Life and Works of Edmund Burke:

We also study Machiavelli because he took a

stand on political matters that still evokes our
thought. He clearly stated that politics had
nothing to do with religion. Burke’s views of
French Revolution and role of people’s
representative are still remembered by
students of Western political thought. Edmund
Burke was born in Dublin in 1729.
• His father was an attorney and a Protestant by faith. His
mother was a Roman Catholic. These two streams of religious
faith met together in the family of Burke. Burke’s two brothers
followed father’s religion, while their sister followed the faith of
mother. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and
received his degree from this college.In 1750 he went to
London to study law, but as it was against his liking he gave up
the study of law, and devoted himself to literary work. Two
Essays—a Vindication of Natural Society and Philosophical
Inquiry into the Origin on our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful— were published and he came to be known in the
academic circles of England.
• His father, Richard Burke, was a prosperous,
professional solicitor, who had converted to the Church of
Ireland from the Roman Catholicism of his Munster
lineage.
• His mother, Mary (née Nagle), came from a
genteel Roman Catholic family of County Cork. He
was raised in the Church of Ireland (although his
sister, Juliana, was brought up as and remained a Roman
Catholic) and would remain throughout his life a
practicing Anglican, although his political enemies would
later repeatedly accuse him of harbouring secret Catholic
sympathies at a time when membership in the Catholic
• Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797) was an Anglo-Irish
philosopher, statesman and political theorist of the Age
of Enlightenment.
• BURKE Enlightenment was an intellectual movement,
developed mainly in France, Britain and Germany,
which advocated freedom, democracy and reason as
the primary values of society. It started from the
standpoint that men's minds should be freed
from ignorance, from superstition and from
the arbitrary powers of the State, in order to allow
mankind to achieve progress and perfection.
• The period was marked by a further decline in the influence
of the church, governmental consolidation and greater rights
for the common people. Politically, it was a time
of revolutions and turmoil and of the overturning of
established traditions.
• also claimed that man is unable to understand the many
ways in which inherited behaviors influence their thinking,
and so trying to judge society objectively is futile.
• is often considered the father of Conservatism in Anglo-
American circles. He argued forcefully against the French
Revolution, especially in his "Reflections on the Revolution in
France" of 1790, (although he sympathized with some of the
aims of the American Revolution of 1776 - 1783).
• There is little doubt that Edmund Burke is the most influential
conservative thinker of all time. His thoughts and comments
deliver a fundamental set of ideas for conservativism.
• Burke provides a wide-ranging contribution to political theory,
although he is best-known for his reflections on the revolution
in France. Along with other conservative philosophers of the
time such as Joseph de Maistre, Burke belongs in the
counter-enlightenment school of thought. Burke rejected the
Enlightenment view that humans are rational entities.
Instead, Burke claimed we are both imperfect and
imperfectible. Any attempt to create a system based upon the
perfectibility of man is thereby contrary to our innate
character.
• Burke’s critique of the French revolution centres primarily
upon its flawed attempt to create a utopian society based
upon the slogans of ‘liberty, fraternity and equality.’ This is to
ignore the social bonds that keep us together, and marks an
attempt to replace the accumulated wisdom of previous
generations with abstractions. The hot-headed idealists who
manned the barricades were entirely wrong to believe they
could construct a new world from the ashes of the old. They
placed their faith in destruction rather than preservation;
thereby acting contrary to what Burke claimed should be the
guiding principles of society.
• The term "conservatism" is derived from the Latin
"conservare" (meaning to "protect" or "preserve") and from the
French derivative "conservateur". Its usage in a political
sense began to appear only after the French Revolution of
1789, and then only hesitantly, only taking its characteristic
political connotation in the1820s.
• He argued instead for the value of inherited
institutions and customs, including the time-honored
development of the state (built on the wisdom of many
generations), piecemeal progress through experience, and the
continuation of other important societal institutions such as
the family and the Church, rather than what he
called "metaphysical abstractions"
 Political Life
• Political Life After an unsuccessful first venture into
politics, Burke was appointed secretary in 1765 to
the Marquess of Rockingham, leader of one of
the Whig groups, the largely liberal faction in
Parliament, and he entered the House of
Commons that year. Burke remained Rockingham’s
secretary until the latter’s death in 1782. Burke worked
to unify the group of Whigs that had formed around
Rockingham; this faction was to be the vehicle of
Burke’s parliamentary career.
TYPES OF CONSERTIVISM:

