Edmund Burke

Born in Dublin, Burke sat in the British House of Commons for nearly three decades as a Whig. He argued for conciliation with the American colonies and led the impeachment of Warren Hastings over misrule in India.

In 1790 he published Reflections on the Revolution in France, a defence of inherited institutions, religion and gradual reform against the claim that a society can be rebuilt from abstract first principles. The book became a founding text of modern conservatism. His earlier Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) remains a classic of aesthetics.