Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke (born in Dublin in 1729) is known to a wide public as a hugely influential orator, philosopher, political thinker and a strong adherent of the American Revolution. His education began with home studying, and because his mother was Catholic, he was later sent to a Quaker boarding school, though raised in his father’s Protestant faith. As a son of a solicitor, he chose to study law at Trinity College situated in Dublin and to qualify for the bar he decided to proceed his education in London. That was a period when Burke lost interest in his legal practice, so after some time wandering around Europe, precisely France and England, he decided to settle in London to concentrate on politics and literary.
At first, Edmund Burke was known as a writer. His first work was anonymously produced A Vindication of Natural Society (1756), where he claimed to be an intense supporter of the importance of religion in moral life and judged treatment of Britain of the American colonies. Shortly in 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful came out and made him famous in England and abroad and drew Denis Diderot’s and Immanuel Kant’s attention. In 1758, he became the part of The Annual Register and was the editor of its first volume. This reference publication is a work, in which a number of authors described events of the previous year in the field of politics, which was founded by Robert Dodsley and Burke. It is worth mentioning that the journal survives to this days. Since the journalism couldn’t provide a stable living for his family, he decided to change the area of activity to politics.
His early political career began with advising some parliamentarian and later Lord Rockingham. 1765 was the year when Burke became the Member of Parliament for The House of Commons. As a parliamentarian was mostly recognized to be in strong opposition to the French Revolution. His primary concerns also were questions of British rules overseas, especially in India, Ireland, and North America. Burke’s hostility to the events, happening in France, was presented in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). This work provoked a huge response, particularly Thomas Paine published The Rights of Man. Burke was also a strong believer in free market system that Karl Marx was an opponent of.
As for Burke’s personal life, he got married to Jane Nugent in 1757 and had a son Richard that unfortunately died in 1794. This loss made the last years of the philosopher’s life cloudy, but he continued to defend his arguments for the independence of an MP, political parties, and long-lived constitutional conventions, which still carry weight. Taking into account the circumstances, his career in Parliament ended in 1794. After this, he paid a lot of his attention to his native Ireland. Burke is credited with setting up modern British conservatism since during his career he appealed a lot to the essentiality of property in human life. Despite the fact that Edmund Burke is not a well-studied political figure, everyone who has interest in political studies should engage with his life and works.