• Cultural Conservatism is a philosophy that supports

preservation of the heritage of a nation or culture
(or sometimes of language traditions), usually by the
adaptation of norms handed down from the past.
• Social Conservatism is a subset of Cultural
Conservatism where the norms may also
be moral (e.g. opposition to homosexuality, covering
of women's faces, etc). In Europe, however, it
usually refers to "Liberal" Conservatives, who
support modern European welfare states.
• Religious Conservatism seeks to preserve the
teachings of particular religious ideologies, either
by example or by law. Religious Conservatives may
promote broad campaigns for a return to traditional
values, or they may go the radical route, looking to
preserve a belief in its original or pristine form.
• Fiscal Conservatism is the economic philosophy
of prudence in government spending and debt,
arguing that a government does not have the right to
run up large debts and then throw the burden on
the taxpayer.
• Neo-Conservatism is the "new" Conservative movement
which emerged in the United States in opposition to the
perceived Liberalism of the 1960s. It emphasizes
an interventionist foreign policy, free trade and free
marketeconomics and a general disapproval of
counterculture.
• Bio-Conservatism is a stance of hesitancy
about technological development, and a skepticism about
medical and other biotechnological transformations of the
living world (genetic engineering), especially if it is perceived
to threaten a given social order.
INTELLECTUAL ORIENTATION:
• BURKE’S mind ,by the time he left Trinity,had two facets:
1. was an orientation towards religions ,improvement and
politics ,the other a philosophical method. The latter derived
from hif university education,the former from reflection on
the Irish situation.Burke was born into an Ireland where
reflective intellect had its social setting in a small
educational elite, much of it connected with the Church of
Ireland .This elite contemplated a political class which
owned much of the land ,and consisted primarily of a gentry
and peerage headed by the King representative, the LOrd-
Lieutenant;but it saw too a tiny professional class, and a
huge illiterate,impoverished peasantry.
• 2.The aim of educational elite,which is shared with some of
the Political; class ,was improvement in the broadest
sense,this is to say it connected self improvement throught
the influence of the Arts & Sciences and through the
development of intellectual skill , with moral culture and with
economic development.The ability of the educated ,the
politicians and the rich to take constructive initiatives
constrasted starkly with the inability of the peasantry to help
itself;peasants releived their misery principally through
spasm of savagery againstthier landlord’s representatives,
but such violence was repressed sternly and helped
nobody.The Irish situation suggested a general rationale of
practice to those who wished to improve themeselves and
• WORK OF EDWARD BURKE
• SUBLIME - Theory developed by EDMUND BURKE in the mid
eighteenth century ,where he defined sublime art as art that
refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation
,measurement or imitation.Burke then turns to his observations
on the sublime. He asserts that ideas of pain are much more
powerful than those of pleasure, and that the strongest pain of
all is the fear of death, which causes terror.Edmund Burke
makes it clear that both political and social life are extremely
complex and their problems cannot be solved with the help of
any easy formula or technique in the tradition of political
organization, the attitude and temperament of people and many
other things are to be brought under active consideration before
suggesting any solution.
• Of BEAUTY
• Burke's distinction between the sublime and the beautiful
rests upon an understanding of sexual difference in which
the "masculine" passions of self-preservation, which stem
from ideas of terror, pain, and danger, are linked to the
sublime, while the "feminine" emotions of sympathy,
tenderness, affection, and imitation are the preserve of the
beautiful. The sublime amalgamates such conventionally
masculine qualities as power, size, ambition, awe, and
majesty; the beautiful collects the equally conventional
feminine traits of softness, smallness, weakness, docility,
delicacy, and timidity.
• improvement,if it was to spread the educational elite , must
spring from the guidance and goodwill of the possessing
classes;from the landlord who developed his property, from the
priest wgo instructedand consoled the poor,and from the lord
lieutenant who used his powerbenevolently. The only obvious
alternative was violence and that was both destructive and
fruitless. Burke retained all his life a sense of the responsibility of
the educated ,rich and powerful to improve the lot of those
whom they directed;asense that existing arrangements were
valuable in so far as they were the necessary preconditions for
improvement; a strong sense of the importance of educated
people as agents foe constructive change , Change which he
often constructed with the use of force , whether as method or
as result.
• The former always includes intimations of power, majesty,
and brute male force—a storm at sea, a raging bull, a ruler
or sovereign, greatness of dimension—while the latter
connotes smallness, delicacy, and serenity: "it is the
flowery species," such as, perhaps, a lily, "so remarkable
for its weakness and momentary duration, that gives us the
liveliest idea of beauty, and elegance" . Beauty, like
femininity, is inseparable from a certain weakness. In part
three of the Enquiry Burke observes that "the beauty of
women is considerably owing to their weakness, or
delicacy, and is even enhanced by their timidity, a quality of
mind analogous to it". He argues against the prevailing
view that perfection is the cause of beauty:
• Beautiful things might amaze and rouse us, but the
sublime affects us in a more profound way. It’s
overwhelming, even frightening, and can leave us
with a deep and lasting sense of wonder. But why do
potential dangers, such as a foreboding storm on the
horizon or the view from the edge of a cliff, exhilarate
the human mind? The 18th-century philosopher and
writer Edmund Burke thought that the sublime
involves the possibility of pain, which triggers feelings
of self-preservation – a visceral response that moves
from the body to the mind.
• Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps
the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the
smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the
variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the
same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye
slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is
carried.
• Here the feminine body, supposedly the symbol of the beautiful,
instead produces the effects of the sublime. Rather than
securing boundaries and limits, its very "smoothness,"
"softness," and "variety" instill "unsteadiness":this body does
not provide a site where distinctions can be fixed but rather
represents the point at which they come apart, and the
observer, seeking a resting place, "slides giddily."
• The absence of a fixed point of view or visual focus
produces disorientation; unlike the male, the beautiful
female body defeats our expectation of a center and
instead becomes the occasion of a giddiness, or vertigo.
Vertigo, of course, is a typically sublime feeling connected
with the falling away of ground or center; it is what we feel
when an abyss opens up before us. It is important to
emphasize that feminine sexual difference, which provides
the foundation for the distinction between the sublime and
the beautiful, here becomes the figure for that distinction's
instability, eliciting a moment of textual dizziness in which
the beautiful takes on the characteristics of the sublime.
THE END..... THANK YOU