The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 08

Burke, Edmund, 1729-1797Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 4.2
Word count
810K words
Chapters
81

Tags

English Originals Politics Political TheoryPolitical AllegoryOratory and EloquencePower GameHumanistic CareCivic AwarenessSocial CritiqueWestern ThoughtMoral DilemmaIntellectual Commentary

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 08 (of 12) by Edmund BurkeAuthor: Burke, Edmund, 1729-1797,Language: English, Class: DA: History: General and Eastern Hemisphere: Great Britain, Ireland, Central Europe, Release Date: Apr 13, 2006

Editor's review

This volume is the eighth of twelve in the collected works of Edmund Burke, a public-domain eBook released by Project Gutenberg in 2019. Burke was a major eighteenth-century British statesman and political thinker whose parliamentary speeches, topical pamphlets, and letters combine rhetorical force with careful analysis of constitutional tradition. In this volume readers encounter Burke's specific arguments on the British constitution, imperial affairs, and public questions, and his style of reasoning from history and precedent against abstract speculation. It is best used as primary material for studying the history of British political thought, parliamentary debate, and eighteenth-century English political prose, rather than as a popular work to be read straight through. Because it is a public-domain electronic text with limited version information and notes, it is advisable to read alongside a reliable introduction to Burke or a selected edition in order to grasp the background and targets of each piece. It is also useful for those who write political argument and public reasoning: note how he organizes long arguments and draws principled judgments out of specific events.

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Reading tips

  1. First consult the volume's table of contents and choose one or two clearly themed pieces for close reading rather than reading page by page.
  2. As you read, note the specific events and debating opponents Burke responds to, to avoid taking him out of context.
  3. Pair the volume with an introduction to Burke's thought or a selected edition; learn each piece's date and political background first.
  4. For long sentences, break them into segments to see the argument's structure and how rhetoric and logic work together.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. 63
  64. 64
  65. 65
  66. 66
  67. 67
  68. 68
  69. 69
  70. 70
  71. 71
  72. 72
  73. 73
  74. 74
  75. 75
  76. 76
  77. 77
  78. 78
  79. 79
  80. 80
  81. 81

FAQ

Is this volume the complete content of Burke's works? No. This is the eighth volume of a twelve-volume collected works, containing only the pieces edited into that volume, not all of Burke's writings. To grasp his thought as a whole, read it alongside other volumes or a selected edition.
Can I understand it without historical background? It will be considerably difficult. Burke's arguments mostly address specific political events and parliamentary disputes; without background it is easy to misread his position. Read a brief history of eighteenth-century British politics and an account of Burke's life before tackling the original text.
Is the electronic edition suitable for academic citation? It can be used for reading and preliminary citation as a public-domain text, but formal academic writing should check authoritative print or scholarly editions to confirm volume, piece, and page numbers, and should note possible differences in layout and punctuation in the electronic text.
How does reading this volume help with writing? You can learn how Burke develops principled arguments out of specific issues, how he supports judgments with history and precedent, and how a long political argument is layered. It is well suited as a structural model for expository writing.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Burke, Edmund, 1729-1797 Author

Edmund Burke (1729-1797) was a British political thinker, pamphleteer and orator whose writings and speeches have had a lasting influence on political theory and the conservative tradition. This site holds sixteen of his works, chiefly the multi-volume The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, together with Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America and Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. These texts comprise parliamentary speeches, political essays and letters, addressing such subjects as the American colonies, the French Revolution, political institutions and moral philosophy. His style is eloquent yet restrained, grounding particular circumstances in general principles and arguing through contrast and historical example. As the library's fields for nationality and dates are incomplete and public information is limited, no biographical details are inferred here; readers may instead trace his political rhetoric and thought through the collected works and speech selections above.