The Sinai Revolution and Ordered Liberty

Conservatives are by default skeptical of revolutions. British statesman Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France declared: “A revolution will be the very last resource of the thinking and the good.” More provocatively, he asserted: “I never liked this continual talk of resistance and revolution, or the practice of making the extreme medicine of the constitution its daily bread. It renders the habit of society dangerously valetudinary: it is taking periodical doses of mercury sublimate, and swallowing down repeated provocatives of cantharides to our love of liberty.” The revolutionary spirit, conservatives fear, tends to instability, chaos, and ultimately violence, as it did in the France of 1789, the Russia of 1917, and the China of 1949.