Anglo-Irish statesman and political thinker, widely regarded as the intellectual founder of modern Conservatism. A Whig MP sympathetic to the American colonists and to Catholic emancipation, Burke is best known for his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), a scathing early critique of the The French Revolution written while many in Britain still welcomed it.
Burke opposed abstract rationalism in politics. He argued that societies are the accumulated wisdom of generations — fragile webs of custom, prejudice (in his technical sense, meaning pre-reflective judgment), and inherited institutions that cannot be redesigned from first principles without catastrophe. Reform, yes; revolution, no. His quarrel with Thomas Paine's Rights of Man became the defining early argument between conservative and radical traditions.
He is a complicated figure for modern readers: the same man who defended the American Revolution as a conservative act (preserving English liberties) and prosecuted Warren Hastings for abuses in India also wrote with aristocratic horror about the storming of Versailles.