Burke’s Reflections has long been seen as an epitomic text, supposedly articulating an – indeed the first – theoretical defence of ‘modern conservatism’. In keeping with the philosophy of the Series, this edition seeks to place it in the intellectual contexts in which its author conceived and wrote it, whilst also indicating those in which it came to be read. Alongside Reflections – Burke’s early response to the Revolution – is included one of his last, the first Letter on a Regicide Peace, a work that reveals the development of his thought during the course of the Revolution and one that has helped to shape a particular view of international society.

The Introduction sketches a widening circle of contexts in which the works can be situated: beginning with the localised political circumstances faced by Burke at the time, and extending to the trans-historical and universal circumstances of human political agency to which Burke appeals in the course of his writing, and which have given his work a significance that has extended far beyond the specific conditions of the Revolution that gave rise to it – themselves of huge and still debated historical significance.

Neither Burke’s prose style nor his references are easily accessible to modern readers. Accordingly both works have been generously annotated to assist in understanding the significance of his wide and nowadays often obscure allusions, whilst leaving readers as free as possible to interpret the text for themselves. Burke was prodigiously well-read in both classical and modern literatures. He possessed extraordinary recall and wove quotations into his speech and writing with great, and doubtless sometimes subconscious, facility. Identifying all of these would have completely changed the character of the edition, but it seemed important to give enough to provide some sense of how richly Burke’s thinking is saturated in and conditioned by this literary and cultural heritage: a feature of the human mind which played such a central part in his political thinking.