About this Book

"The essays in this volume are centred on Edmund Burke, the great Irish political philosopher, and his varied attempts to articulate an alternative to what seemed to him to be the French Revolution's catastrophic vision of liberty and modernity. Yet the alternative that he proposed was itself shadowed by the violence of British colonialism, most especially in India and Ireland. He asked if any version of liberty and any form of colonialism were compatible with one another. His attempt to answer that question had been anticipated in the eighteenth century by writers as varied as Swift, Diderot and Hume; and was addressed again, under Burke's influence, in the nineteenth century by some who are often regarded as exemplars of liberalism, such as Tocqueville and Lord Acton, or as enemies to it, such as John Henry Newman."--BOOK JACKET.