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.

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Edmund Burke; Edited and Introduced by Jesse Norman

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Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Winston, once summarized Benjamin Disraeli’s life as ‘Failure, failure, failure, partial success, renewed failure, ultimate and complete triumph’. The same might be said of the great eighteenth-century philosopherstatesman Edmund Burke.
 
Edmund Burke was born, probably in 1730, on the banks of the Liffey in Dublin, the third of four children. His father was a solicitor, a difficult man described in an age before class analysis as of ‘the middling sort’, who practised in the superior courts, and a Protestant. His mother was calmer and kinder, and a Catholic. She came from a distinguished family, the Nagles of County Cork, Jacobites who had supported the claims of James II and his successors after the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688–9, in which James went into exile and William III came to the throne amid a new constitutional settlement – a cause which had cost them both lands and grandeur.
 
Ireland at that time was in name a Kingdom, but in reality an English and Protestant dominion, in which the rights of Catholics were severely curtailed by the so-called Popery Laws. It was a place of huge disparities of wealth and wellbeing, compounding and in turn compounded by intense religious hatreds and political instability. It offered rich material for Burke’s vivid moral and literary imagination, and for what proved to be his lifelong detestation of injustice.
 
Burke was educated first at a non-denominational school outside Dublin (1741–4), and then at Trinity College Dublin (1744–8). At school he was inspired by the intellectual and moral example of his schoolmaster, Abraham Shackleton, a Quaker and the father of his first great friend and early correspondent, Richard Shackleton. He was less enthused by Trinity, it seems, finding the teaching laborious and pedantic; his outlets lay elsewhere, in two short-lived literary societies which he helped to found, in three hours a day in the public library, and in poetry and other writing.
 
We know relatively little of Burke over the following seven years. He seems to have worked in his father’s office, before arriving at the Middle Temple in London in May 1750 to read for the Bar, aged twenty. He had a year or two of ill-health and low spirits, which he sought to cure through extended journeys with his friend (but not it seems, relative) Will Burke. In 1755, to his father’s apparent displeasure, he took the momentous decision to leave the law and try to live by his pen.
 
There followed an extraordinary burst of writing, sustained by the financial support and literary access given to Burke by Robert Dodsley, a noted publisher and bookseller. His wideranging early works included an almost too sophisticated parody, the literary polemic A Vindication of Natural Society; a highly influential work of aesthetics, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful; a social and historical survey, An Account of the European Settlements in America in collaboration with Will Burke; and An Essay towards an Abridgment of the English History, which broke off with Magna Carta in 1215 and was never completed.
 
By 1759 Burke had become the editor of Dodsley’s new periodical, the Annual Register, and was married to Jane Nugent, with two infant sons, Richard and Christopher (the latter died in early youth). He was making a name for himself in literary circles, and in 1764 became a founder member of Dr Johnson’s Club, alongside Johnson himself, Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith and others. He had also taken his first steps into politics, as secretary to William Gerard Hamilton, whom he followed from the Board of Trade to Ireland, where Hamilton became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1763. But Burke found himself impossibly constricted by Hamilton’s demands, and by early 1765 they had parted.
 
Burke now had an extraordinary turn of luck. He was introduced to the Marquis of Rockingham, possibly the richest man in England and the leader of an important group of Whigs in Parliament. Britain had been wrestling with the financial aftereffects of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), and its attempts to raise new revenues were proving highly controversial in the colonies. Moreover, George III, who had succeeded to the throne in 1760, saw his Hanoverian predecessors as having handed over the conduct of politics to Parliament, and sought to reassert the informal and prerogative rights of the Crown. The result was a political merry-go-round, in which a succession of administrations attempted to reconcile financial prudence and colonial management with parliamentary politics and the demands of the new monarch. By 1765, after several failed administrations, the King was reluctantly persuaded to approach Rockingham. Burke thus became private secretary to the new Prime Minister, and shortly afterwards a Member of Parliament, for the ‘pocket borough’ of Wendover, in his own right.
 
Rockingham’s administration was short-lived; but Burke was an immediate success in Parliament, quickly gaining a formidable reputation for his speeches and skill in debate. He also developed a role over time as a party manager, helping to shape the Rockinghamites into what we can now see as the first genuine forerunner to the political parties of today. In 1770 he published Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, notable today because it drew a crucial distinction between mere factions and parties which are ‘united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some political principle in which they are all agreed’. The test comes when such a group is evicted from office. Founded on self-interest, factions will tend to disperse. Parties, however, will sustain themselves and their membership – on principle and shared values, on mutual commitments and on personal loyalties and friendship– until the opportunity to take power returns.
 
For many years this distinction, and the Thoughts itself, was denounced in some quarters as an apologia for the political power exercised by Rockingham and other great Whig magnates. However, recent research has demonstrated that Burke had formulated the key ideas in a hitherto unattributed essay of 1757, reproduced in this collection for the first time outside the scholarly journals.
 
The Rockinghamites had to wait until 1782 before they could resume office. The intervening sixteen years were a torrid time for them, a period dom…