Edmond Burke is in some ways the founder of modern conservatism, and is most famous for staunchly opposing the French Revolution. Burke believe that people ultimately understood very little about the forces that governed society, and any changes that we make have to be done slowly to ensure that society doesn't collapse into anarchy. He thought the radicals that wanted to remake society "rationally" during the French Revolution were far too arrogant in their ability to imagine a utopian society from scratch, and any attempt to do so would only result in disaster. While he believed in social progress, he thought we should never make large changes all at once, or we would risk dissolving institutions that we did not fully understand and upsetting the balance in society, bringing large scale suffering.

He wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790, only eighteen months after the revolution had begun, so a lot of his predictions of unrestrained violence came true. Of course, his ideas such as "actually, democracy is bad", and "women shouldn't be educated" aged a little less well.