Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke is the founder of conservatism as a philosophy rather than a mood. An Irishman in the English Parliament, he watched the French Revolution begin and, in 1790, while polite Europe was still applauding, wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France – a prophecy that the abstract liberty being proclaimed in Paris would end in confiscation, then in the guillotine, then in a general on horseback. The Terror and Napoleon proved him right within a decade.

His quarrel is not with liberty but with liberty invented overnight from first principles. A society, he wrote, is a contract – but a contract between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born, and no living generation may tear up the lease. Real freedom is an inheritance, secured by long usage and handed down like an estate, safer than any right deduced from a philosopher's diagram. We learn to love our country by first loving the little platoon we belong to – the family and the parish – and public affections grow outward from that small warm circle. In his youth he had even written on the sublime and the beautiful, tracing why terror at a distance can thrill us.

What saves Burke from being a mere defender of whatever exists is that he spent his life attacking the abuses of power. He took the side of the American colonists against his own government. He spent fourteen years trying to impeach Warren Hastings for the plunder of India, insisting that an Englishman's writ of justice did not stop at the colour of a subject's skin. He is the conservative who understood that order and reform are allies, and that a nation which knows how to change is the one best able to keep itself. Living through the first ideological war, he saw what men will do to real villages once they are armed with a perfect idea.