Burke, Edmund

Edmund Burke (1730–97), Irish-born and educated British politician, publicist, and man of letters, was a Whig reformer, the great ideological opponent of the French Revolution, and the spiritual father of Anglo-American conservatism. Four aspects of Burke's career are crucial for the study of ethics: his defense of party and party loyalty, his defense of the elected representative as a trustee of his constituents' interests rather than a delegate instructed by their opinions, his war on every incarnation of arbitrary power (even in the guise of the enlightened despotism of a monarch or newly enfranchised People), and finally the pan-European crusade he preached against the French Revolution and the desire to rationalize politics.