the American Colonists, and supported reconciliation from the outbreak of hostilities with the American Revolution; He favoured strong state support for the established Anglican Church and for the landed gentry;

India

He fought for restrictions on the powers of the East India Company in its administration of India; in particular he led the greatest impeachment trial in the history of the British Empire, that of the former governor-general of India for the East India Company, Warren Hastings, for "high crimes and misdemeanours" during his tenure in India. The defense articulated a vision of empire based on ideas of power, conquest, and subjugation of the colonized in pursuit of the exclusive national interests of the colonizer. Burke had a different vision, calling for a deterritorialized supranational juridical sovereignty based on a recognition of the a priori rights of the colonized. These two opposing discourses and visions, as they came to be articulated in the trial, had decisive implications for both the nature and evolution of the British empire and its imperial institutions and of Indian legal and political discourse and institutions in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the early 20th centuries, a series of imperial historians like Fitzjames Stephen, John Strachey, Sophia Weitzman, Lucy S. Sutherland, and Keith Feiling dismissed Burke's accusations that Hastings had been personally corrupt and argued that his arbitrariness was justified by the necessities of maintaining empire in the east, a view that Hastings himself articulated in the trial.

French Tevolution

Burke supported military intervention against the French Revolution and for tighter controls of civil Liberties in Britain, so as to prevent such an occurrence happening there. All these causes were effectively lost, but Burke's ceaseless politics of principle made them burning issues and subsequently made him famous. He died disappointed three years after his retirement and the death of his son, which caused him much grief.

Historiography

The "New Conservative" interpretation of Burke's philosophy with its concentration upon the Natural Law has dominated Burke studies since the 1940s, especially in America. This interpretation has not been accepted in England. It negan with Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (1953), and Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind from Burke to Santayana (1953). The Introduction to is an early-and extreme-anticipation of the Natural Law interpretation. For statements of the Natural Law school see Russell Kirk, 'Burke and Natural Rights', The Review of Politics, XIII (1951), the more moderate and far more compelling essay by Charles Parkin, The Moral Basis of Burke's Political Thought (Cam-

Bibliography

• Cone, Carl B. Burke and the Nature of Politics (2 vols, 1957, 1964), a detailed modern biography of Burke; somewhat uncritical and sometimes superficial regarding politics
• Crowe, Ian, ed. The Enduring Edmund Burke: Bicentennial Essays (1997) essays by by American conservatives online edition
• Kirk, Russell. Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered (1997) by a leader of American conservatism online edition
• Kirk, Russell. The Conservative Mind from Burke to Santayana (1953), put Burke in the mainstream of American conservatism online edition
• Kramnick, Isaac. The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative (1977) online edition
• Lock, F. P. Edmund Burke (2 vol 1998, 2007), the standard scholarly biography vol 1 online
• Magnus, Philip. Edmund Burke: A Life (1939), older biography
• Marshall, P. J. The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (1965), the standard history of the trial and Burke's role
• O'Gorman, Frank. Edmund Burke: Edmund Burke: His Political Philosophy (2004) 153pp online edition

Primary Sources

• Burke's Politics (1949), edited by R. Hoffman and P. Levack
• Burke, Edmund, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (9 vol 1981- ) vol 1 online; vol 2 online; vol 6 India: The Launching of the Hastings Impeachment, 1786–1788 online; vol 8 online; vol 9 online;