One of the difficulties in treating Edmund Burke as a political thinker is that he wrote and spoke voluminously about so many different subjects.

As a prominent parliamentarian for three decades, Burke tackled nearly everything that concerned the British Empire in the final third of the eighteenth century: the American and French revolutions, imperial expansion in India, a series of constitutional crises in his native Ireland, domestic political transformation after the accession of George III, and the disintegration of the so-called “Whig Supremacy.”

In recent years, Burke has usually been studied within political theory through an imperial lens, either as an Enlightenment critic of empire as in the influential work of Jennifer Pitts, or alternatively as a conservative promoter, according to Daniel O’Neill.

Gregory Collins has written a fine book on Burke as a political economist, and William Selinger has expertly treated Burke’s “parliamentarism” in a landmark study. For evident reasons, though, studies that treat Burke’s entire intellectual and political career in the round tend to be extremely long.

Key examples include Richard Bourke’s 1032-page magnum opus, Empire and Revolution, and F. P. Lock’s two-volume biography totaling 1256 pages, along with earlier classics such as Conor Cruise O’Brien’s The Great Melody (768 pages), and Carl B. Cone’s Burke and the Nature of Politics, whose two volumes together come to 942 pages. David Bromwich’s The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke covers the period up until American Independence in 512 pages.

But one of the selling points of Ross Carroll’s new book, Edmund Burke, is that it treats Burke’s main contributions to political thought in only 227 pages (including notes, bibliography, and index). Most impressively, it manages to do so without sacrificing either context or complexity. The result is the best short introduction to Burke’s political thought.

A Classic Thinker

Carroll’s book is part of Polity Press’s “Classic Thinker” series. Previous installments include William J. Prior’s Socrates, Céline Spector’s Rousseau, and James T. Schleifer’s Tocqueville. Part of Carroll’s achievements is to show that Burke should be considered as a classic thinker alongside these other famous names. This is not at all obvious, since for most of his life he was not an “armchair philosopher” but an active politician.

As Carroll states in the introduction: “Separating Burke the thinker from Burke the wit, Burke the political brawler, and Burke the scorner, is easier said than done. … There are some political thinkers whose principal ideas can be studied without needing to know much about the texture of their life, personality, and career. Burke is not one of these thinkers.”

Alongside the range of his topics, another difficulty of studying Burke is that he thought about politics on so many different levels, practical and philosophical, sometimes within the very same work, notably in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).

Moreover, as Carroll notes, “Burke’s contributions to thought are contained in letters, pamphlets, speeches, and other occasional pieces of writing, rather than concentrated in a handful of philosophical masterworks.” Carroll has mastered this vast and diverse source material and demonstrates that Burke’s most revealing political commentary can often be found in his private correspondence.

The closest thing Burke wrote to a systematic treatise was his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), which offered a naturalistic account of what we would call aesthetics. But though the Philosophical Enquiry was widely read in the eighteenth century, it is as a political thinker that Burke is best known, and this is also Carroll’s main focus.

A Man of Action

Burke abandoned a life dedicated to contemplation for the vita activa when he became a secretary to William Gerard Hamilton in 1759. But his six-year association with Hamilton, which involved Burke in politics in both Dublin and London, ended unhappily at the beginning of 1765. Burke had by then become infuriated that Hamilton appeared to want him to continue indeterminately in an inferior position and broke off the connection abruptly. He felt that the entire Hamilton episode had retarded his intellectual development and hurt his literary reputation.

Rather than returning to life as a “man of letters,” however, Burke became even more immersed in politics. His close friend and writing collaborator William Burke introduced him to the circle of Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, and when Rockingham took office as Prime Minister in July 1765, Burke became his private secretary.

The importance of the Rockingham connection can hardly be overstated. As Carroll comments: “Many political thinkers have flourished under the protective wing of a powerful aristocratic sponsor: Hobbes had Cavendish, Locke had Shaftesbury, Burke had Rockingham. It was Rockingham who drew Burke into the center of British politics.”

At the end of 1765, Burke was elected as a member of Parliament. He was to remain in the House of Commons, serving three different constituencies, for 29 years.

Parliamentary historian Paul Langford—the general editor of the Writings & Speeches of Edmund Burke—once commented that there were three types of members of the House of Commons in the eighteenth century: landowners, men from commercial backgrounds, and adventurers. Though Burke became a lesser landowner in Beaconsfield—partly thanks to money borrowed from Rockingham—he was certainly an adventurer, or a novos homo, like Cicero.

It was as an MP that Burke became a national figure, mainly as an opposition spokesperson since his political party was only in government for three brief periods during his political career (for one year in 1765–66, for just over three months in 1782, and for nine months in 1783). Burke never became a Cabinet minister, and only served briefly as Paymaster General in the early 1780s. But for the best part of three decades, he was arguably the most prominent opposition spokesperson in the British Parliament.

