Treatise of the English parliamentarian Edmund Burke, containing extensive criticism of the programs of revolutionary reorganization of society and written at the height of the French Revolution in 1790. The treatise caused widespread public discussion, in particular because of Burke's parallel oratory in parliament and as a vivid expression of the ideology of conservatism. Burke "sharply and unequivocally condemned the French Revolution in this text as an attempt to destroy the established social order and replace it with a purely speculative and therefore unviable scheme of social relations developed by encyclopedic philosophers." Predicted its collapse and rebirth into a semblance of what happened before.