Edmund Burke in recent years has assumed extraordinary stature in American political thinking as the father of neoconservatism. In this book, the first of a two-volume biography of this eighteenth-century English statesman, Mr. Cone brings important new evidence to his thesis that during the age of the American Revolution Burke was significant more as the politician and the party man than as a systematic political philosopher. This volume deals with Burke's career to 1782, when the Marquis of Rockingham, to whom Burke had attached himself seventeen years earlier, stood once again on the threshold of the prime ministership. In this period Burke was the voice—and frequently the behind-the-scenes leader—of the parliamentary opposition to George III, Lord North, and the "King's Friends." Ever since the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766, he and his colleagues had struggled against the government over the great imperial questions of America, India, and Ireland and over the "influence" of the crown in domestic affairs through the patronage of the royal household offices. Mr. Cone stresses the importance of Burke's practical contributions to the art of government. By his partisan activities, his leadership in parliament, and his political writings, Burke gave expression to new ideas about the nature of English politics and emphasized the value of political parties as necessary instruments of free government. Indeed, Mr. Cone states, in so far as Burke the conservative championed the cause of party government, he did more than the political radical to change the nature of the cabinet, of parliament, of their relationship to one another, of the monarchy and its relationship to the cabinet and parliament—in short, to revolutionize the practical working of the political and constitutional system of England. Based upon manuscript sources which were not opened to general scholarship until 1949, this book contains much new information about Burke's private life and provides a provocative reevaluation of his political career in the age of the American Revolution.

Contemporary environmental political theory considers the implications of the environmental crisis for such political concepts as rights, citizenship, justice, democracy, the state, race, class, and gender. As the field has matured, scholars have begun to explore connections between Green Theory and such canonical political thinkers as Plato, Machiavelli, Locke, and Marx. The essays in this volume put important figures from the political theory canon in dialogue with current environmental political theory. It is the first comprehensive volume to bring the insights of Green Theory to bear in reinterpreting these canonical theorists. Individual essays cover such classical figures in Western thought as Aristotle, Hume, Rousseau, Mill, and Burke, but they also depart from the traditional canon to consider Mary Wollstonecraft, W. E. B. Du Bois, Hannah Arendt, and Confucius. Engaging and accessible, the essays also offer original and innovative interpretations that often challenge standard readings of these thinkers. In examining and explicating how these great thinkers of the past viewed the natural world and our relationship with nature, the essays also illuminate our current environmental predicament. -- Publisher.

Combines historical and theoretical analysis, setting political thought in the context of various frameworks of the modern world. From the impact of the French and American revolutions, through reaction and constitutional consolidation, this book traces the contrasting criteria invoked to justify particular forms of political order from 1789.

Essay from the year 2014 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0 (A in England), Oxford University, language: English, abstract: The aim of this essay is to analyse whether the striking differences between the political ideologies of Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke are also mirrored on the level of their use of language and thus on the level of their styles. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and Paine’s Rights of Man, “the most successful of the many responses that Burke’s pamphlet provoked” (Hodson 115), are the basis for this investigation. I will argue that the widely spread assumption that the nature of Burke and Paine’s largely antithetic political ideas can be reflected in their respective styles needs to be reassessed and that – indeed surprisingly – there is no distinct/strong link between their political convictions on the one hand and their styles on the other hand.