The East India Company, the British trading company that ruled much of India, arrived in an ancient society with a theory of its own competence, dissolved what it found there because it could not read it, and called the wreckage improvement. One member of the House of Commons spent seven years prosecuting its governor-general, Warren Hastings, in a trial he opened in Westminster Hall in 1788 and lost with the acquittal of 1795. India taught him what France would confirm.
The most confident idea in European politics at the time held that a government could be worked out — that reason, applied to human nature from first principles, would yield the rights a people ought to have and the constitution to deliver them. Defenders of existing institutions had little to say against it beyond the fact that the institutions existed. Burke supplied the missing argument, and it has never gone away since: rights are an inheritance rather than a deduction, and a society is a contract whose parties include the dead and the unborn — which is why a generation that redesigns it from scratch is spending what it does not own.
He was an unlikely person to be defending England's inherited constitution: the son of a Dublin attorney, schooled at Ballitore under a Quaker master, a Protestant dissenter, trained at Trinity College Dublin, the city's Protestant university, and sent to the Middle Temple in London, one of the Inns of Court that trained barristers, where he abandoned the Bar for writing. He made his first mark at twenty-eight with A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, on why terror at a distance moves us more than beauty does. He entered Parliament in 1765 as a great Whig's private secretary (the Whigs were one of Parliament's two parties), sat for nearly twenty-nine years, held office only as Paymaster of the Forces and only for a matter of months, and never reached the cabinet. An Irishman with no land argued the case for prescription — title by long possession — to men who had inherited everything.
Nothing in that case was deference to power, and his career is the evidence. He told the electors of Bristol in 1774 that he owed them his judgement and not his obedience, then proved it by supporting concessions to Irish trade and relief for Irish Catholics, and lost the seat in 1780. He argued for conciliating the American colonies while Westminster was taxing them.
Reflections on the Revolution in France appeared in November 1790, sold thirteen thousand copies in five weeks and ran through eleven editions within a year. He had recognised the first-principles method as soon as the Bastille fell, and the argument is blunt: the French National Assembly's rights of man were abstractions with nothing in them to tell anybody how to govern a particular people, and the collapse of every restraint would end in an army and a popular general.
The book cost him his party and his closest friendship. Mary Wollstonecraft answered within weeks with A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Thomas Paine within months with Rights of Man, and a Britain that had thought Burke a reformer decided he had lost his reason. On 6 May 1791, during a debate on the government of Canada, he declared in the chamber that his alliance with Charles James Fox, the Whig leader in the Commons, was over. Fox wept; Burke did not take it back.
Then the terror came, and the general. Every argument since about a constitution imposed on a society that did not grow it goes through him first, and he was made the founder of a conservative tradition by people who never met him. The label fits him loosely: scholars still divide over whether a doctrine of natural law runs beneath the whole body of work, or whether he judged each case on its circumstances and no system holds him.