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Edmund Burke (; 12 January [NS] 1729 – 9 July 1797) was an Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher who spent most of his career in Great Britain. Born in Dublin, Burke served as a member of Parliament (MP) between 1766 and 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party. Burke was a proponent of underpinning virtues with manners in society and of the importance of religious institutions for the moral stability and good of the state. These views were expressed in his A Vindication of Natural Society (1756). He criticised the actions of the British government towards the American colonies, including its taxation policies. Burke also supported the rights of the colonists to resist metropolitan authority, although he opposed the attempt to achieve independence. He is remembered for his support for Catholic emancipation, the impeachment of Warren Hastings from the East India Company, and his staunch opposition to the French Revolution. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Burke asserted that the revolution was destroying the fabric of "good" society and traditional institutions of state and society, and he condemned the persecution of the Catholic Church that resulted from it. This led to his becoming the leading figure within the conservative faction of the Whig Party which he dubbed the Old Whigs as opposed to the pro–French Revolution New Whigs led by Charles James Fox. In the 19th century, Burke was praised by both conservatives and liberals. Subsequently, in the 20th century, he became widely regarded, especially in the United States, as the philosophical founder of conservatism, along with his more conservative counterpart, Joseph de Maistre. Early life Burke was born in Dublin, Ireland. His mother Mary, née Nagle, was a Roman Catholic who hailed from a County Cork family and a cousin of the Catholic educator Nano Nagle, whereas his father Richard, a successful solicitor, was a member of the Church of Ireland. It remains unclear whether this is the same Richard Burke who converted from Catholicism. The Burgh (Burke) dynasty descends from the Anglo-Norman knight, William de Burgh, who arrived in Ireland in 1185 following Henry II of England's 1171 invasion of Ireland and is among the "chief Gall or Old English families that assimilated into Gaelic society" (the surname de Burgh (Latinised as de Burgo) was gaelicised in Irish as de Búrca or Búrc which over the centuries became Burke). Burke adhered to his father's faith and remained a practising Anglican throughout his life, unlike his sister Juliana, who was brought up as and remained a Roman Catholic. Later, his political enemies repeatedly accused him of having been educated at the Jesuit College of St. Omer, near Calais, France; and of harbouring secret Catholic sympathies at a time when membership in the Catholic Church would disqualify him from public office per Penal Laws in Ireland. As Burke told Frances Crewe: Mr. Burke's Enemies often endeavoured to convince the World that he had been bred up in the Catholic Faith, & that his Family were of it, & that he himself had been educated at St. Omer—but this was false, as his father was a regular practitioner of the Law at Dublin, which he could not be unless of the Established Church: & it so happened that though Mr. B was twice at Paris, he never happened to go through the Town of St. Omer. After being elected to the House of Commons, Burke took the required oath of allegiance and abjuration, the oath of supremacy and the declaration against transubstantiation. As a child, Burke sometimes spent time away from the unhealthy air of Dublin with his mother's family near Killavullen in the Blackwater Valley in County Cork. He received his early education at a Quaker school in Ballitore, County Kildare, some 67 kilometres (42 mi) from Dublin; and possibly like his cousin Nano Nagle at a Hedge school near Killavullen. He remained in correspondence with his schoolmate from there, Mary Leadbeater, the daughter of the school's owner, throughout his life. In 1744, Burke started at Trinity College Dublin, a Protestant establishment which up until 1793 did not permit Catholics to take degrees. In 1747, he set up a debating society, Edmund Burke's Club, which in 1770 merged with TCD's Historical Club to form the College Historical Society, the oldest undergraduate society in the world. The minutes of the meetings of Burke's Club remain in the collection of the Historical Society. Burke graduated from Trinity in 1748. Burke's father wanted him to read Law and with this in mind, he went to London in 1750, where he entered the Middle Temple, before soon giving up legal study to travel in Continental Europe. After eschewing the Law, he pursued a livelihood through writing. Early writing The late Lord Bolingbroke's Letters on the Study and Use of History was published in 1752 and his collected works appeared in 1754. This provoked Burke into writing his first published work, A Vindication of Natural Society: A View of the Miseries and Evils Arising to Mankind, appearing in Spring 1756. Burke imitated Bolingbroke's style and ideas in a reductio ad absurdum of his arguments for deistic rationalism in order to demonstrate their absurdity. Burke claimed that Bolingbroke's arguments against revealed religion could apply to all social and civil institutions as well. Lord Chesterfield and Bishop Warburton as well as others initially thought that the work was genuinely by Bolingbroke rather than a satire. All the reviews of the work were positive, with critics especially appreciative of Burke's quality of writing. Some reviewers failed to notice the ironic nature of the book which led to Burke stating in the preface to the second edition (1757) that it was a satire. Richard Hurd believed that Burke's imitation was near-perfect and that this defeated his purpose, arguing that an ironist "should take care by a constant exaggeration to make the ridicule shine through the Imitation. Whereas this Vindication is everywhere enforc'd, not only in the language, and on the principles of L. Bol., but with so apparent, or rather so real an earnestness, that half his purpose is sacrificed to the other". A minority of scholars have taken the position that in fact Burke did write the Vindication in earnest, later disowning it only for political reasons. In 1757, Burke published a treatise on aesthetics titled A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful that attracted the attention of prominent Continental thinkers such as Denis Diderot and Immanuel Kant. It was his only purely philosophical work, completed in 1753. When asked by Sir Joshua Reynolds and French Laurence to expand it thirty years later, Burke replied that he was no longer fit for abstract speculation. On 25 February 1757, Burke signed a contract with Robert Dodsley to write a "history of England from the time of Julius Caesar to the end of the re.... Discover the Alfred Bekker Earl Warren Thomas West popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Alfred Bekker Earl Warren Thomas West books.