Edmund Burke and the Natural LawTransaction Publishers, 10.03.2015 - 311 Seiten Today the idea of natural law as the basic ingredient in moral, legal, and political thought presents a challenge not faced for almost two hundred years. On the surface, there would appear to be little room in the contemporary world for a widespread belief in natural law. The basic philosophies of the opposition--the rationalism of the philosophes, the utilitarianism of Bentham, the materialism of Marx--appear to have made prior philosophies irrelevant. Yet these newer philosophies themselves have been overtaken by disillusionment born of conflicts between "might" and "right." Many thoughtful people who were loyal to secular belief have become dissatisfied with the lack of normative principles and have turned once more to natural law. This first book-length study of Edmund Burke and his philosophy, originally published in 1958, explores this intellectual giant's relationship to, and belief in, the natural law. It has long been thought that Edmund Burke was an enemy of the natural law, and was a proponent of conservative utilitarianism. Peter J. Stanlis shows that, on the contrary, Burke was one of the most eloquent and profound defenders of natural law morality and politics in Western civilization. A philosopher in the classical tradition of Aristotle and Cicero, and in the Scholastic tradition of Aquinas, Burke appealed to natural law in the political problems he encountered in American, Irish, Indian, and British affairs, and in reaction to the French Revolution. This book is as relevant today as it was when it was first published, and will be mandatory reading for students of philosophy, political science, law, and history. |
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... tradition of political thought and continued as its central tradition for two millennia, the first half of the twentieth century saw a determined attack on it from several different perspectives. In his classic Natural Right and History ...
... tradition of moral and political thought. If so, a reconsideration of Burke is also in order. Here we confront the well-known problems surrounding the character and coherence of Burke's ideas. During the nineteenth century and much of ...
... traditions of political freedom and constitutional government on the one hand, and international communism on the other. Specifically referring to Burke's criticism of and opposition to the French Revolution, Stanlis wrote, "[w]e too ...
... tradition of natural law. In the remainder of this introduction, I want to look at that more theoretically important question. First I argue that the usual opposition between custom or tradition and natural law argument is much ...
... tradition remains apart from practical politics partly because his concerns are, as Plato has Socrates say in the Republic, "all time and all being" and thus he holds human affairs as "nothing great." The philosopher prefers to ...