"Burke squarely contended that party-divisions were, for good or evil, "things inseparable from free government"; and in his well-known eulogy of party as a union of men endeavouring to promote the national interest on a common principle, gave a forecast of parliamentary government. Men so connected, he wrote, must strive "to carry their common plan into execution with all the power and authority of the State"; in forming an administration give "their party preference in all things"; and not "accept any offers of power in which the whole body is not included". While professing adherence to the Revolution Settlement, by implication he eliminated the rights of the Crown, and obliquely argued that in fact the royal executive had ceased to exist, replaced by the monstrous contraption of a cabal set on separating "the Court from Administration". The "double Cabinet", a product of Burke's fertile, disordered, and malignant imagination, long bedevilled his own party and their spiritual descendants."
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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
Lewis Namier, 'Monarchy and the Party System', Romanes Lecture (1952), quoted in Lewis Namier, Crossroads of Power: Essays on Eighteenth-Century England (1962), p. 219
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke
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Edmund Burke
1729 – 1797
irischer Staatsmann und Philosoph
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