ESSAY THE VARIETIES OF BURKE IN CONTEMPOR ARY AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE THOUGHT Steven D. Ealy T he first of many references to Edmund Burke in Robert Nisbet's Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary occurs in his very first entry, "abortion." Here Nisbet offers a brief history both of abortion practices and of philosophical and theological perspectives from the Hebrews and ancient Greeks to "the contemporary preoccupation with abortion."1 Eventually, Nisbet arrives at Roe v. Wade and its aftermath. After surveying the ongoing battles between "militant abortionists" and "aggressive antiabortionists," Nisbet concludes, "Rarely has sheer zeal overtaken a moral question in the measure that is found on both sides of the abortion question. What is badly needed at this juncture is a liberal infusion of expediency in Edmund Burke's noble sense of that word" (PPD, 7).2 Steven D. Ealy is a senior fellow at Liberty Fund Inc., an educational foundation. He has written on politics in the fiction of Robert Penn Warren, Ralph Ellison, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. This essay was adapted from a talk delivered at the April 2015 meeting of the Philadelphia Society on "The Roots of American Conservatism and Its Future." 29