Continuing from Greer:

What these imply, in turn, is that social change is not necessarily a good thing. It's always possible that a given change, however well-intentioned, will result in consequences that are worse than the problems that the change is supposed to fix. In fact, if social change is pursued in a sufficiently clueless fashion, the consequences can cascade out of control, plunging a nation into failed-state conditions, handing it over to a tyrant, or having some other equally unwanted result. What's more, the more firmly the eyes of would-be reformers are fixed on appealing abstractions, and the less attention they pay to the lessons of history, the more catastrophic the outcome will generally be.

That, in Burke's view, was what went wrong in the French Revolution. His thinking differed sharply from continental European conservatives, in that he saw no reason to object to the right of the French people to change a system of government that was as incompetent as it was despotic. It was, the way they went about it--tearing down the existing system of government root and branch, and replacing it with a shiny new system based on fashionable abstractions--that was problematic. What made that problematic, in turn, was that it simply didn't work  Instead of establishing an ideal republic of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the wholesale reforms pushed through by the National Assembly plunged France into chaos, handed the nation over to a pack of homicidal fanatics, and then dropped it into the waiting hands of an egomaniacal warlord named Napoleon Bonaparte.

Why things went wrong in the French Revolution:

Two specific bad ideas founded in abstractions helped feed the collapse of revolutionary France into chaos, massacre, tyranny, and pan-European war. The first was the conviction, all but universal among the philosophes whose ideas guided the revolution, that human nature is entirely a product of the social order. According to this belief, the only reason people don't act like angels is that they live in an unjust society, and once that is replaced by a just society, why, everybody would behave the way the moral notions of the philosophes insisted they should. Because they held this belief, in turn, the National Assembly did nothing to protect their shiny up-to-date system against such old-fashioned vices as lust for power and partisan hatred, with results that made the streets of Paris run with blood.

The second bad idea had the same effect as the first. This was the conviction, also all but universal among the philosophes, that history moved inevitably in the direction they wanted: from superstition to reason, from tyranny to liberty, from privilege to equality, and so on. According to this belief, all the revolution had to do to bring liberty, equality, and fraternity was to get rid of the old order, and voila--liberty, equality, and fraternity would pop up on cue. Once again, things didn't work that way. Where the philosophes insisted that history moves ever upward toward a golden age in the future, and the European conservatives who opposed them argued that history slides ever downward from a golden age in the past, Burke's thesis--and the evidence of history--implies that history has no direction at all.

The existing laws and institutions of a society, Burke proposed, grow organically out of that society's history and experience, and embody a great deal of practical wisdom. They also have one feature that the abstraction-laden fantasies of world-reformers don't have, which is that they have been proven to work. Any proposed change in laws and institutions thus needs to start by showing, first, that there's a need for change; second, that the proposed change will solve the problem it claims to solve; and third, that the benefits of the change will outweigh its costs. Far more often than not, when these questions are asked, the best way to redress any problem with the existing order of things turns out to be the option that causes as little disruption as possible, so that what works can keep on working.

I don't think I even heard the name Karl Polanyi while I was getting my Masters in History,(1965), but, fifteen years later, when I was handed a copy of "The Great Transformation" by an economist friend I saw the great power of tradition through the eyes of a socialist. Polanyi was very Burkian in his criticism of the reform of the Poor Laws in England in i834 and the entire transition of England from a traditional feudal culture to a laissez faire, market oriented economy, calling it, to paraphrase, "the largest and longest running utopian social experiment in history", and not in a good way. This last bit by Greer would certainly be endorsed by Polanyi:

The existing laws and institutions of a society, Burke proposed, grow organically out of that society's history and experience, and embody a great deal of practical wisdom. They also have one feature that the abstraction-laden fantasies of world-reformers don't have, which is that they have been proven to work. Any proposed change in laws and institutions thus needs to start by showing, first, that there's a need for change; second, that the proposed change will solve the problem it claims to solve; and third, that the benefits of the change will outweigh its costs. Far more often than not, when these questions are asked, the best way to redress any problem with the existing order of things turns out to be the option that causes as little disruption as possible, so that what works can keep on working.

Of course this overlooks the role of the dynamics of a revolution as so lucidly laid out by Historian Crane Brinton in "Anatomy of Revolution" almost 80 years ago. It could be argued that, regardless of the ideals of a revolution, once started it will be driven by inherent internal dynamics to a course similar to what Brinton described for the English, French and Russian Revolutions. Certainly a strong case was made for that thesis by Zbigniew Brzezinski to Carter for the Iranian Revolution. The case Brinton makes offers a cautionary tale for Sanders' 'Political Revolution' (from Wiki):

Brinton summarizes the revolutionary process as moving from "financial breakdown, [to] organization of the discontented to remedy this breakdown ... revolutionary demands on the part of these organized discontented, demands which if granted would mean the virtual abdication of those governing, attempted use of force by the government, its failure, and the attainment of power by the revolutionists. These revolutionists have hitherto been acting as an organized and nearly unanimous group, but with the attainment of power it is clear that they are not united. The group which dominates these first stages we call the moderates .... power passes by violent ... methods from Right to Left."

Peaceful change is more than a desideratum.