Product Description

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
                  ---Edmund Burke

Customer Reviews (2)

Informative At least
In reply to an earlier reviewr:

Logical Fallacy on your part, Sir.

You say that the quote has been falsely attributed to him for decades, but has never been sourced.
You agree that for decades it has been thought to be his but there has never been any proof that it is not.
Now, coming to the point of cover. You so easily conclude that the content is not worth reading on the basis of the inappropriate authority that you have. I am not the writer of the book but I can point out what you have said and what you should not have.

I believe carelessness lies on your part because few people in this world judge a book from its cover, only those who love affectation and ostentation.

I am an authority on Edmund Burke myself and I have researched his works for more than two decades.

I hope you don't mind this interference of mine, for I have nothing to do with this particular book.
Kind Regards

Not promising
I will confess up-front that I have not read this book. What I have done is seen the cover, which was enough. The quote so prominently placed on the cover is NOT by Burke; it has been falsely attributed to him for decades, but has never been sourced. If the creators of this book are so careless as to use a false quote, how careful can they be with the rest of the content? ... Read more

Product Description
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 09 (of 12) is presented here in a high quality paperback edition. This popular classic work by Edmund Burke is in the English language. If you enjoy the works of Edmund Burke then we highly recommend this publication for your book collection. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Biography based on the nature of ambivalence
For a political biography, THE RAGE OF EDMUND BURKE/ PORTRAIT OF AN AMBIVALENT CONSERVATIVE by Isaac Kramnick goes a long way into the psychology of social breakdown.Burke is remembered mainly as a conservative, old enough at the time of the French revolution to be appalled that anyone thought an attack which left the queen's bedchambers in Versailles full of mayhem and dead bodies could advance civilization.The revolutionary freedom which America is currently attempting to bring to foreign portions of the world by demonstrating air superiority might be considered as deranged as the situations examined in this book, which was published in 1977, when hardly anyone had reason to suppose that the form of freedom offered by American military conquest was similar to the acts of Medea conjured by Edmund Burke into a description of the nature of rebellion in his REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE, quoted in this book as an instance in which "Burke might well have sensed the relationship between his own radical streak and his enduring hatred towards his father.Guiltily, however, he recoiled from the bloody horror and emphasized the loving and caring son.The good subject, he insisted,

should approach to the faults of the State as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude.By this wise prejudice we are taught to look with horror on those children of their country who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces and put him into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their poisonous weeds and wild incantations they may regenerate the paternal constitution and renovate their father's life."(p. 64).

Other major figures mentioned in this book include Bedford, James Boswell, Charles James Fox, Warren Hastings, Tom Paine, Joseph Priestley, Rockingham, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Richard Shackleton, and Mary Wollstonecraft.The beginning of the book emphasizes the role that religious dissenters in England played "in scientific and political innovation."(p. 13).Joseph Priestly, "founder of the modern Unitarian movement," (p. 13) opposed the "Poor Laws, which for the bourgeoisie were one of the most onerous of the old order's interferences with economic liberty."(p. 14).In those exciting times, a mob "burned his laboratory and home in 1791, sending him to finish his days in dissenter's paradise--America."(p. 13).

Freud is mentioned well a few times in this book, showing that it is possible to take a modern view of times that were shaking the foundation of everything that was not America.People who are used to the pampered civilized existence which Americans of today expect others to worship even as they experience extreme forms of chaos might learn a few things that provide a better perspective for understanding Freud than the middle class version of conservatism provides.This book is interesting, if you can stick with it. ... Read more

