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List Price: $35.00
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Product Details:
Type: Hardcover
Item#: c4595
ISBN#: 089526398X
Volume One of the Conservative Leadership Series
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How well do you know the works of conservatism’s “founding father”?
Now, you can enjoy all of his greatest writings and speeches in this magnificent – and definitive – 720-page collection
The Best of Burke
by Peter Stanlis
Russell Kirk’s great intellectual history of conservatism, The Conservative Mind, was subtitled From Burke to Eliot for good reason. For Kirk, as for all knowledgeable conservatives, modern conservatism begins with Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century English statesman, writer and political philosopher whose landmark work, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), first manifested what Kirk calls “conscious conservatism.”
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“But Burke was no mere precursor,” wrote Kirk; he remains “the greatest of modern conservative thinkers. . . whose definitions and defenses of conservatism still stand and are not liable to fall in our time.”
Today, unfortunately, Burke is more often read about than read. To address that problem, Conservative Book Club is reissuing in our own deluxe hardcover edition, Peter Stanlis’ esteemed 1963 anthology, originally published by Regnery Gateway.
Essential Volume for Well-Read Conservatives
Stanlis, the leading Burke scholar in America, has collected all the most important works and speeches of Burke and edited them down to their essentials – without chopping them into fragments, as many anthologists do. “The main purpose of these selections,” Stanlis explains, “is to present extensive and in the main unbroken samples of Burke’s most representative thought in his most characteristic style, on a great variety of subjects.”
Here you can find – to name but a few topics covered – Burke’s defense of ordered liberty, his advocacy of secure property rights, his love of the Christian religion and the Western moral tradition, and his impassioned jeremiad against that orgy of destruction, the French Revolution.
Stanlis’ general introduction gives important insight into Burke’s early life, education, professional training, literary and political career, prose style, political philosophy, and more. In addition, each selection is preceded by a headnote that clarifies the selection’s historical context and includes a brief analytical interpretation. A chronology highlights important dates in Burke’s life and career.
No conservative library is complete without Edmund Burke, and no other anthology better captures the full range of his genius. For well-read conservatives, this is one of the few books that can truly be called essential.
The Living Burke
Does Edmund Burke still speak to us today? Consider these excerpts from The Best of Burke:
On Tradition:
“We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that the stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.”
“A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”
On Religion and Society:
“We know, and, what is more, we feel inwardly, that religion is the basis of civil society, and the source of all good, and of all comfort.”
“Nothing is more certain than that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners and civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles, and were, indeed, the result of both combined: I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion.”
On Property Rights:
“[Men] have a right to the fruits of their industry, and to the means of making their industry fruitful. They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents, to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring, to instruction in life and to consolation in death. Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, which all its combinations of skill and force, can do in his favor. In this partnership, all men have equal rights; but not to equal things.”
On True Liberty:
"It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
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Not Rated KEN ADAMS
This compilation is a wonderful read. I was captured by the power of Burke's writing. I was so taken with the majesty of his language and the power of his logic that I found myself reading aloud, savoring each word. For example: "Liberty...is a general principle, and the clear right of all the subjects within the realm, or of none. Partial freedom seems to me a most invidious mode of slavery. But unfortuantely, it is the kind of slavery most easily admitted....The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts." Burke's erudition and style are refreshing in a modern political landscape of mediocrity. I found the book an excellent read.
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