Edmund Burke

The genius of the Federalist Papers was to devise a constitution for the new republic which made the United States the most enduring and most successful republic in modernity. The genius of the Reflections was to provide a philosophical critique of that other revolution, so different from the American, which produced another republic, ill-conceived and ill-fated. “You chose to act,” Burke told the French, “as if you had never been molded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew.” The Americans never made that mistake. --Gertrude Himmelfarb, Reflections on Burke's 'Reflections': Revisiting the lasting, provocative wisdom of Edmund Burke, The New Criterion, February 2009

Burke maintained that although individual Englishmen could make poor choices, as a whole and over time the English people would not. [footnote omitted] Thus, popular government could work. It is a simple but nonetheless sophisticated notion. --Clifford W. Taylor, Merit Selection: Choosing Judges Based On Their Politics Under The Veil Of A Disarming Name, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Volume 32, Number 1 , Winter 2009, p. 97, at p. 99

...there is more to Burke’s philosophy than a simple celebration of the established social order. Not least, it is suffused with a thoroughgoing scepticism about the character and capabilities of human beings, which led him to reject the Enlightenment view that reason can be readily employed to the betterment of mankind. --Jeremy Stangroom, Edmund Burke: The great conservative, March 17, 2009

For the first time I ever cast my eyes on anything of Burke's (which was an extract from his Letter to a Noble Lord in a three-times-a-week paper, the St. James's Chronicle, in 1796), I said to myself, "this is true eloquence: this is a man pouring out his mind on paper." All other style seemed to me pedantic and impertinent. ... I did not care for his doctrines. I was then and am still, proof against their contagion; but I admired the author, and was considered as not a very staunch partisan of the opposite side, though I thought myself that an abstract proposition was one thing -- a masterly transition, a brilliant metaphor, another. I conceived, too, that he might be wrong in his main argument, and yet deliver fifty truths in arriving at a false conclusion. --William Hazlitt, On Reading Old Books (1821), Essays: Picked by Blupete (via Video meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor)
See recommended reading by William Hazlitt at Reading Rat

See Burke's Conservatism

Edmund Burke: not for neocons by Jonathan Clark, review of Edmund Burke, Volume Two, 1784–1797 by F. P. Lock, Times (London), March 7, 2007
(via Milt's File)

Burkesday? Ireland should celebrate another great son, by Anthony Paletta, National Review Online, posted June 16, 2005, 7:42 a.m.

The Bluto-Burke Connection — Revealed! Animal House and the philosophy of the Right, by Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online, January 22, 2001 5:10 p.m.

Burke's Mansions, by Daniel Ritchie, First Things, April 1998, review of Edmund Burke: A Life in Caricature, by Nicholas K. Robinson, Edmund Burke and India, by Frederick G. Whelan, The Literary Genres of Edmund Burke, by Frans de Bruyn, and Intertextual War: Edmund Burke and the French Revolution in the Writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, and James Mackintosh, by Steven Blakemore

The Liberalism/Conservatism Of Edmund Burke and F. A. Hayek: A Critical Comparison, by Linda C. Raeder, Humanitas, 1997 No. 1

Burke, Kant and the Sublime, by Gur Hirshberg, Philosophy Now, Winter 1994/1995

Was Burke a Conservative? by Mark C. Henrie, First Things, November 1993

A Note on Burke’s 'Vindication of Natural Society' by Murray N. Rothbard, Journal of the History of Ideas, January 1958