This is a collection of essays on Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. The contributors consider its reception, its legacy to English and Irish writers and its impact within contemporary cultural and critical theory.

The eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish MP and philosopher offers his opinion on the early days of the French Revolution and his expectations of its outcome. The French Revolution began in 1789. In the following year, Edmund Burke, a member of Great Britain’s House of Commons, wrote one of the most famous arguments against the rebellion. The work started off as a letter to a friend of Burke’s family who had asked for his opinion on whether France’s new ruling class would succeed in establishing a better order. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke presents his reply on a much larger scale. He offers “a dire warning of the consequences that would follow the mismanagement of change.” He contends the French Revolution would fail due to its foundation being constructed upon individualism and ignoring human nature and society. With thoroughness, rhetorical skill, and literary power, Burke ultimately makes his case for monarchy, aristocracy, private property, the order of succession, and wisdom. A founding philosophical work of the conservative movement, Reflections was a favorite of Britain’s King George III.

A selected collection of Burke's later writings on the French Revolution, illuminating important dimensions of Burke's political and social philosophy beyond his Reflections on the revolution in France.

Reissued here is one of the most influential works of Western political thought and rhetoric, first published in 1790.

Edmund Burke’s 1791 Reflections on the Revolution in France is a strong example of how the thinking skills of analysis and reasoning can support even the most rhetorical of arguments. Often cited as the foundational work of modern conservative political thought, Burke’s Reflections is a sustained argument against the French Revolution. Though Burke is in many ways not interested in rational close analysis of the arguments in favour of the revolution, he points out a crucial flaw in revolutionary thought, upon which he builds his argument. For Burke, that flaw was the sheer threat that revolution poses to life, property and society. Sceptical about the utopian urge to utterly reconstruct society in line with rational principles, Burke argued strongly for conservative progress: a continual slow refinement of government and political theory, which could move forward without completely overturning the old structures of state and society. Old state institutions, he reasoned, might not be perfect, but they work well enough to keep things ticking along. Any change made to improve them, therefore, should be slow, not revolutionary. While `Burke’s arguments are deliberately not reasoned in the ‘rational’ style of those who supported the revolution, they show persuasive reasoning at its very best.