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.

Reflections on the Revolution in France by an English-Irish politician Edmund Burke is a philosophico-political treatise that widely criticizes the revolutionary method programms for rebuilding the society. It was written in the middle of the French Revolution in 1790. The treatise caused a wide social discussion, in particular because of the parallel oratorical activity of Burke in the Parlainment and as a bright expression of the ideology of conservatism. In his work Burke criticized sharply and categorically the French Revolution as an attempt to destroy the entrenched social order and change it into a theoretic, and that is why inviable, scheme of social relations, which was developed by encyclopedic philosophers.

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.

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.

Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France is one of the major texts in the western intellectual tradition. This book describes Burke’s political and intellectual world, stressing the importance of the idea of ‘property’ in Burke’s thought. It then focuses more closely on Burke’s personal and political situation in the late 1780s to explain how the Reflections came to be written. The central part of the study discusses the meaning and interpretation of the work. In the last part of the book the author surveys the pamphlet controversy which the Reflections generated, paying particular attention to the most famous of the replies, Tom Paine’s Rights of Man. It also examines the subsequent reputation of the Reflections from the 1790s to the modern day, noting how often Burke has fascinated even writers who have disliked his politics.