Anti-Semitism, Millenarianism, and Radical Dissent in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France

Abstract

The status of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France as a classic text in political theory can be ascribed to the thoroughness with which it articulates a philosophical argument for political conservatism and to its undeniable rhetorical and literary power. 1 From its first appearance late in 1790, readers have responded to the astonishing range of cultural, historical, intellectual, and literary reference in the Reflections (as, indeed, in Burke's other writings on the French Revolution). John Thelwall makes the point tellingly, if disapprovingly, in reviewing one of Burke's later antirevolutionary tracts: "The rage of Juvenil, and the playful levity of Horace, are not sufficient; and Billingsgate and the shambles are forced into alliance with the muses, the classics, and the sciences, to supply him with terms and metaphors sufficiently forcible to express the mighty hatred with which he labours." 2 Thelwall shrewdly identifies an important and sometimes disconcerting feature of Burke's rhetorical virtuosity: his ability to press into service the full compass of eighteenth-century cultural discourse, from the high, polite, and exalted to the low, popular, and scurrilous.