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Edmund Burke is considered by many to be the father of modern conservatism. His thoughts are so deeply subsumed in ritual and customs that he has often been described as a defender of vanishing traditions. This viewpoint is emphasized in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, in which radical revolutionary and democratic philosophy is depicted as tantamount to the collapse of Western civilization itself. Given Burke’s suspicion of abstraction, an important interpretive question remains at issue in contemporary scholarship: what overarching political theory drives Burke’s interpretation of the French Revolution and revolution in general? In this paper, I will use the perspective of the “new institutionalism” to shed light on Burke's analysis of social change, an analysis that has been misunderstood by some Burke scholarship.While he may have supported aristocratic and religious establishments for their own sake, Burke’s theoretical analysis is based largely on the protection of these institutions due to their secondary effects: stability, unity, and economic progress. Burke’s assertion that the aristocracy and church constitute irreplaceable and vital social institutions fits neatly into the new institutionalists’ broad definition of institutions, which includes not only formal organizations like legislatures but also rules, norms, patterns of interaction between members of society, and a whole host of other “informal” institutions. Utilizing the framework of the new intuitionalism, I will elucidate this understanding of institutions in Burke’s writing and show that the new institutional paradigm provides an appropriate framework for understanding Burke’s theories. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]