In the 1970s, when I began to take interest in Burke, not only was there was no collected Correspondence, but there was not even any modern edition of his Works. I successively purchased secondhand copies of the six-volume Bohn edition, and then (in the flush of a modest pay rise) of the Boston Little, Brown edition. The interpretive work was not extensive, and heavily influenced by two kinds of presentist preoccupation—both distinctively anglophone. One was the preoccupation with Burke's “contribution” to elements of the English Constitution—party government, the nature of representation, financial management—and his success in characterizing its customary, gradualist, pragmatic political culture, subsequently identified as “conservatism.” The other—prominent in American readings—comprised energetic attempts to recruit Burke into Cold War polemics: the clash between Burke and the French Revolutionaries (and their British supporters) presaging the clash between Marxism–Leninism and Western, free-market democracy. For scholars of a Straussian persuasion this involved reading into Burke a commitment to neo-Thomist natural law. These parameters spun an intellectually vertiginous confusion of issues. Quite how Burke's opposition to Paine was supposed to cohere with their shared defence of the America he (Paine) helped to create raised a number of historical issues. But instead of resolving these it was the implications of merely supposing them to be coherent that constituted the interpretive field. Controversies focused on whether Burke's political identity was conservative or liberal—anachronistic lexical markers, further complicated by their different connotations on either side of the Atlantic—and on how to characterize the “philosophical core” of his thinking. These too were contested in often disarmingly proleptic categories: liberal, utilitarian, collectivist. Looking back, this ideological fog was only made possible by the absence of any reasonably clear sense of eighteenth-century political-theoretical discourse within the categories and preoccupations of which to situate the man.

But the last forty years have transformed both Burke scholarship and our understanding of eighteenth-century political thinking. This has hugely enlarged not only the availability and integrity of Burke's own texts but also that of the materials for exploring the context, sources, identity and coherence of his political thought. The completion of his Correspondence, and of his Writings and Speeches (the first scholarly edition since Payne's in the mid-nineteenth century), the major, and surely now standard, two-volume biography by F. P. Lock, are scholarly landmarks.Footnote ¹ And it is not only Burke's own texts, but those on which he drew and against which he contended that have become more accessible. A further consequence of this primary scholarship has been an increasingly sensitive flow of interpretation in monographs, articles and collections of essays—writing devoted not only to Burke himself, but also to works that contextualized his own, providing a multiplier effect in the richness of material available.Footnote ²

Burke has continued to attract politicians as well as academics. Conor Cruise O'Brien devoted a great deal of what must have been—given his diplomatic responsibilities—his very precious spare time to a substantial biography;Footnote ³ and recently Jesse Norman MP has written a shorter study, appealing to practising politicians to learn from Burke's political insights.Footnote ⁴ The apparently quixotic desire of many modern, English, Tory, politicians to identify with, and secure their descent from, this eighteenth-century Irish Whig persists unabated, although their perceptions of the nature of that inheritance vary in line with their own variety of Toryism.Footnote ⁵

Scholarship has often presented the “political practitioner” and the “political thinker” as rival categories against which to measure Burke's identity and achievement. Moreover, these two roles can be presented as mutually undermining or at least threatening to his own reputation. Some historians of an earlier generation had seen Burke's political “theory” as a mere ideological cover for the real stuff of eighteenth-century—or perhaps of any—politics: namely personal connections and interests.Footnote ⁶ The contextualization of Burke in his role as secretary to Lord Rockingham and political adviser to his eponymous Whigs, even if it did not, as some claimed, reveal him as a party hack, could be seen to impugn his integrity as a political theorist, or at least the universality of his judgments. As Oliver Goldsmith gently teased, had Burke, “born for the universe, narrowed his mind and [given] up to party what was meant for mankind”? Moreover, the problematic relationship between Burke's status as a political actor and that as a political thinker has seemed to many to have been exacerbated by Burke's own famous denunciations of “theory.” However, the historical turn in modern political-theory scholarship has narrowed the gap between these two, once perceived as disparate, identities. Political agents act through speech. Both the opportunities and the constraints on political action are embedded in the prevailing political languages of the audience, and if political theories are one way of characterizing those languages, then agents’ politics bear a much closer relation to theory than skeptics such as Namier allowed. Which is not to say that the distinction can be collapsed.Footnote ⁷ Is it by situating Burke in his intellectual or his political context that our understanding of him is best enhanced?

