A Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

Abstract This article focuses on the period between 1812 and 1834, when the British Empire introduced protection measures to mitigate the suffering of slaves from planter brutality, but also to protect planters from slave rebellion. By examining the impact and influences wielded by Edmund Burke’s Sketch of a Negro Code (1780), this article studies protection as an alliance between the abolitionists and planters who, despite contestations, found in Burke’s Code a means to attain their separate ends. Through the workings of the Office of the Protector, instituted by the imperial authorities in the slave colony of Trinidad, this study examines how it granted slaves the humanity of ‘rights’ against their masters, while also protecting the right to property (in slaves) of the planters. I argue that the paternalistic practice of protection was, as is in the present, at the center of the exploitation of subjugated groups.

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A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

10.1017/cbo9780511732027 ◽

2010 ◽

Author(s):

Mary Wollstonecraft

Keyword(s):

Edmund Burke ◽

The Right

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A letter from the right honourable Edmund Burke to a noble lord (1796)

The Sublime ◽

10.1017/cbo9780511620409.054 ◽

1996 ◽

pp. 292-293

Author(s):

Edmund Burke

Keyword(s):

Edmund Burke ◽

The Right

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Legitimacy and Usurpation in the Thought of Edmund Burke

Albion A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies ◽

10.2307/4049256 ◽

1980 ◽

Vol 12 (3) ◽

pp. 257-267 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Frederick A. Dreyer

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Chief Complaint ◽

Natural Rights ◽

Democratic Legitimacy ◽

Edmund Burke ◽

Legitimate Authority ◽

Royal Family ◽

Public Controversy ◽

Ability To Pay ◽

The Right

In matters of public controversy the eighteenth-century Englishman displayed a cast of mind that was legalistic and unpragmatic. The first question he tended to ask was not what the benefits of a policy might be but whether anyone possessed the right to implement it. Public debate was legitimist in emphasis. There were few disputes where the issue of jurisdiction was ignored; very often jurisdiction was the only issue in contention. The great example of this is to be found in the debate over American taxation. The question was not whether the taxes had been voted for some improper purpose or whether the colonies could afford to pay. The argument turned on the issue of authority: did Parliament have the right to tax the colonies for any purpose whatever regardless of their ability to pay? The same emphasis on jurisdiction is to be found in the debate over the Royal Marriages Act of 1772. This act restricted the right of members of the royal family to marry whom they pleased. Opponents of the act condemned it not in terms of policy but in terms of right and jurisdiction. It was “repugnant to the natural rights of mankind.” It was “null and invalid.” Parliament possessed no authority to legislate such a measure, and it could be submitted to “only as the effect of power.” This eighteenth-century pre-occupation with legitimacy is evident even in the writings of its most radical and eccentric thinkers. Thomas Paine's chief complaint against the ancien régime in England was not that it governed badly but that it governed without legitimate authority. Whether it governed well or ill, it remained by Paine's standards an usurpation. Paine's zeal for democratic legitimacy may have been peculiar, but his method of debate was not.

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Extract from Letters to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, Occasioned by His Reflections on the Revolution in France, London, 1791, pp. 1-9

Volume I ◽

10.4324/9780429349423-7 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 95-103

Author(s):

Joseph Priestley

Keyword(s):

Edmund Burke ◽

The Right ◽

The Revolution

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Paul Gottfried and Paleoconservatism

Key Thinkers of the Radical Right ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190877583.003.0007 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 102-120

Author(s):

Seth Bartee

Keyword(s):

Presidential Election ◽

Republican Party ◽

Political Ideology ◽

Edmund Burke ◽

Right Wing ◽

National Review ◽

The Us ◽

The Right

This chapter discusses the life and work of Paul Gottfried, who is known as the founder of Paleoconservatism, a reformulation of the Right that advocated aspects of the conservatism of Edmund Burke, southern agrarian writers, and the National Review as it was before neoconservatism. His criticism of neoconservatives focused on their belief in the universal imperative of categories and ideas that led them to therefore disparage any kind of historicism. Gottfried maintained both Platonic and biblical categories in his conceptions of truth, beauty, justice, and revelation. He became the foremost critic of the Republican Party and neoconservatism. From 1999 until 2005 he expanded his criticisms of political ideology in the US and Europe. Since 2008 Gottfried has adopted the label of right-wing pluralist and allows most conservative dissidents into his organization, the H. L. Mencken Club, which became associated with the Alt Right during the 2016 presidential election.

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