ABSTRACT
The French Revolution introduced to the world the modern politics of secular transformation. Burke's own name has been invoked increasingly over the last two centuries by Tories, politicians and conservative thinkers as providing its first, and still perhaps the best theoretical defence of a creed that has largely sought to avoid that awkward partner of political action. Burke grasps the revolutionary character of an event that is quite outside the categories of this old political-conceptual world and in doing so signals the significance of that dichotomy for modern politics. The defining feature of modern Toryism then is its attitude, not just to 1789, but to the conception of change to which it gave birth; and modern conservatives differ from both eighteenth-century Whigs and eighteenth-century Tories in that neither of the latter had that alternative available by which to define themselves.
