ABSTRACT
Edmund Burke's speech would stand as an early effort to defend aristocracy against the advance of representative government. There is reason for a fresh consideraion of Burke's famous "Bristol Speech," in which he laid down principles to guide the judgment of the people's representatives. This speech may be taken as a practical reflection on the problem of rationality and representation both in the narrow and in the broad sense of representative government. In the Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents Burke presented the first argument in Britain that party was a necessary and respectable part of a free constitution. The defense of his own career turned his thoughts back to the problems of rationality and to the problematic solution of representative government in the first, broad sense. Burke's synthesis of rationality and representation may seem too good to be true.
