Edmund Burke (12 January 1729 – 9 July 1797) was a British Whig MP from 1765 to 1794. Considered to be the father of traditionalist conservatism, he believed in the importance of religious institutions for the moral stability and good of the state. He also opposed his country's taxation policies in the Thirteen Colonies, supported colonial resistance to metropolitan authority (but not American independence), supported Catholic emancipation, and was vehemently opposed to the French Revolution and the chaos which ensued.
Biography[]
A statue of Burke at Trinity College Dublin
Edmund Burke was born on 12 January 1729 in Dublin, Ireland, Great Britain, and he was an Anglican like his family. He became a famous writer, authoring A Vindication of Natural Society in 1756 and becoming a member of the House of Commons in December of 1765. Burke was liked by both liberals and conservatives, and he supported the grievances of the American colonists during the American Revolutionary War, making speeches demanding reconciliation with the Thirteen Colonies. During the French Revolution, he wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France, which transformed traditionalism into his new view of conservatism, which became a major political ideology. The pamphlet led to pamphlet wars with other writers such as Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and James Mackintosh, and he supported Britain's intervention in the French Revolutionary Wars on the side of King Louis XVI of France as an intervention in a civil war and not a war against the whole of France. He died in 1797 in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire.