Edmund Burke PC (12 January [New Style] 1729 � 9 July 1797)
was an Anglo-Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist, and
philosopher who, after relocating to England, served for many years in the House
of Commons of Great Britain as a member of the Whig party. He is mainly
remembered for his opposition to the French Revolution. It led to his becoming
the leading figure within the conservative faction of the Whig party, which he
dubbed the "Old Whigs", in opposition to the pro-French-Revolution "New Whigs"
led by Charles James Fox. Burke lived before the terms "conservative" and
"liberal" were used to describe political ideologies. Burke was praised by both
conservatives and liberals in the nineteenth-century and since the
twentieth-century he has generally been viewed as the philosophical founder of
modern conservatism.
- Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
