On Edmund Burke, Joseph De Maistre and Louis De Bonald, the founding trio of conservatism: An evaluation in the framework of political philosophy and the theory of sovereignty

The three founders of modern conservatism are Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald. The event that gave rise to conservatism was the French Revolution of 1789, and conservative thought took shape as a reaction to the Revolution and Enlightenment philosophy. In this study, Burke, Maistre and Bonald's theories of sovereignty are systematically analyzed and compared both with their predecessors and with each other. The study first analyzes the development of the theories of sovereignty and presents the theoretical framework. Then, Burke, Maistre and Bonald's theories of sovereignty and the philosophical backgrounds that shaped their ideas of sovereignty are discussed in detail. It is seen that Burke's philosophical approach defined by "epistemological humility" and the principle of prescription based on the social and historical directs his idea of sovereignty. The radical form of Burke's historicism can be seen in Maistre's "providential historicism" and the radical form of his social approach in Bonald's "sociological Traditionalism". Bonald's a priori philosophical approach and the mathematical certainty of his theory are more reminiscent of Enlightenment rationalists than Burke and Maistre, and Bonald's stern theory, which does not share epistemological humility, is the only theory among the three that can be called reactionary.