Richard Bourke's new and stupendous work of intellectual and political reconstruction claims that scholarship's historical contextualization has hitherto “emphasized Burke's connection to other thinkers rather than [to] the pragmatic demands of eighteenth-century policy.” In consequence “a comprehensive study relating Burke's politics to his principles has not been previously undertaken” (225, added emphasis). This magnificent study is the first sustained and successful attempt to integrate Burke's political life (the subtitle) with the political problems he and his contemporaries faced, and in so doing demonstrate the political coherence of Burke's life. Whilst it is theoretically informed by scholarship on other thinkers, its main focus is on locating Burke within, and understanding his actions in relation to, the (diverse) political issues in which he was engaged. Presenting him as a coherent theorist might still seem to involve, by contrast, a considerable abstraction from those issues, driven as they often were by localized and often contradictory imperatives. The question remains, as John Brewer memorably put it, whether one could “gain on the historical swings and not lose on the philosophical roundabouts.”Footnote ⁸

The study not only deploys the full range of Burke's writings that have now become available—some indeed recovered by Richard Bourke himself—but exhibits a stupendously detailed grasp of the international, national and party-political contexts in which they were written, as well as modern academic understandings of them. This is a truly monumental work of exemplary scholarship, relentless, exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting). But the payoff is enormous, accomplishing a definitive repositioning of Burke's political activity within his time and preoccupations.

The organization of such a major work, seeking as it does to integrate political thinking, occasion and action, poses problems. Some are peculiar to Burke's intellectual biography, in that his few systematic theoretical works are clustered at the start of his career. The temptation for scholars has been either to ignore them as irrelevant to his politics, or to see them as providing a philosophical groundwork from which the politics could then be “read off.” Even chronological treatment risks implying this latter. The very weight of scholarship being deployed here is a further problem. At a thousand pages, and several hundred footnotes for each of the sixteen chapters, there is a danger that the wealth of arboreal detail will obscure any overall forestial argumentative trajectory. That trajectory is announced in the introduction as being “about the vicissitudes of empire and revolution as confronted by one of the leading political intellects of the eighteenth century” (1). And crucial to Burke's understanding of these vicissitudes, Bourke claims, is to recover the contemporary understandings of “the spirit of conquest” and the “spirit of liberty.”

Bourke tackles these problems by organizing his sixteen chapters into five broadly chronological sections. (1) “Reason and Prejudice: Early Formation 1730–1750” covers his Irish upbringing and education to 1750. (2) “Antinomianism and Enlightenment: Intellectual Formation 1750–1765” gives the background, context, and argument of his early philosophical and literary works: The Vindication of Natural Society (1756), Philosophical Enquiry into . . . the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), editorship of the Annual Register (1758–65). (3) “Party, Sovereignty and Empire 1765–1774” covers the Wilkes affair, the outbreak of the American dispute, and his first engagement with India. (4) “Conquest, Conciliation and Representation 1774–1785” covers relations with Ireland, English constitutional reform, conciliation with America, and the East India Company's governance of Madras and Bengal. The final part, “Whiggism, Jacobinism, Indianism and Ascendancy 1785–1797” covers the Hastings Impeachment, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791) and the other anti-Jacobin works. Each part begins with an overview, and the whole book with an introduction through which the salience of the overarching themes is managed and sustained.

