Reflections of the Revolution in France

In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, the Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke condemned this attitude, as well as the violence of 1789. In this influential counterrevolutionary tract, Burke argues that France had passed from Despotism to Anarchy in the name of misguided, abstract principles. Burke distrusted the simplicity of reason that the Assembly celebrated, In his view the complexity of traditional institutions served the public interest. Burke attacked the belief in natural rights that guided the revolutionaries; something was natural, he believed, only if it resulted from long historical development and habit. Trying to wipe the slate of history clean was a grievous error, he wrote, since society "is a contract between the dead, the living, and the unborn." Society's main right, in Burke's view, was the right to be well governed by its rulers. Natually this argument did not go unchallenged, even in England. Mary Wallstonecrat conuntered with A Vindication of the Rights of Man, while Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man, published in 1792 to refute Burke, won a larger readship the Burke's tract.