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He was born in Dublin, [[Ireland]], the son of a [[Protestant]] lawyer and a [[Catholic]] mother. He was educated in classics at a [[Quaker]] boarding school and at [[Trinity College Dublin]], he remained a committed [[Anglican]] the rest of his life. He considered a national established church a requirement for sound government. In 1750 he went to London to study law but soon left his course. In 1756 he published his first book anonymously ''A Vindication of Natural Society'', a satirical account of the rise of civilization and how it produces unhappiness and distress; it attacked the political rationalism and religious skepticism of Henry St. John, Viscount [[Bolingbroke]]. In 1757 he anonymously published the ''Origin of Our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful'', his most philosophical work; it is a founding manifesto of Romanticism, which came to dominate European thought and sensibility after 1800.<ref> Byrne, William F. Byrne, "Burke's higher romanticism: politics and the sublime," ''Humanitas'' (2006) [http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-6661343/Burke-s-higher-romanticism-politics.html online] </ref> He founded the ''The Annual Register'', a record of contemporary political events. He was a member of the intellectual circle around [[Samuel Johnson]].

Hastings was acquitted in 1795 after an 8-year trial, thanks to defense spokesmen opposing Burke who articulated a vision of empire based on ideas of power, conquest, and subjugation of the colonized in pursuit of the exclusive national interests of the colonizer. Burke had a different vision, calling for a deterritorialized supranational juridical sovereignty based on a recognition of the ''[[a priori]]'' rights of the colonized. These two opposing discourses and visions, as they came to be articulated in the trial, had decisive implications for both the nature and evolution of the British empire and its imperial institutions and of Indian legal and political discourse and institutions in the 19th and 20th centuries.<ref> Mithi Mukherjee, "Justice, War, and the Imperium: India and Britain in Edmund Burke's Prosecutorial Speeches in the Impeachment Trial of Warren Hastings." ''Law and History Review'' 2005 23(3): 589-630. Issn: 0738-2480 Fulltext: [[History Cooperative]]</ref> In the early 20th centuries, a series of imperial historians like Fitzjames Stephen, John Strachey, Sophia Weitzman, Lucy S. Sutherland, and Keith Feiling dismissed Burke's accusations that Hastings had been personally corrupt and argued that his arbitrariness was justified by the necessities of maintaining empire in the east, a view that Hastings himself articulated in the trial.<ref> Lucy S. Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952); Keith Grahame Feiling, Warren Hastings (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1954).

Burke supported military intervention against the [[French Revolution]] and for tighter controls of civil Liberties in Britain, so as to prevent such an occurrence happening there. Rejecting [[Jean Jacques Rousseau]] (1712-781712–78) and the philosophies, Burke said the popular will does not really exist, but that the ancient constitution did, and it should be upheld.

The book, for example, has ten pages on the monasteries of France that deplores not only the confiscation of their property but also the destruction of the institutions themselves, which are defended for their contribution to learning, beauty, and agriculture and for their general social role. Their "superstition" is vindicated as preferable to that of the radical philosophies. Burke maintains that they could and should have been reformed rather than suppressed.<ref> Derek Beales, "Edmund Burke and the Monasteries of France." ''Historical Journal'' 2005 48(2): 415-436. Issn: 0018-246x </ref>

By contrast with the French fiasco, he praised the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in Britain, saying, "The Revolution was made to preserve our ancient indisputable laws and liberties, and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty." The English were not creating a new regime, merely restoring the old one that had been distorted by the Catholic James II.<ref> J.G.A. Pocock, "Burke and the Ancient Constitution", ''Historical Journal,'' 3 (1960), 125-43 </ref>

{{DEFAULTSORT: Burke, Edmund}}