Edmund Burke on (the Venezuelan) Revolution

Do not be fooled, it is virtually impossible that Edmund Burke wrote something about Venezuela, let alone about the Chavista so-called socialist Revolution...

Edmund Burke was a famous Irish born political thinker back in the 18th century and served for many years in the British House of Commons as a member of the Whig party. He is mainly remembered for his opposition to the French Revolution.

In 1789, soon after the Fall of the Bastille, the French aristocrat Charles-Jean-François Depont asked his impressions of the Revolution; Burke replied with two letters. The longer, second letter became Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790.

As per his Reflections, Burke argued that the French Revolution would end disastrously, because its abstract foundations, purportedly rational, ignored the huge complexities of human nature and society. Further, he focused on the practicality of solutions instead of the metaphysics, writing:

'What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or to medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In this deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor."

Founded upon St. Augustine, Cicero, and Plato, he believed in "human heart"-based government. Nevertheless, he was contemptuous and afraid of the Enlightenment, led by intellectuals such as Rousseau, Voltaire, and Turgot, who disbelieved in Divine Moral Order and Original Sin, saying that society should be handled like a living organism, that people and society are limitlessly complicated, thus, leading him to conflict with Thomas Hobbes's assertion that politics might be reducible to a deductive system akin to mathematics.

Burke has been termed as a cornerstone of the conservative intellectual in Britain, eventhough that he was a member of the Whig party which in turn became the Liberals. So it is also natural to see classic liberal thinkers supporting Burkes view on government and society.