"Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the first classic of the counter-revolution, is among other things a polemic against intellectuals: it claims that it is presumptuous for individuals to seek through reason to challenge the state, a mystic organism symbolised by the domestic hearth as well as the throne and the altar. The radical intellectual becomes a bogey-man... The Burkean positives are family affections and loyalties, hearth and home; hence, by extension, the greater family made by the nation, a hierarchy with the king at its head; and continuity with the past, especially with the inherited creed which it is the Church's business to preserve. Against this imaginative concept of an organic nation, Burke is able to depict as puny and unwholesome the intellectuals, French and English, who want to change the fabric or body of the state: he is in effect anti-individualist and anti-rationalist."
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Members of the Parliament of Great BritainPhilosophers from IrelandPoliticians from IrelandPeople from DublinAnglicans
Original Language: English
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Sources
, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background, 1760–1830 (1981), pp. 55, 180
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke
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Edmund Burke
1729 – 1797
irischer Staatsmann und Philosoph
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