Edmund Burke PC (12 January [New Style] 1729 – 9 July 1797) was an Anglo-Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist, and philosopher who, after relocating to England, served for many years in the House of Commons of Great Britain as a member of the Whig party. He is mainly remembered for his opposition to the French Revolution. It led to his becoming the leading figure within the conservative faction of the Whig party, which he dubbed th...
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Edmund Burke PC (12 January [New Style] 1729 – 9 July 1797) was an Anglo-Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist, and philosopher who, after relocating to England, served for many years in the House of Commons of Great Britain as a member of the Whig party. He is mainly remembered for his opposition to the French Revolution. It led to his becoming the leading figure within the conservative faction of the Whig party, which he dubbed the "Old Whigs", in opposition to the pro-French-Revolution "New Whigs" led by Charles James Fox. Burke lived before the terms "conservative" and "liberal" were used to describe political ideologies. Burke was praised by both conservatives and liberals in the nineteenth-century and since the twentieth-century he has generally been viewed as the philosophical founder of modern conservatism.
Burke was born in Dublin, Ireland to a prosperous solicitor father (Richard; d. 1761) who was a member of the Protestant Church of Ireland. It is unclear if...
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