ABSTRACT
Edmund Burke has long been recognized as the progenitor of a set of skeptical arguments lying-at least until the advent of Thatcherism-at the heart of English Conservatism. His characteristic themes of the importance of habit and prejudice in human conduct, the authority he claimed for inherited social institutions, and his stress on the overriding need to safeguard continuity, tradition, and the prejudices which comprise a culture, derived from a strong sense of the frailty of human knowledge and a low estimation of the capacity of human reason to direct and control affairs. Because he did not elaborate these ideas in any systematic work of political theory, but in speeches, letters, and polemical pamphlets addressed to the issues of the day, interpreting him has always posed problems, not only of what kind of political theory might be said to underpin these occasional works, but of whether he should be thought of as any kind of theorist at all.1
