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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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Edmund Burke
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(1729–97) Irish politician and author, who made his career in London. He was a member of parliament from 1765 to 1794, but his main influence was as a political philosopher. His concern for a just relationship between rulers and the ruled caused him to argue for the rights of the American colonists and of the Irish and the Indians, who were all alike in being governed from a distant Britain. At Westminster he favoured an organized party system of government and opposition, in place of arbitrary *Tory and Whig factions depending for power on the royal whim (he was himself a Whig).
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Burke's most influential work was Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), in which he rejected the revolutionaries' over-zealous destruction of much that was good in society in the name of inhuman abstractions. His treatise, a classic statement of pragamatic conservatism, provoked many replies – in particular The Rights of Man from Thomas *Paine.
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