Edmund Burke's reflections on the revolution in France : new interdisciplinary essays

Abstract

On its publication, Burke's Reflections entered a highly charged political context. Relatively few positive public responses are documented, partly because, even before one considers the nature of the text, its author was already public property and immersed in a complex set of partisan, and sometimes simply prejudiced, relationships with people in power and with the print culture which surrounded him. Burke's Reflections provides the metaphysical dressing to many brands of conservative and liberal democratic thought. The essays in the book reflect and extend recent trends in critical and historiographical work on the Reflections which have included a desire to return Burke to his original historical context and to see him as a pragmatist whose writing is strategic and provisional rather than theoretical and systematic. Each of the contributors here is engaged in negotiating and traversing the interdisciplinary boundaries between history, politics, aesthetics, and philosophy. They engage in the various kinds of interpretive strategies that are most commonly associated with English studies and cultural studies; and they are all also interested in having to move between the different contexts in which both Burke's text and they themselves are situated. In their different ways, they acknowledge that reading the Reflections is no easy business; any reading of this text has to be argued for and struggled over, and the outcome will be understood against the history of previous readings

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