ABSTRACT
Eighteenth-century Britain was a revolutionary state. There is no great paradox about conservative revolution—the paradox is rather that revolution should ever have been thought of as distinctively radical. Many new dynasties, whether peacefully or violently instituted, claim to have restored ancestral rights; many adorn themselves with ceremonies symbolic of an heroic past. That is why there may be more to be learnt from one who, like Edmund Burke, can see the essential conservatism of the revolutionary idea than from those who mask it under a rhetoric of change. Burke spoke for mankind in the sense that he held the revolutionary settlement of 1689 to have been offered as a political example to all men for all time. Burke believed that England was a free nation because it had a tradition of freedom. Its ancestral belief in an ordered liberty had defeated the challenges of tyrants in the seventeenth century, and had enshrined itself in the settlement of 1689.