An exegete concerned to sustain a defence of Burke as a systematic and philosophically informed thinker, whilst recognizing the necessarily occasional character of Burke's political writing, is surely faced with a dilemma. One must either sketch out, at least in broad terms, the conceptual world available to Burke so that specific arguments or policy moves can be seen to make sense in relation to it, or one can start with the political move, unpacking enough of the conceptual framework needed at that moment to make sense of it. The former risks “fitting up” Burke with a philosophical coherence that owes more than it ought to the exegete's hermeneutical creativity; the latter risks underplaying that coherence. Richard Bourke's approach tends to the latter. A basic chronological narrative is leavened by a series of interpretive and analytical passages reflecting on the controversial contexts and intellectual sources on which Burke drew in specific cases. The cumulative effect of these is to provide hitherto unparalleled understanding of the detail and development of Burke's political decision making.

Insisting on the circumstantial forces that led to Burke's preoccupations risks making the range of issues addressed seem purely adventitious, but they may also harbour claims about the coherence of overarching conceptual categories. Take, for example, C. C. O'Brien's account of his own attempt to establish the coherence of Burke's preoccupations, which he did by relating them to a couplet from Yeats referring to “American colonies, Ireland, France and India / Harried, and Burke's great melody against it.”

The unifying “it” was, claimed O'Brien, the abuse of power. But these themes, he confessed, were simply ones that “worked well for me”; they enabled him to escape what he described as the “day-to-day clutter” deriving from a strictly chronological approach to Burke's political life.Footnote ⁹ O'Brien was thus equivocal about the status of his “themes.” Richard Bourke's aspiration is more tightly hermeneutic. “Empire” and “revolution” are not for him “themes” that an enterprising biographer brings to his subject, but are claimed as fundamental categories, central to Burke's thinking and acting. The importance and posthumous salience of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and its role in defining a postrevolutionary conservatism have led generations of readers to see the central organizing polarity in his politics as that between a politics based on revolutionary abstraction and one based on experiential continuity. But this may have distorted our overall understanding of Burke.

Once we take seriously the notion—propounded now by a whole generation of scholarship—that England (even within its own Atlantic archipelago) was the seat of an empire, the theorization of empire becomes a topic we can see as integral to British political discourse, and not a set of contingent external relationships to which Britain (otherwise understood) becomes exposed. The eighteenth-century conception of empire as a congeries of (differently constituted) political bodies under metropolitan rule sets an agenda about the range of relationships by which the component parts—Ireland, the Americas, India (and, as we are now reminded, after the UK's Brexit vote, Scotland too)—might be related to that centre, and to each other. With the fact of empire at the core of Burke's political thinking and preoccupations, many other things fall into place. One corollary is to remind us that his preoccupation was with what we might today call structures of good governance. Good governance did not necessarily entail any particular level of political participation on the part of the governed. The focus of good governance is on the quality of rule, not its responsiveness to the wishes of the governed, which is only one aspect of it. Good governance did not even entail any particular set of institutions (although it did preclude some). Indeed the definition of empire virtually presupposes this diversity. But this recognition of difference was vital to the emergence of a sociohistorical political science. Achieving good governance across the diversity of imperial provinces required great sensitivity to the particularities of local economic, sociological and cultural circumstances. This perspective should not only dissuade us from any residual temptation (still surprisingly widespread) to engage in retrospective wrist slapping for Burke's resistance to principled democratization, but dissolves much of the supposed inconsistency between his earlier “liberal” and his post-revolutionary politics. It shifts the emphasis from locating him in an opposition between “radical” abstract universalism and “conservative” concern with historical continuity to understanding his continuing concern with the construction of the conditions for and the maintenance of liberty, and invites an understanding of the difference between his support for (or at least acquiescent understanding of) American, and repudiation of French, revolutionaries, based less on a “democratization” scale than on one that offers the possibility of sustaining liberty under local circumstances. Bourke's delineation of the controversial context within which Burke elaborates a theory of empire (often drawing on his own earlier articles) exposes both the conceptual space that Burke's position occupied, and the political and juridical constraints within which it was constructed. Perceptive—even critical—contemporaries’ assessments are used to great effect—for example Walpole's observation that Burke's argument was that “[p]rinciples should be subordinate to government” (10). Burke's insistences that metaphysical precepts cannot provide a guide to the business of government, that speculative right and practical policy stood in no simple (deductive) relationship with each other, but must be mediated by knowledge of circumstance and of humans’ acquired natures, were fundamental principles that can be seen at work throughout all his major political engagements, and it is only in following the detail of Burke's reasoning in these cases that we can come to a fair judgment about the charge of unprincipled casuistry which has been so often levelled at him.

