Passion and virtue as the foundation of politics in Edmund Burke

The paper, drawing on the interpretative lines of Edmund Burke’s political philosophy, investigates love as passion and charity as virtue, which, together with sympathy, constitute the foundational elements of politics. These categories are interpreted as a possible solution to human viciousness, in defense of individual freedoms and all those principles that establish prudence as a political criterion. The analysis takes on a threefold meaning: as a discovery of the objectivity of emotions; as an antidote to the pathologies of politics; and as a recovery of the passions that motivate political action. These three concepts seek to reorganize the organic nature of political systems, which, in Burke’s lexicon, takes on the characteristics of a process of “social construction” within a theoretical horizon that positions the conservative mind, pioneered by Russell Kirk, as the basis and foundation of the moral and political universe.