Burke, Edmund

Burke, Edmund (1729-1797), Irish-born British statesman and political philosopher, renowned both for his brilliant oratory and his critique of the French Revolution. Burke was born in Dublin (city, Republic of Ireland) and educated at Trinity College. He studied law briefly in London, entering London cultural life. His first important work was A Vindication of Natural Society (1756), a satire ridiculing the reasoning of the British statesman Henry St John Bolingbroke. This work, published anonymously, attracted considerable attention, as did his essay, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756). In 1757 he began a 30-year career as founder editor of The Annual Register, a British political yearbook. In 1761 Burke became private secretary to the chief secretary for Ireland, William Hamilton. Four years later he became private secretary to Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd marquess of Rockingham prime minister (1765-1766), a position he held until Rockingham's death in 1782, and in 1766 he was elected to Parliament as Whig member for the pocket borough of Wendover. Almost immediately Burke sought repeal of the Stamp Act. In a pamphlet, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), and in two speeches, “On American Taxation” (1774) and “Conciliation with America” (1775), he urged justice and conciliation towards the American colonies. His pamphlet also criticized the attempts of King George III to enhance royal power in relation to Parliament. In 1774 he was freely elected to Parliament as member for Bristol, but his efforts to alleviate commercial and religious discrimination against Ireland cost him his seat in 1780, and from then until 1794 he represented the pocket borough of Malton. He held office briefly in the Rockingham Whig administration of 1782-1783. Appointed in 1781 to a parliamentary select committee on India, Burke began vigorously investigating the colonial rule of the British East India Company. Convinced that the corruption of Indian government required the removal of the Company's powers of patronage, he drafted an East India Bill in 1783, which was defeated in Parliament. Burke persisted, holding the statesman and colonial administrator Warren Hastings personally responsible for the corruption of India. On February 15, 1788, Burke began his classic four-day-long opening speech in Westminster Hall in the unsuccessful impeachment proceedings against Hastings for high crimes and misdemeanours committed in India. Hastings was acquitted after a trial that lasted seven years, and Burke's case, despite its brilliance, was marred by excess zeal and personal abuse. Modern authorities tend to support Hastings' innocence. Burke at first suspended judgement when the French Revolution broke out in 1789, but he soon turned against it and its British sympathizers. The publication of Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which was read throughout Europe, confirmed him as the most eloquent defender of the established order. He especially criticized the Revolutionary ideology, and its elevation of abstract principle above painstaking social evolution. He regarded the social order as essentially a product of natural law, and distrusted rationalism's qualifications to comment on and modify that order. Burke became more and more vehement in his denunciation of the French Revolution as time went on and the atrocities of the Terror grew worse. Burke retired from Parliament in 1794. Though he had never made a single comprehensive formulation of his thought, his ideas became the basis of modern British political conservatism.