In the Reflections, Burke argued that the French Revolution would end disastrously because its abstract foundations, purportedly rational, ignored the complexities of human nature and society. Further, he focused on the practicality of solutions instead of the metaphysics, writing 'What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or to medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In this deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor." Following St. Augustine and Cicero, he believed in "human heart"-based government.
Nevertheless, he was contemptuous and afraid of the Enlightenment, led by intellectuals such as Rousseau, Voltaire, and Turgot, who disbelieved in divine moral order and original sin, saying that society should be handled like a living organism, that people and society are limitlessly complicated, thus, leading him to conflict with Thomas Hobbes's assertion that politics might be reducible to a deductive system akin to mathematics.
A dominant theme in Reflections is that the French were not upholding the rights accorded to all men, like the American revolutionaries that he supported or the English in the Glorious Revolution. C. B. Macpherson, goes as far as saying any contradiction can "be dismissed very quickly."
Others, such as Jeff Spinner, argue that opposition to the United States revolution was more pragmatic. Burke believed only war and the spread of uniquely American ideals, which were ill-suited for Europe, could result from opposition to the American self-determination.
As a Protestant and Whig, he expressly repudiated the belief in divinely appointed monarchic authority and the idea that a people have no right to depose an oppressive government; however, he advocated central roles for private property, tradition, and 'prejudice' (adherence to values regardless of their rational basis) to give citizens a stake in their nation's social order. He argued for gradual, constitutional reform, not revolution (in every case except the most qualified case), emphasizing that a political doctrine founded upon abstractions such as liberty and the rights of man could be easily abused to justify tyranny. He saw inherited rights, restated in England from the Magna Carta to the Declaration of Right, as firm and concrete providing continuity (like tradition, 'prejudice,' inheritable private property,) by contrast enforcement of 'speculative' abstract rights might waver and be subject to change based on currents of politics. Instead, he called for the constitutional enactment of specific, concrete rights and liberties as protection against governmental oppression.