The philosophical founder of modern conservatism is often imagined as an aristocratic insider guarding the establishment. Edmund Burke, born in Dublin in 1729 to a Protestant father and a Catholic mother under Ireland’s penal laws, spent his career as a whistleblower against the East India Company, a defender of the American colonists, and a champion of Irish Catholic emancipation. This episode explores how his upbringing gave him an insider’s privilege and an outsider’s empathy.

We cover his anonymous satire A Vindication of Natural Society, which London’s elite mistook for sincere Bolingbroke; his speeches on American taxation and conciliation; the impeachment of Warren Hastings and the idea of imperial trusteeship; his Bristol speech distinguishing a delegate from a representative, which cost him his seat; and Reflections on the Revolution in France, where his defense of “prejudice” as inherited wisdom predicted the Terror and the rise of Napoleon.

• Why Burke could support the American rebellion but condemn the French one
• His comparison of the French Revolution with England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688
• The argument that society is an ecosystem, not a machine to be rebuilt from abstract theory
• Adam Smith’s remark that Burke reached the same economic conclusions independently
• Burke’s social contract between the living, the dead, and those yet to be born