Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke is something of a political 'north star' for me. I don't agree to the letter with everything he said, and frankly much of it is open to interpretation - even the crazy neocons tried to hijack the author of Reflections of the Revolution In France to justify their Iraq scheme, implausible as it sounds.

But I do agree with his distilled political essence: As a member of parliament he stood up for the American revolutionaries - saying they were only Englishmen defending their ancient, God-given liberties. When the French revolution came along, he shocked Whigs and Jacobites by opposing it - saying, in essence, once you throw out the law and try to create a society from scratch you've opened society to a cycle of violence. He correctly predicted, while Napoleon was an unknown field officer, that good King Louis would be replaced by a far worse tyrant.

The American Revolution was not really a revolution, but assertion of ancient English liberties, one for which perhaps England is overdue.

Some famous quotes:

• "Manners are of more importance than laws... Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation like that of the air we breathe in."^[2]
• "There is a sort of enthusiasm in all projectors, absolutely necessary for their affairs, which makes them proof against the most fatiguing delays, the most mortifying disapointments, the most shocking insults; and, what is severer than all, the presumptuous judgement of the ignorant upon their designs."^[3]
• The quote "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" is often attributed to Burke, but does not appear in his works or recorded speeches.^[4]
• "But the age of chivalry is gone. - That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.

• Particularly Relevant to Iraq: "I cannot [...] give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances [...] are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind. Abstractedly speaking, government, as well as liberty, is good; yet could I, in common sense, ten years ago, have felicitated France on her enjoyment of a government (for she then had a government) without inquiring what the nature of that government was? [...] Can I now congratulate the same nation upon its freedom? Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate a madman, who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty? [...] I should, therefore, suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France until I was informed how it had been combined with government, with public force, with the discipline and obedience of armies, with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue, with morality and religion, with the solidity of property, with peace and order, with civil and social manners. All these (in their way) are good things, too, and without them liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely to continue long.