ABSTRACT
Edmund Burke founded modern conservatism. Almost single-handed, he turned the intellectual tide from a rationalist contempt for the past to a traditionalist reverence for it. He was born in Dublin, a middle-class Irishman, his father Protestant, his mother Catholic, the boy Protestant. He loved old England, its established Anglican Church and its nobility, with a plebeian outsider's passion, unmatched by anyone born in England itself. The position of Burke in all the instances would also be endorsed by modern liberal democrats. But at the same time, he was attacking the ability of the masses and the demand for giving them new liberties and for letting them vote. Burke was too much the practical man of action, expediently winning immediate battles, to leave his heirs any universal philosophy: "No rational man ever did govern himself by abstractions or universals".
