Edmund Burke v Thomas Paine
With lashings of Joseph de Maistre, the executioner's champion...
This is Who made our minds? my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Coming up: The Totalitarian Mind, God’s Capitalists and Confucius: the first humanist
AN ELOQUENT RESPONSE to the French Revolution issued from the Irish-born anglophile, politician and political theorist Edmund Burke (1729–1797).
Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) reached multitudes (and still does) and reinforced the prevailing British conservative opinion of the French Revolution as the disgusting regicide of a gentle king by a hysterical mob.
Burke’s celebrated work was a prolonged defence of inherited privilege, the propertied few and the monarchy. Today, his Reflections is revered as the secular Bible of the conservative movement.