The political character of Burke's adult career entailed political engagement, the agenda for which was provided “by the shifting fortune of events.” It was this, rather than any philosophical imperative to organize and present his thinking systematically, that determined what he wrote on and how. But it was not only the agenda that was “occasioned by the course of practical affairs” (224). Political orators and writers (and it is worth remembering not only the epistolary form but the almost invariably vocative mood of Burke's writing, mimicking as it did the spoken oration) are concerned to persuade their target audiences, rather than to establish or demonstrate timeless truths—which are perhaps only persuasive to other philosophers. Reading Burke requires greater sensitivity than usual to the audience being addressed in any particular text. That audience varies from his relatives, Irish and other private acquaintances, and political associates in private correspondence, to his fellow legislators and the “people out of doors” in published letters and speeches. Whilst the political character of the Life explains the serendipitous and unsystematic topics that Burke chooses to address in his writing, can we nevertheless identify a systematic philosophical mind behind, and informing, those pièces d'occasion? Bourke claims that Burke's rhetoric was powerful because he combined “mastery of detail with philosophical analysis of political relations.” Burke's responses were “informed by an education in the science of politics indebted to . . . philosophical history” (3–4). It is here that we have the nub of the swings-and-roundabouts conundrum.

Bourke's Burke is not a political philosopher. There is no sustained attempt here to present Burke's politics as part of a more comprehensive position comprising an epistemology, let alone a metaphysics. In this sense the subtitle “The Political Life of Edmund Burke” is important. But to say that Burke's politics are a pragmatic response to political circumstance need not be to say that they were ungrounded in wider, and considered, views. There is a kind of politician whose responses—like those of Oakeshott's raft rider—are purely local and reactive, devoted to keeping afloat. But Burke's were not—indeed he saved some of his most destructive invective for contemporaries who went this way to work. The wider view in which Burke located his response was, Bourke insists, historical, rather than philosophical, and can usefully be located in relation to a systematic eighteenth-century schematic understanding of the British polity.

The English (sometimes British) Constitution comprised a scheme of liberty in which the security of property rights was linked to institutions of consensual rule in such a way as to provide not only a stable polity but a trustworthy—(and hence investment-worthy)—economy. The Crown's authority needed to be effective, and to be effective it needed resources. But if liberty was to be sustained, and property secured, that rule would have to be circumscribed. The maintenance of an independent judiciary as arbiter was one means of doing this. But the executive's access to resources too, would need to be limited to those that property-owning citizens—or a Parliament representing them—were prepared to grant. Any government, whether a monarch or his executive, that could access resources independently of Parliament's grant—such as a monarch's private purse, or imposts on or booty taken from subject peoples outside the metropole—threatened liberty. Worse, at least more insidiously, a supine Parliament willing to be corruptly influenced by an administration with the resources and a mind to do so might achieve the same ends through the forms of legality. Key to the maintenance of this vision of liberty was that now long-disregarded political virtue, independence. The independence of Parliament defended by Burke was multifaceted: independence from the Crown and its administration on one side, certainly, but independence also from outside influences, on the other, whether agglomerations of corporate or aristocratic power, or the power of the unincorporated mob outside Parliament, mobilized by economic grievances real or imagined, speculative political ideology (the word is only just anachronistic) or religious fanaticism (supposedly then, as until recently, in decline). Most famously, of course, it also meant the relative independence of the MP from their electors.

