![]() Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. It argues for piecemeal reform rather than revolutionary change, and deplores the influence the revolution might have in Britain. Presenting a scathing attack on the French revolution's attitudes to existing institutions, property and religion, this work makes a cogent case for upholding inherited rights and established customs. ![]() Rather, as Conor Cruise O'Brien shows in his introduction, he was an Irishman with a good deal of smypathy for the "revolutionary" Catholic cause - a latent sympathy which, paradoxically, may explain some of the power of this work. Edmund Burke, author of Reflections on the Revolution in France, is known to a wide public as a classic political thinker: it is less well understood that his intellectual achievement depended upon his understanding of philosophy and use of it in the practical writings and speeches by which he is chiefly known. On all these topics Burke gave a definitive expression to a set of attitudes still at the heart of contemporary controversies, and yet he was no mere unthinking reactionary. For Burke is one of the foremost conservative British political thinkers: in his support for piecemeal reform rather than revolutionary change, in his sceptical belief in expediency and practical wisdom rather than abstract theorizing, and in his defence of property, religion and traditional institutions. This work is far more than an eloquent piece of occasional writing. ![]()
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