Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke occupies an ambiguous place in the history of political thought, not least because his writings seem to contain something for everyone. His attack on the French Revolution made him a darling of liberals fearful of demotic uprisings and over-zealous reformers. Conservatives with a fondness for aristocracy love to quote his defence of chivalry; but at the same time Burke launched enough withering attacks on the haughtiness and incompetence of actual aristocrats to make the most ardent egalitarian blush. Elitists of every stripe have lauded Burke’s insistence that political representatives should be free to exercise their judgment rather than be bound by instructions from their constituents. But democratic republicans can take comfort from his insistence that any Parliament that repeatedly ignores popular pressure cannot survive in the long run. Imperial nostalgics can look to Burke for inspiration on how a heterogenous empire can be prudently managed from a metropolitan centre. At the same time, the anti-colonial left has found much to admire in Burke’s effort to bring the sufferings caused by the East India Company to bear on the consciousness of the British political elite.

Rather than try to recover the one true Burke from those who have selectively read or misread him, my aim in this book has been to show how the tensions running through Burke’s thought are a virtue rather than a vice. Burke, I argue, was above all an active political agent who spent his career diagnosing the different forms of misrule that ailed the British body politic. If his writings occasionally seemed contradictory, this was because the ways in which rulers could fail or abuse their power were numerous and messy. If Burke’s political thought lacks a smooth consistency, then that’s largely because politics itself is never smooth either.