Burke Edmund - Reflections on the Revolution in France

Rethinking the Western Tradition

The volumes in this series seek to address the present debate over the Western tradition by reprinting key works of that tradition along with essays that evaluate each text from different perspectives.

EDITORIAL

COMMITTEE FOR

Rethinking the Western Tradition

David Bromwich
Yale University

Gerald Graff
University of Illinois at Chicago

Geoffrey Hartman
Yale University

Samuel Lipman (deceased)
The New Criterion

Gary Saul Morson
Northwestern University

Jaroslav Pelikan
Yale University

Marjorie Perloff
Stanford University

Richard Rorty
Stanford University

Alan Ryan
New College, Oxford

Ian Shapiro
Yale University

Frank M. Turner
Yale University

Allen W. Wood
Stanford University

EDMUND BURKE

Edited by Frank M. Turner
with essays by
Darrin M. McMahon
Conor Cruise OBrien
Jack N. Rakove
Alan Wolfe

Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund.

Copyright 2003 by Yale University.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Set in Times Roman type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc., Orwigsburg, Pennsylvania. Printed in the United States of America by Vail-Ballou Press, Binghamton, New York.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Burke, Edmund, 17291797.
Reflections on the revolution in France / Edmunde Burke ; edited by Frank M. Turner ; with essays by Darrin M. McMahon... [et al.]...
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-300-09978-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-300-09979-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Burke, Edmund, 17291797Correspondence. 2. FranceHistoryRevolution, 17891799Foreign public opinion, British. 3. Public opinionGreat BritainHistory18th century. 4. Burke, Edmund, 17291797. Reflections on the Revolution in France. I. Turner, Frank M. (Frank Miller), 1944II. McMahon, Darrin M. III. Title.
DC150.B8 2003
944.04dc21
2003010965

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Darrin M. McMahon of Florida State University is the author of Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Conor Cruise OBrien is the author of The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). He has also written Ancestral Voices: Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 17851800 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998), and Memoir: My Life and Themes (New York: Cooper Square, 2000), as well as many other works relating to the era of the French Revolution and to modern Irish history.

Jack N. Rakove of Stanford University is the author of Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York: Knopf, 1996), for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He is the author of James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic (New York: Longman Group, 2001), and the editor of James Madison: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1999) and The Unfinished Election of 2000 (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

Frank M. Turner of Yale University is most recently author of John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). He has also written Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), and Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).

Alan Wolfe is the director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College and the author of Moral Freedom: The Search for Virtue in a World of Choice (New York: Norton, 2002) and One Nation, After All: What Americans Really Think About God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, the Right, the Left, and Each Other (New York: Viking, 1999). He is also the editor of School Choice: The Moral Debate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

Frank M. Turner

Edmund Burke

Conor Cruise OBrien

Darrin M. McMahon

Jack N. Rakove

Alan Wolfe

This edition of Edmund Burkes Reflections on the Revolution in France is intended for the general reader wishing to reencounter this remarkable work or to become acquainted with it for the first time. Consequently, the scholarly apparatus within the text has been kept to a minimum. The notes are those which Burke appended, as indicated with an asterisk (*), and additional editorial notes to help the reader understand Burkes references. Unless otherwise indicated, the translations of ancient texts cited in the notes are from the Loeb Classical Library, published by Harvard University Press. A Glossary-Index has been supplied to identify the numerous contemporary figures whom Burke mentions, to explain some of Burkes more archaic terms, and to permit readers to follow some of Burkes major themes.

I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to the remarkable Victorian scholarship of E. J. Payne, who edited Burkes Reflections on the Revolution in France for Burke: Select Works (Oxford: Clarendon, 1886). His painstaking tracing of classical and contemporary references in Burkes volume and his more general commentary have provided the basis for virtually all subsequent editions of the Reflections. For a recent scholarly edition of Burkes text, with extensive critical and historical apparatus upon which future scholars will depend and from which I have much benefited and drawn, see the edition edited by J. C. D. Clark (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

The text of the present edition is that printed as volume 2 of The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854) in eight volumes.

I would like to thank Jens-Uwe Guettel for his careful and thoughtful reading of the introduction. Dr. Joseph Skelly of the College of Mount Saint Vincent provided aid at several crucial moments. I would also like to thank Jonathan Brent of Yale University Press for conceiving and launching this series on Rethinking the Western Tradition, and Lara Heimert of the Press for her help and encouragement in producing this volume. My wife, Ellen Louise Tillotson, has provided both support and much patience.

FRANK M. TURNER

Edmund Burke was born in Ireland in 1729. His mother was a Roman Catholic, and his father had conformed to the Protestant Church of Ireland to improve his personal and professional prospects. Edmund Burke attended Trinity College, Dublin, which admitted only Protestant students, and in 1750 entered the Inns of Court in London to receive legal training. His career did not lead him into the law, however, but into literature and politics. In 1756 he published