  In attacking the Revolution in France, Burke constructed a rogues' gallery for French politicians, and stocked it also with quite a number of French thinkers. The figures who appeared to be rogues, however, were most of them only straw men, stuffed according to the prejudices of a British audience. More significantly for our purposes, Burke's censure of the philosophes attributed to them complicity with the style of thought that had set up a limited range of simple principles as the norm for politics, and which was wholly inadequate to satisfy the connected and various needs of human nature under modern conditions. Burke preferred to emphasize that numerous principles, and practical thinking to combine them, were necessary to meet these needs, and so to sustain improvement, and emphasize, too, that such accommodation involved much more practical activity than speculative design. Correspondingly his own writings develop, not a political philosophy but rather a political style that had at its core philosophical elements—a style which, indeed, implicitly suggested that political philosophy was not feasible as a sort of knowledge, and, if it was, certainly not one sufficient to the task of 'the philosopher in action'. The latter, at least as embodied by Burke himself, when he mentioned political philosophy, assumed that it was highly practical. It for its goal regulating opinion in order to produce good political results and to prevent bad ones. “It has ever been the great primary object of speculative and doctrinal philosophy to regulate opinion”, he wrote. “It is the great object of political philosophy to promote that which is sound, and to extirpate what is mischievous, and which directly tends to render men bad citizens in the community, and mischievous neighbours out of it” (RP2, W &amp; S ix.295).