ABSTRACT
Edmund Burke used all his political skills to oppose the French Revolution of 1779 as it turned into a bloody assize. Tradition and reform, however, are not mutually exclusive for Burke. Reflections sets out to some extent the tenets of what was to become conservative thought and that most certainly informed both aspects of the Whig tradition and modern historiography. Since community is held together by venerable customs and traditions, gradual changes can be made but only when they have gained wider acceptance. Whig history has been an influential current in English historiography. Its nineteenth-century origins can be traced to Thomas Babington Macaulay who was to become the first of a dynasty of Whig historians. The Whig interpretation of history skewed the selection of evidence that was important to this narrative and implied a causation between events that may only have existed in the mind of the historian.
