Politics

The British Statesman Who Recognized America's 'Fierce Spirit of Liberty'

"When you drive him hard, the boar will surely turn upon the hunters," Edmund Burke warned Parliament. What if the British government had followed his advice?

Damon Root | From the July 2026 issue

Share on FacebookShare on XShare on RedditShare by emailPrint friendly versionCopy page URL Add Reason to Google

Media Contact & Reprint Requests

(Photo: An 1890s caricature of Americans kicking out the British; Wikimedia)

In a special America 250 issue, Reason takes a look back at our country's founding people and ideas. Read more here.

In 1790, the British statesman Edmund Burke published the work that made his name. Part diatribe and part manifesto, Reflections on the Revolution in France denounced that world-shaking upheaval not only for its "crude and violent schemes of liberty," but also for its "prattling about the rights of man." Aghast at what he called the "tyranny and cruelty employed to bring about and to uphold this revolution," Burke preached the virtues of "a monarchy directed by laws, controlled and balanced by the great hereditary wealth and hereditary dignity of a nation; and both again controlled by a judicious check from the reason and feeling of the people at large acting by a suitable and permanent organ." An immediate hit upon release, Burke's Reflections would seal its author's reputation as the great conservative defender of traditional values and the settled social order.

It also drew the fury of Burke's more radical contemporaries. His Reflections revealed him to be no "friend of liberty," declared Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering British feminist and liberal whose daughter, Mary Shelley, would achieve literary immortality as the author of Frankenstein. "If there is anything like argument, or first principles, in [Burke's] wild declamation," Wollstonecraft wrote in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, her book-length attack on the Reflections, it is "that we are to reverence the rust of antiquity, and term the unnatural customs, which ignorance and mistaken self-interest have consolidated, the sage fruit of experience."

The great American revolutionary Thomas Paine, who was by then a passionate supporter of the French Revolution, was also horrified by what Burke had........

© Reason.com