Letter to a member of the National Assembly

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) is one of those English political writers who are known very little in Poland. True, his works have been published Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), as well as his first book, which he began working on at the age of nineteen, while still a student at Trinity College Dublin, Philosophical Inquiries into the Origin of Our Ideas of Sublimity and Beauty (1757). However, reflection on his political thought is practically non-existent.

In the times of Stanisław August Poniatowski, in the then published Historical and Political Memoir one could find a lot of information about the writer's parliamentary activity. Later, however, on Burke silence fell in Poland. Even contemporary Polish conservatives have little to say about Burke, although they commonly list him among their spiritual forebears.
In a sense, it is hard to be surprised. Poles, deprived of their own state, became, as it were, by definition, allies of all European revolutionary movements. In the French Revolution, in which Edmund Burke saw a fundamental threat to European civilization, we saw an ally. The Caesarian dictator, whose appearance Edmund Burke predicted, became almost our national hero.

The wars of revolutionary France became our wars. Its successes were our own, and its failures became our real defeats. Those who in Poland referred to Burke, such as Józef Kalasanty Szaniawski, were simply thrown out of national memory.

Who remembers Burke?

It is of little comfort that Burke has also been largely forgotten in his adopted homeland of England. Russell Kirk titled the first chapter of his book on the philosopher directly: How dead is Edmund Burke?

Meanwhile, the French Revolution was neither the last nor the worst atrocity to befall the Old World. In the 19th century, our continent was struck by the barbarity of a completely modern version of Jacobinism: communism and Nazism. The belief, which underpinned the revolutions in France in 1789, Russia in 1917, and Germany in 1933, that man can transform the world around him in a purely scientific, rationalistic way, is also alive and in our times. But so far all radical changes, made in the name of human rights and the good of all humanity, have ended bloodily and cruelly. And that is why one must know Burke; because in our times utopia is doing very well.

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