Burke’s Reflections has long been seen as an epitomic text, supposedly articulating an – indeed the first – theoretical defence of ‘modern conservatism’. In keeping with the philosophy of the Series, this edition seeks to place it in the intellectual contexts in which its author conceived and wrote it, whilst also indicating those in which it came to be read. Alongside Reflections – Burke’s early response to the Revolution – is included one of his last, the first Letter on a Regicide Peace, a work that reveals the development of his thought during the course of the Revolution and one that has helped to shape a particular view of international society.

The Introduction sketches a widening circle of contexts in which the works can be situated: beginning with the localised political circumstances faced by Burke at the time, and extending to the trans-historical and universal circumstances of human political agency to which Burke appeals in the course of his writing, and which have given his work a significance that has extended far beyond the specific conditions of the Revolution that gave rise to it – themselves of huge and still debated historical significance.

Neither Burke’s prose style nor his references are easily accessible to modern readers. Accordingly both works have been generously annotated to assist in understanding the significance of his wide and nowadays often obscure allusions, whilst leaving readers as free as possible to interpret the text for themselves. Burke was prodigiously well-read in both classical and modern literatures. He possessed extraordinary recall and wove quotations into his speech and writing with great, and doubtless sometimes subconscious, facility. Identifying all of these would have completely changed the character of the edition, but it seemed important to give enough to provide some sense of how richly Burke’s thinking is saturated in and conditioned by this literary and cultural heritage: a feature of the human mind which played such a central part in his political thinking.

Edmund Burke was born in Dublin in 1730 to a Catholic mother and a Protestant Father. He was educated in Ireland at both Catholic and Quaker schools, and at Dublin’s Anglican university, Trinity College, before studying law at the Middle Temple in London. His initial ambitions were literary and his first two works, the Vindication of Natural Society (1756) and - more particularly - the Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), gained him public recognition, the company of London’s literary elite and the editorship of the newly-founded Annual Register a political and literary review. Need for a secure income led him into political service, briefly as secretary to William Hamilton MP, on the staff of Lord Halifax, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland; but in 1765 he formed his major political connection, as secretary to Lord Rockingham, the leader of the Whig Party. Although twice briefly Paymaster General (1782 and 1783), his major role was as opposition pamphleteer, political fixer, and spokesman for the Rockingham Whigs. Burke produced polemical writings and speeches on a wide range of issues critical of the government, opposing its controversial taxation policy in the American Colonies, seeking reform of the tangled skein of national and royal domestic finances, of the East India Company’s administration of British India, and, less publicly in that stridently Protestant age, to relieve the restrictions imposed on Irish Catholics in his home country.

It may not be unnecessary to inform the Reader, that the following Reflections had their origin in a correspondence between the Author and a very young gentleman at Paris, who did him the honour of desiring his opinion upon the important transactions, which then, and ever since, have so much occupied the attention of all men. An answer was written some time in the month of October, 1789; but it was kept back upon prudential considerations.That letter is alluded to in the beginning of the following sheets. It has been since forwarded to the person to whom it was addressed. The reasons for the delay in sending it were assigned in a short letter to the same gentleman. This produced on his part a new and pressing application for the Author’s sentiments.

The Author began a second and more full discussion on the subject. This he had some thoughts of publishing early in the last spring; but the matter gaining upon him, he found that what he had undertaken not only far exceeded the measure of a letter, but that its importance required rather a more detailed consideration than at that time he had any leisure to bestow upon it. However, having thrown down his first thoughts in the form of a letter, and indeed when he sat down to write, having intended it for a private letter, he found it difficult to change the form of address, when his sentiments had grown into a greater extent, and had received another direction. A different plan, he is sensible, might be more favourable to a commodious division and distribution of his matter.