POL 2108 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: French Revolution
7 Apr 2016
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Rousseau looked at society one of the first to examine the impacts of social institutions on individuals. Irish, member of parliament for almost 30 years. Didn"t believe in revolutions, the virtue of revolutions, or visionary schemes. Very opposed to the after effects of the french revolution. But for him, good change was slow and almost imperceptible. Conservatism and liberalism, in that tradition, were the opposite sides of the same coin: Conservatives were merely more cautionary; skeptical, pragmatic. Burke was in support of the american revolution. The american colonies were simply trying to achieve rights, and burke agreed that they should be able to have those rights and govern themselves. Burke opposed the french revolution, however, because it sought to overthrow everything that was already established, which burke felt wasn"t pragmatic or constructive. Almost everything burke wrote focused on an immediate issue in his time. *** for burke, politics (like morals) is not a subject to be learned alone.
