Burke, Popular Opinion, and the Problem of a Counter-Revolutionary Public Sphere

Abstract

Except that a 'Burke problem' in several guises has haunted the revival of Burke studies in recent decades, it might seem perverse to question his role as the consummate British anti-radical and counter-revolutionary writer in the age of the French Revolution. For Romantic-period literary scholarship especially, his name and the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) seem to stand for the conservative reaction to revolution as fully as Tom Paine and the Rights of Man stand for its defence; subsequent conservative ideologists can be described as assuming 'the Burkean role as public critic of radicalism'. Yet questions do arise about the typicality of this 'Burkean role', and recent scholarship has intensified them.

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