Thanks to its thoroughness, rhetorical skill and literary power, it has become one of the most widely known of Burke's writings and a classic text in political theory. Academics have had trouble identifying whether Burke, or his tract, can best be understood as "a realist or an idealist, Rationalist or a Revolutionist". Before seeing this work as a pamphlet, Burke wrote in the mode of a letter, invoking expectations of openness and selectivity that added a layer of meaning. The pamphlet has not been easy to classify. The Norton Anthology of English Literature describes Reflections as becoming the "most eloquent statement of British conservatism favoring monarchy, aristocracy, property, hereditary succession, and the wisdom of the ages." Above all else, it has been one of the defining efforts of Edmund Burke's transformation of " traditionalism into a self-conscious and fully conceived political philosophy of conservatism". One of the best-known intellectual attacks against the French Revolution, Reflections is a defining tract of modern conservatism as well as an important contribution to international theory. It is fundamentally a contrast of the French Revolution to that time with the unwritten British Constitution and, to a significant degree, an argument with British supporters and interpreters of the events in France.
Reflections on the Revolution in France is a political pamphlet written by the Irish statesman Edmund Burke and published in November 1790. Constituent power thus ends up being, once more, an alternative to sovereignty.Reflections on the Revolution in France at Wikisource In addition, the state’s foundations would be constantly augmented through procedures of collective constitutional revision and amendment. This had to be republican, as the exercise of power would be devolved, via federal structures, to local assemblies. By showcasing the plurality inherent to politics, constituent power testified that popular power does not have to disappear once the political order is created, but must be continuously exercised through the state’s institutional structure. It did not find its origins in the canon of Western philosophy but in the historical practice of people promising and acting together in the public space. The former was not a conceptualisation of popular power but its practical instantiation. Arendt thus aimed to rescue the democratic principle of popular authority by presenting constituent power as a radical alternative to the notion of sovereignty. By contrast, politics for Arendt had to be structured around a radically different conceptualisation of popular power, and constituent power served precisely that purpose. This abolished human plurality by prioritising the need to represent the people as a unitary body having a unitary will. Hannah Arendt disapproved of all conceptualisations of popular power in terms of sovereignty.
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