The campaign to separate the domestic royal finances from the public purse; the denial of the appropriateness (though not the right) of Parliament taxing the American colonies; the untypical and precarious appeal to the “people out of doors” for fear that Parliament had become irretrievably corrupt; the defence of principled party against opportunist faction; the defence of MPs’ independent judgment; the problem of politically constraining, without controlling, the operations of the East India Company in India; the delicate balance to be struck in Ireland between domination by England and domination by a domestic (religious) faction—is itself only a partial list of Burke's political engagements. But each and every one of them is embedded in this understanding of the constitution of liberty. It was an understanding which had grown out of—and, as contemporaries were fully aware, existed in the shadow of—the civil, military and constitutional conflicts of the seventeenth century. Much of the scholarship of more recent generations has been devoted to rediscovering and rearticulating the way these background preoccupations—shared even by hardened political opponents—sedimented into a widespread political language.Footnote ¹⁰ It was this background which was disconcerted and at least partly overthrown by the issues raised by the French and Industrial Revolutions which came to dominate political modernity, making the recovery of this earlier linguistic and political world so difficult.

The advent of empire—one-half of Bourke's title—placed huge strains on this nexus, in which a balance was to be sustained between effective government and the liberty that was safeguarded by curbing the reach of that efficacy. The American states imposed costs on the motherland through the need to police maritime trade routes no less than because it provided another theatre in which imperialistic European monarchies could fight expensive wars. Such expenditure could not—or would not—be met purely from the domestic economy (and even if it were, that too provided worrying opportunities for patronage). But, despite the employment of colonial agents, such as Burke himself, in the House, it was unclear how consent from any transatlantic taxpayers could be meaningfully elicited in the metropolitan Parliament. Without that consent, attempts to tax were liable to be thought, and indeed were soon perceived as, coercive. Indeed they could be and were used by domestic opponents to raise fears of similar impositions at home. The Indian case was more complex, although the consent of those ruled, at least initially, was less salient. In India the colonial vehicle, as so often in America, was the chartered commercial company, but unlike in America, the proprietors and stockholders who benefited from the company were predominantly British residents and voters who, even if pursuing a career in India, would return enriched enough to buy England's estates, marry into her aristocracy, and influence her politics. The tension that broke out initially was between the imperative for metropolitan control and access to revenue, against the need to respect chartered property rights. The government's control over East India Company revenues was not only itself a potential threat to property rights, but would constitute an income stream completely outwith Parliamentary control. The probity of the Company's treatment of Indians also became an issue highlighted by the Bengal famine. A commercial company might rightly seek to prioritize its return on investment, but political rule, if it was not to fall prey to the “spirit of conquest,” involved other responsibilities. Parliament's task was to find a way of regulating the EIC consistent with respect both for the company's property rights and for its own responsibility for the treatment of Indian subjects.

Entangled in each of these policy issues were conceptual questions. Empire can derive from a spirit of conquest (in fact the first and second British Empires begin in a spirit of commerce on which conquest was forced to supervene). Here, as indeed domestically, Burke did not think the ultimate origins of British rule relevant to its legitimacy. What made rule legitimate was not its origin, but its conduct. Conquest can found subsequently legitimate rule, but a legitimate polity cannot be sustained by a spirit of conquest. How, then, could imperial relations (necessarily ultimately absolutist) be conducted with a spirit of liberty? In Burke's mind, that was only possible if those exercising empire at home could so restrain their rule as to allow liberty to prevail against conquest, hence his position on taxation—Britain had an imperial right to tax America which she should (in the name of liberty) forbear to exercise. But who were the “they” who exercised empire? If an empire was a diversity of polities under a single sovereign, where was the sovereign in the British Empire located? Was the sovereign the monarch? And if so, did he stand in the same relation to the British Parliament as to the assemblies in the American colonies? Or was the sovereign the king-in-Parliament, making the provincial assemblies subordinate to Westminster?

