Edmund Burke

Born

12 January 1729

Died

9 July 1797

An Irish-born member of the House of Commons and the leading intellectual figure of the Rockingham Whigs, Burke had built his reputation on opposition to arbitrary power, arguing for conciliation with the American colonies and prosecuting Warren Hastings over the government of India. His Reflections on the Revolution in France, published on 1 November 1790, argued that the Revolution had destroyed inherited institutions in the name of abstract theory and predicted that it would end in military rule. It provoked more than fifty published replies, among them Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men and Paine’s Rights of Man. The book divided the Whigs, and Burke broke publicly with Fox in the Commons in May 1791. He opposed any peace with the Republic in his Letters on a Regicide Peace, and died in 1797.

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