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Reflections on the Revolution in France

Edmund Burke·English

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Burke's warning that abstract reason loosed upon a living tradition would end in terror, a prophecy events soon honored. Society, he argues, is an inheritance to be pruned with care, not a machine to be redesigned by theory.

Society is indeed a contract. It is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. It becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

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