Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke was an Irish-born member of Parliament who spent thirty years in opposition, prosecuting Warren Hastings for the misgovernment of India and defending the American colonies, and who then, in Reflections on the Revolution in France, wrote the founding statement of modern conservatism: that a society is a partnership between the living, the dead and the unborn, and that abstract rights are no substitute for inherited liberties. Wollstonecraft and Paine answered him within months. A Philosophical Enquiry, written in his twenties, gave the eighteenth century its theory of the sublime.