It was not just overseas colonies that raised these issues and their problematic implications for the domestic constitution. For the United Kingdom was itself an empire, internally differentiated into distinct subordinate realms, and most distinctively in Burke's native Ireland. Here the other issues were further complicated by the majority, and entirely un-enfranchised, Catholic community. The withdrawal of imperial control over Ireland, would, under existing arrangements, expose the majority community to the depredations of the minority Protestant ascendancy, who, there was reason to expect, would rule in a spirit of conquest.

The spirits of conquest and of liberty are introduced at the outset of the book in a typically discriminating discussion of the relationship between Burke and the various “schools” of thought of which commentators have sought to claim Burke a disciple. As Bourke remarks, this relation of discipleship “scarcely captures Burke's relationship to his predecessors” (19). But Bourke does place emphasis on the way Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws stimulated Burke's thought, not only about national politics but also about constitutions in general. He emphasizes Montesquieu's conclusion that liberty was better preserved by constitutional devices than by the promotion of public morals. Nevertheless the distinctive core of Burke's argument about the importance of maintaining balance and independence (and Bourke's portrayal of it), no less than the distinctly more difficult business of maintaining a commitment to an empire built on the spirit of liberty rather than conquest, comes to rely ultimately on the preservation of a moral commitment, rather than merely on an institutional framework. This at least must be true for those Whig grandees prepared to risk possible lifetime banishment to the opposition benches rather than accept the blandishments of court and spoils of office. This emphasis on the way moral disposition acted as a constitutional backstop was a view reiterated in his Reflections, where Burke stressed the importance of maintaining the “spirit of a gentleman” when tempted in these ordinary ways—tempted, that is to say, rather less by the swinish multitude than by the “sophisters and oeconomists” who lead them by the nose.Footnote ¹¹ It is hard to find criticism of this monumental work of scholarship, but one might be a wish that this polarity of “spirits” had been given more sustained theoretical articulation throughout the often dense accounts of Burke's political life.

This leaves us with “Revolution,” the other subtitle of Bourke's life. Bourke is undoubtedly right that from the perspective of Burke's own biography, the posthumous salience of Burke's writings on English Parliamentary issues and his Reflections provides a distorted perspective on his political life. Indeed, Burke himself said that it was for his Indian campaigning, which has ultimately proved perhaps the least tractable for modern interpreters of him, that he wished most to be remembered. One of the distinctive features of Bourke's revisionist account is to limit the space and distinctive importance attached to Reflections and its codas, although it produces some of the finest and most intellectually rewarding writing in the book. But it is not only the apportionment of space attached to it, but also the radical reading of Burke's stance on political resistance that is distinctive. Bourke reaches back to his American and Indian writings in trying to synthesize a view of this. There is historical warrant for this. Burke's contemporaries expressed surprise at his stance on the French Revolution—which led to his famous tearful and public break with Fox; so it is perhaps no surprise that an interpretation committed to resituating Burke in his political context and reapportioning weight to his prerevolutionary political life should read him in a way more congenial to that cause. There are interpreters who have read Burke as a repressed radical or even Jacobin.Footnote ¹² Bourke's reading of Burke as recognizing a “right to revolution” (665), a “recourse to insurrection” (678) and even “a resort to arms . . . enjoined by the rights of man” (699) eschews the assistance of any such psychological ideological legerdemain. It is presented as a clear and avowed principle of Burke's, and perhaps even offers us a Burke more congenial to some moderns. But it is striking new territory, and is clearly a minefield through which a passage, one sometimes feels, is having to be forced.