Product Description
This 12-volume set contains the complete life works of EDMUND BURKE (1729-1797), Irish political writer and statesman. Educated at a Quaker boarding school and at Trinity College in Dublin, Burke's eloquence gained him a high position in Britain's Whig party, and he was active in public life. He supported limitations on the power of the monarch and believed that the British people should have a greater say in their government.In general, Burke spoke out against the persecutions perpetuated by the British Empire on its colonies, including America, Ireland, and India. Burke's speeches and writings influenced the great thinkers of his day, including America's Founding Fathers.In Volume III, readers will find:. "Speech on the Nabob of Arcot's Debts". "Speech on the Debate of the Army Estimates in the House of Commons". "Reflections on the Revolution in France" ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Burke's evils of the French Revolution
This was required reading for a graduate course in the history of the French Revolution.In Burke's book Reflections on the Revolution in France, he penned a diatribe against the evils of the French Revolution,believing that there was a pernicious cabal of philosophes and politicians joined by money-jobbers whose aim was to topple not only the old regime in France, but to export their "plague" throughout Europe.Thus, Burke astutely understood and abhorred the influence that Radical Enlightenment ideas had on the French Revolution.One instantly detects, in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, a conservative philosophy by which he not only understood his own society, but the entire human civilization.Much of his work was an appeal to a politically conservative notion of a "created order" of the world, which from this reading seemed to be universal to all European nations.This reader sensed that Burke's Reflections were written as a warning to the rest of Europe not to follow the model of change embodied in the French Revolution, and to adopt the steady reforms that took place in England.

Burke found no social redeeming value in the French Revolution and when he wrote Reflections, the worst of the "reign of terror" had yet to come.In fact, if one used Georges Lefebvre's notion of "four acts" to the Revolution, Burke poured out all his criticism against the first two acts, the aristocratic and bourgeois revolts.This reader found Burke's long sections on British history used to buttress his case; that change should have come to France within a more staid social order as either ignorant of the complex socio-economic and political factors that led up to the Revolution, or as a naïve belief that that the French people were so culturally close to the English that they should both react in similar fashion to socio-political upheaval.Burke delivered a literary "tongue lashing" to the French for how easily they turned their backs on their socio-political traditions."You had all these advantages in your ancient states; but you chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew.You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you" (31).This reader found Burke's argument on this point a little disingenuous.He lectured how Britain's "Glorious Revolution" in 1688 should have been the model for reform.However, he barely mentioned the bloody English Civil War that Cromwell staged, including the regicide of Charles I.In addition, one's impression of Burke's information is that he had received a very narrow view of the history leading up to the Revolution and its opening days, which seemed confined to correspondence from a small circle of friends.Burke had high praise for the First and Second Estates.His opinion of the nobles he knew was that they were, "...for the greater part composed of men of high spirit, and of a delicate sense of honour....They were tolerably well bred; very officious, humane, and hospitable" (115-116).Not the impression one is left with after viewing the movie Dangerous Liaisons!In describing his personal contacts with the French clergy, he noted that, "I received a perfectly good account of their morals, and of their attention to their duties" (123).

Burke essentially observed a "cabal" that planned the opening of the Revolution to include a pronouncement of aristocratic intentions to abolish feudalism, the National Assembly's adoption of the "Declaration of the Rights of Man," and the confiscation of Church property.Burke blamed two evils for the old regimes' demise.First, he blamed the philosophes whose atheistic literature he believed provided the influential ideas necessary to set the Revolution in motion."The literary cabal had some years ago formed something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion" (94)."Writers, especially when they act in a body, and with one direction, have great influence on the public mind" (95).Second, he blamed the doubling of the Third Estate's representation in the National Assembly who were led by an overabundance of undistinguished lawyers and whose ambitions were to grab the reins of power.Burke described these men as "the inferior, unlearned, mechanical, merely instrumental members of the profession" (36).Burke also ascribed to this cabal; the desire to reorder society through the confiscation of property, which he decried in his Reflections."I see the confiscators begin with bishops, and chapters, and monasteries; but I do not see them end their" (128).Thus, Burke found that the pernicious cabal of philosophes and politicians were too enamored of the "new religion" of enlightenment science and had no respect for tradition or the wisdom of religion."They conceive very systematically, that all things which give perpetuity are mischievous" (75).
Alexis de Tocqueville noted how Burke misjudged the Revolution."At first he thought it meant that France would be weakened and virtually destroyed" (94).Burke also feared that this "irrational" revolution would infest his own countrymen similar to a plaque."If it be a plague, it is such a plague that the precautions of the most severe quarantine ought to be established against it." (76).

Burke was no stranger to enlightened ideas.After all, he had been a supporter of American and Irish liberty.Burke was a Conservative Enlightenment figure, defending "reason" with tradition and religion.However, what Burke, was condemning in its earliest form is what we now recognize as ideology.And what he understood with great foresight is the power of modern intellectuals, acting as a literary clerisy, to produce it.Thus, Burke found that the pernicious cabal of philosophes and politicians were too enamored of the "new religion" of enlightenment science and had no respect for tradition or the wisdom of religion."They conceive very systematically, that all things which give perpetuity are mischievous" (75).