Opposition

As Carroll emphasizes, Burke had been interested in reform in the areas of culture, manners, and customs ever since his student days when he briefly edited a journal called The Reformer (1747).

But being a member of the parliamentary opposition meant that Burke had to think about political reform of various kinds: imperial, administrative, and parliamentary, though he rejected and became a consistent opponent of the latter.

Along with the members of his Whig party connection, he became obsessed with the idea that the power of the Crown had increased since the accession of George III in 1760, at the expense of the people and the aristocracy alike. To reduce the power of the Crown, Burke proposed administrative reforms of the British state and its empire, supported by the idea of political party, held together as “a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.”

Carroll notes that reform for Burke meant preserving rather than innovating. He viewed the principles of conservation, transmission, and improvement as mutually reinforcing.

Carroll rightly points out that Burke was always a shaper of party policy rather than a mere underling of his aristocratic superiors. As a spokesperson for the Rockingham Whigs in the House of Commons, Burke often championed popular as well as unpopular causes. He was convinced that the people had no interest in disorder and that their representatives therefore needed to take their complaints seriously, while ultimately following their own judgment rather than strict instructions from voters.

Carroll writes: “The closest thing we get to an axiom in Burke’s political thought is that the people are the best judges of whether they are being oppressed or not. … As Burke would show time and again in his career, there is nothing inconsistent about deploring violence on the one hand and attempting to understand the motives of those who carry it out on the other.”

This frame of mind informed Burke’s approach to the Americans’ outrage over the Stamp Act in the middle of the 1760s. “We look very improperly upon North America,” he told the House of Commons in one of his first parliamentary speeches, “if we consider their disturbances only and entirely neglect their grievances.”

Burkean Politics

Such a complex and multifaceted thinker as Burke defies simple categorization. Though presentist moralists may find things to deplore—they often do—there is clearly much in him for both liberals and conservatives to admire. Carroll’s Burke was “an ardent modernizer and reformer who embraced Enlightenment notions of religious toleration, commerce, and the application of new knowledge to the improvement of everything from agriculture to statesmanship.”

At the same time, Carroll notes that reform for Burke meant preserving rather than innovating, and in particular, conserving the parliamentary settlement following the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89. More generally, Burke viewed the principles of conservation, transmission, and improvement as mutually reinforcing.

None of this made him complacent, as he lamented that the benefits of the Revolution Settlement had not been extended to his native Ireland and that Catholics were treated as second-class citizens in his native country as well as in his adopted one. Yet for him, George III and the “King’s Friends” were the innovators who sought to expand the power of the Crown, and undermine the balance in the mixed constitution.

The same applied to Parliament after it imposed direct taxes on its North American colonies. When Burke was accused of inconsistency after the outbreak of the French Revolution, he memorably told the House of Commons that “he was favourable to the Americans, because he supposed they were fighting, not to acquire absolute speculative liberty, but to keep what they had under the English constitution. … He considered the Americans as standing at that time, and in that controversy, in the same relation to England, as England did to king James the Second, in 1688.” In short, the Americans had been on the “defensive footing,” according to Burke.

The same applied, with added force, to Warren Hastings and the East India Company, who failed to respect the local customs in India. Though it never crossed Burke’s mind to question the validity of imperial power as such, he emerged as a fierce critic of imperial abuses. He admired conquerors who won the allegiance of people through magnanimity, but detested those who established despotism over conquered peoples.

Burke devoted nearly ten years of his life to the impeachment of Hastings, former Governor-General of Bengal, and many more to studying Indian affairs. The impeachment was ultimately unsuccessful, but Burke regarded it as the most important struggle of his political career. In the 1790s, he viewed “Indianism” (his term for the corruption represented by the monopolistic East India Company) as a greater threat than Jacobinism.

The zeal with which he went after Hastings baffled his contemporaries, many of whom had little interest in India. “I know what I am doing; whether the white people like it or not,” he wrote to a correspondent. Very fittingly, Carroll’s final chapter is devoted to Burke’s criticisms of British abuse in India.

Burke’s Legacy

It is because Burke’s opposition to “innovation” and “democracy” may seem odd in the abstract that we need to study him contextually, as a man of the eighteenth century. Carroll’s new book first and foremost exemplifies the historicist method of studying political ideas.

But Carroll also implies that the better we understand Burke as a man of his own time, and the better we learn to distinguish his thought from his posthumous reputation, the more relevant he appears to be.

Carroll singles out Burke as a thinker who thought deeply about the abuse of power. He writes: “The conundrum that Burke often faced was how to prevent governments from using the pretext of continual emergencies to enlarge their authority over time.”

As power is as inescapable in politics as its corruption is inevitable—and as it is almost inconceivable to see state power shrinking—Burke is unlikely to go out of fashion. Carroll’s book shows that Burke is not only a classic thinker who transcends -isms, but one that we stop reading at our peril.