Few thinkers have provoked such violently opposing reactions as Edmund Burke. A giant of eighteenth-century political and intellectual life, Burke has been praised as a prophet who spied the terror latent in revolutionary or democratic ideologies, and condemned as defender of social hierarchy and outmoded political institutions. Ross Carroll tempers these judgments by situating Burke-s arguments in relation to the political controversies of his day. Burke-s writings must be understood as rhetorically brilliant exercises in political persuasion aimed less at defending abstract truths than at warning his contemporaries about the corrosive forces - ideological, social, and political - that threatened their society. Drawing on Burke-s enormous corpus, Carroll presents a nuanced portrait of Burke as, above all, a diagnostician of political misrule, whether domestic, foreign, or imperial. Burke-s lasting value, Carroll argues, derives less from the content of his specific positions than from
