‘The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever’.

Edmund Burke was a man of contradictions. An Irishman, a supporter of Catholics and advocate of the American Revolution, he was also one of the first observers to see the dangers the French Revolution posed to the established order. He made his case in what is now considered a classic statement of liberal conservatism.

Writing in 1789, just after the fall of the Bastille, Burke decried the revolutionaries for their thoughtless radicalism and wanton destruction. He writes movingly of the ill-treatment of the King and Queen, and is scathing of the Revolution’s ‘barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings…’ Even Burke’s enemies admired the brilliance of his prose, described by William Hazlitt as ‘forked and playful as the lightning, crested like the serpent’. This edition includes a new introduction by philosopher A.C. Grayling, tracing Burke’s political and philosophical arguments.