Recommended reading for anyone interested in political philosophy, enlightenment history, and the French Revolution.
... Read more

Product Description
This 12-volume set contains the complete life works of EDMUND BURKE (1729-1797), Irish political writer and statesman. Educated at a Quaker boarding school and at Trinity College in Dublin, Burke's eloquence gained him a high position in Britain's Whig party, and he was active in public life. He supported limitations on the power of the monarch and believed that the British people should have a greater say in their government.In general, Burke spoke out against the persecutions perpetuated by the British Empire on its colonies, including America, Ireland, and India. Burke's speeches and writings influenced the great thinkers of his day, including America's Founding Fathers.In Volume IV, readers will find:. "Letter in Answer to Some Objections to His Book on French Affairs". "Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs". "Letter to a Peer of Ireland on the Penal Laws Against Irish Catholics". "Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, On the Subject of the Roman Catholics of Ireland". "Hunts for a Memorial to be Delivered to Monsieur De M.M.". "Thoughts on French Affairs". "Heads for Consideration on the Present State of Affairs". "Remarks on the Policy of the Allies With Respect to France" ... Read more

Product Description
This 12-volume set contains the complete life works of EDMUND BURKE (1729-1797), Irish political writer and statesman. Educated at a Quaker boarding school and at Trinity College in Dublin, Burke's eloquence gained him a high position in Britain's Whig party, and he was active in public life. He supported limitations on the power of the monarch and believed that the British people should have a greater say in their government.In general, Burke spoke out against the persecutions perpetuated by the British Empire on its colonies, including America, Ireland, and India. Burke's speeches and writings influenced the great thinkers of his day, including America's Founding Fathers.In Volume I, readers will find:. "A Vindication of Natural Society". "A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful". "A Short Account of a Late Short Administration". "The Present State of the Nation". "Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontent" ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Whelan Knows Burke Well
Whelan is the sort of scholar rarely found in this age of academic narcissism.Not kowtowing to fashionability, Whelan presents examples Burke's writings on India in a balanced, considered manner, withoutincluding the tempting digressions that could make this a western -non-western multicultural ax grind. Every Burke enthusiast will benefitfrom this latest excursion into Burke's lesser known works.

Well-Expressed Summary of Burke, Given in Context of India
Whelan has done a marvelous job at interpreting Burke's politicalphilosophy through the window of Burke's writings on India, Empire, and inparticular, the Warren Hastings trial. ... Read more

Product Description
The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars.
Delve into what it was like to live during the eighteenth century by reading the first-hand accounts of everyday people, including city dwellers and farmers, businessmen and bankers, artisans and merchants, artists and their patrons, politicians and their constituents. Original texts make the American, French, and Industrial revolutions vividly contemporary.
++++
The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification:
++++
Harvard University Libraries

N023683

In this edition there are no rules above and below the edition statement; the press figures are: 14-5, 16-4, 20-3, 31-1, 40-3, 42-4, 59-3, 60-1, 68-3, 75-5, 93-1.

London : printed for J. Dodsley, 1775. 96p. ; 8° ... Read more

Product Description
This book provides close readings of Burke's public discourse and political writings.A singularly impressive scholarly work. As the author points out so deftly in his introduction, Burke's rhetoric has been too long ignored or simply used to serve other purposes, and it has never been subjected to the close textual analysis it receives in this work. The result of Browne's study is to present Burke and his work in a light that was clearly essential to Burke himself, one that illuminates the close connection between rhetoric construction and action that is so necessary to a fuller understanding of the man, his career, and his discourse.This book is an extremely important addition to Burke scholarship...Browne's demonstration of the textual/contextual connections is firmly rooted in historical, critical, and theoretical scholarship and evidences a firm and broad command of relevant literature. The essays stand as an exemplar of a rich interpretive approach to rhetorical texts, an approach that can be studied with profit by young and mature critics alike. ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishings Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the worlds literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
The book has no illustrations or index. Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: Great Britain; ... Read more