Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke
Published 1790 · 326 pages · 110,000 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Reflections on the Revolution in France to read?
Reflections on the Revolution in France scores 66 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 68 out of 100
- Eighteenth-century rhetorical vocabulary; dense with classical allusion and political terminology of the period.
- Sentence structure: 67 out of 100
- Abstraction: 75 out of 100
- Engages at the level of political philosophy and theory of institutions while grounding argument in specific events.
- Information density: 78 out of 100
- Dense with political argument, historical allusion, and rhetorical elaboration; requires sustained engagement.
- Narrative indirection: 22 out of 100
- Burke proceeds through argument and image simultaneously; the rhetorical and analytical strands require separate tracking.
- Symbolic density: 25 out of 100
- Burke's famous set-pieces — the attack on the October Days, the figure of Marie Antoinette — function as argument through image.
- Ironic distance: 24 out of 100
- Burke's controlled outrage and elaborate sarcasm directed at the philosophes are rhetorical instruments.
- Resolution withholding: 14 out of 100
- Burke's conclusions are stated explicitly; the complexity is in the argument's texture, not its withholding.
- Structural complexity: 44 out of 100
- Organized as a letter but structured as an extended political and philosophical treatise; arguments loop back and develop.
How Reflections on the Revolution in France is regarded
Reflections on the Revolution in France holds a literary regard score of 48 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.