Extract

Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle repose beneath the shadow of the British oak, chide and gape wherever they are found, shall those grasshoppers be held to be the only inhabitants of the field?

In November 1790, with the Bastille barely a year fallen and the Revolution still presenting itself as the dawn of reason, Edmund Burke published a furious, prophetic warning. Reflections on the Revolution in France was written in real time, not as history but as alarm, and its predictions — that abstract liberty would lead to tyranny, that the mob would devour its leaders, that a military strongman would restore order by force — proved devastatingly accurate. Burke's prose burns with a passion rarely found in political philosophy: he writes not as a theorist but as a man watching a civilization tear itself apart. The book provoked Thomas Paine's Rights of Man and Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Men in direct rebuttal, making it the opening salvo in a debate that still defines modern politics. It is the founding text of conservatism, and it was written by an Irishman defending a tradition that had never fully accepted him.