Edmund Burke

Burke was a Dublin-born statesman and writer who supported the American colonists and the reform of empire, yet recoiled in horror from the French Revolution. Society, he argued, is not a machine to be redesigned by theory but a living inheritance, a contract between the dead, the living, and the unborn, and reform must prune rather than uproot. His Reflections on the Revolution in France warned that abstract reason loosed upon tradition would end in terror, a prophecy events soon honored. From his prudence and his distrust of grand schemes, modern conservative thought traces its descent.