Edmund Burke

Few thinkers have provoked such violently opposing reactions as Edmund Burke. A giant of eighteenth-century political and intellectual life, Burke has been praised as a prophet who spied the terror latent in revolutionary or democratic ideologies, and condemned as defender of social hierarchy and outmoded political institutions.

Ross Carroll tempers these judgments by situating Burke's arguments in relation to the political controversies of his day. Burke's writings must be understood a ...