A bronze inscription in the public library of Bridgend calls Richard Price "Philosopher. Preacher. Actuary. Cfaill Dynolryw" Friend of Humanity]. He was all these and something more. Son of a Welsh Presbyterian of Calvinistic leaning, Richard Price was educated for the ministry. That he belonged in the best of Dissenting tradition was exhibited at an early age in his own interest in Arianism, an interest fostered by the academy at Pentwyn where he studied. Here he met the works of Samuel Clarke, which thoroughly aroused the ire of his father.

Richard Price did not cringe in the face...

Edmund Burke in recent years has assumed extraordinary stature in American political thinking as the father of neoconservatism. In this book, the first of a two-volume biography of this eighteenth-century English statesman, Mr. Cone brings important new evidence to his thesis that during the age of the American Revolution Burke was significant more as the politician and the party man than as a systematic political philosopher.

This volume deals with Burke's career to 1782, when the Marquis of Rockingham, to whom Burke had attached himself seventeen years earlier, stood once again on...