Burke, Edmund

A statesman and philosopher, Edmund Burke was born in Dublin and entered parliament as a Whig in 1765. Today, he is seen as the leading thinker behind the Tory Party. In parliament Burke protested against coercion of the American colonies. Edmund Burke 's Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was published in 1756. Edmund Burke's book made an important distinction between the aesthetic category of The Sublime, which induces fear, and The Beautiful, which induces pleasure. A later generation of aestheticians and designers inserted a category for The Picturesque, intermediate between The Sublime and The Beautiful.

Burke's most famous phrase was that "Society is a contract between the past, the present and those yet unborn."