The passages discussing this issue, unusually, stand back from the political narrative and move backwards and forwards across Burke's life. One consequence of this is that they can lose the close contextualization which is so prominent a feature of this study. For example, Bourke's reading of the Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777) is that Burke claimed that the adminstration's hostility to the Americans “fully justified ‘a change of government by force’” (699). That work, though, is focused on metropolitan mistreatment rather than on colonial vindication. Burke seeks to explain how the foolishness of the administration has led the empire to the present situation. It is surely an exploration of what one might call the philosophical sociology of allegiance rather than a justification of rebellion. His observation that no political theorist denied that government hostility justified a change in government is less a vindication of the colonists than a clearing of the moral landscape for the deployment of an analysis of the political causalities operating on obedience. Another strand of the argument here concerns Burke's use of the famous Latin tag necessitas non habet legem. Bourke claims (on the basis of a manuscript draft speech) that Burke subscribed not only to a right, but also to a duty, of resistance, and that American action in 1776 was a matter of “necessity” rather than choice. I haven't seen the manuscript in question, but this certainly looks like a confusion of modes. As Bourke himself brings out, the understanding that necessity overrules law is not the same as a prescription that it should, and the necessity at issue here is not the same thing as a duty, otherwise Burke would not have spent so much public effort insisting that there can be no principled delineation of precisely when resistance is morally permissible—an insistence he applied not only to 1789, but also to 1688 and 1776.

It is, of course, impossible to say everything at once, but it is nevertheless important to remember that discussion of the justification of resistance involves not only an occasion but also an agent, and the identity of those resisting is much more of an issue for one committed, as Bourke shows his subject to be, to a society of ranks than it could appear to moderns with their subscription to a morally equalized and undifferentiated humankind. For Burke it is the spirit of conquest that animated the French Revolution, whereas it was the spirit of liberty that animated the American. This might be another way of saying that the American Revolution was a secession (of an entire provincial “people”), whereas the French was a class uprising (however clothed in the language of universality). After all, in terms of what we would call political culture, Americans, Burke claimed, were Englishmen seeking English liberties, whilst the French revolutionaries were bourgeois conspirators using unscrupulous (or naive) philosophers to fool the poor to help them capture the nation's assets.

Such issues relate not only to important and long-debated questions about the classification of these two early modern revolutions, but also to the related, if broader, issue about how we translate the language that past political protagonists used about them into modern political terminology. Were the American and French Revolutions two examples—or even facets—of a broadly unitary, modernizing, liberal, Atlantic, political transformation?Footnote ¹³ Or were they quite distinctive—the one devoted to liberty, grounded in reciprocal respect and preexisting associative bodies, mutually constituted, the other in the dissolution of all such historically acquired institutions and practices? Despite his worries about the outbreak of some “abstract theorizing” in America, Burke clearly sees the difference to be the latter. But if that difference is grounded in, and to be understood in terms of, their “spirit,” where does Burke locate this “spirit”—in the institutional practices? Or (like Montesquieu) in the beliefs of historical agents? Indeed where does Bourke locate this spirit? In the end the issue of spirit was unresolved for me. Is spirit to be understood as an ex post characterization of political events or episodes or practices, identified by the historian? Or is it an intrinsic, internal feature of Burke's own understanding of his political practice? And if so, is it theorized by him, or theorizable by the exegete without doing violence to Burke's own thinking? The vast and detailed historical canvas painted for us here has, for this reader, deepened, not settled, John Brewer's question about the whether the takings on the historical swings necessarily affect the viability of the theoretical roundabouts.

Does this matter? For the (out-and-out?) historian perhaps not. Historical figures such as Burke thought and did what they thought and did. On one view the historian's task is to simply narrate the evidence-able claims about those acts and thoughts. But of course we finish up doing more—we seek to relate what was done to what was believed (by the actor) and to what is believed to be of significance (by us). Even what starts out as merely an attempt to understand action pushes through to some kind of theoretical understanding (all history is the history of past thought). So it is difficult (not only motivationally, but intellectually and theoretically) to insulate questions about the political actions of agents whom we deem to have been both historically significant and conceptually astute from questions about their theoretical grasp of the field as a whole—even if they never offered an explicit overview of it. And even if we are in the habit of thinking of politics as a persistent aspect of the human condition, it is very difficult not to raise questions about the relationship between their understanding of it and ours.