Edmund Burke is difficult to classify. Born in Ireland in 1730, he entered parliament in 1765 having already achieved literary distinction for several philosophical works, including On the origins of the sublime and beautiful (1757). His subsequent career as a Whig statesman, politician, and reformer spanned the tumultuous decades of the late eighteenth century and culminated, less than a decade before his death, in his famous polemic against the French Revolution, Reflections on the revolution in France (1790). Over the course of his life, Burke opined with such frequency on so many topics that the nature of his ‘philosophy’ remains an open question, and scholars continue to offer strikingly different interpretations of his life and legacies. ‘Burke's legacy to history’, historian Richard Bourke summarized, ‘has been a complicated affair’.Footnote ¹

As Bourke emphasizes in a recent essay, ‘What is conservatism?’, Burke's relationship to conservatism has been particularly fraught.Footnote ² On the one hand, historically minded scholars like Bourke have challenged long-held assumptions of a fixed ‘Burke’ suspended in time and space – of a man who easily fits contemporary labels such as ‘conservative’.Footnote ³ For example, in the first volume of what will be a two-part intellectual biography of Burke, professor of English David Bromwich has observed that ‘No serious historian today would repeat the commonplace that Burke was the father of modern conservatism.’Footnote ⁴ On the other hand, for many interpreters, Burke continues to serve as the paragon of conservatism. Assessments along these lines range from American political theorist Corey Robin's insistence that ‘Edmund Burke invented conservatism as an idea’ to English philosopher Roger Scruton's recent invocation of Burke as ‘the greatest of British conservative thinkers’.Footnote ⁵

Burke's conservative legacies after the eighteenth century also remain divisive, as the three books under review here demonstrate. Through their varying assessments of Burke's multi-century impact and the stakes involved in claiming Burke's influence past and present, Daniel I. O'Neill, Robert J. Lacey, and Emily Jones make clear that Burke's relationship to conservatism invites serious reflection on some of the important questions intellectual historians, political theorists, and their colleagues must face: How do we study the legacies of figures such as Burke? How do we study the development of political traditions such as conservatism? How do we study the influence of figures like Burke on the development of political traditions like conservatism, without misconstruing ‘influence’ or minimizing the extent to which that influence changes over time? Read together, O'Neill, Lacey, and Jones offer provocative answers to these questions.

Daniel I. O'Neill, a scholar of eighteenth-century British and American political thought, re-evaluates Burke's defence of the eighteenth-century British empire through a study of the relationship between his political philosophy and his ideas about empire. Burke, O'Neill argues, was consistently an anti- or illiberal imperialist whose pro-empire arguments reveal what he calls in the book's title a ‘conservative logic of empire’. O'Neill's goals are twofold: to show that Burke was indeed conservative (the founding father, in fact, of modern conservatism) and that he was a staunch advocate – if occasional critic – of the British empire. O'Neill's insistence that each of these points is reliant on the other deserves particular attention. In the first place, O'Neill posits, until we come to terms with and take seriously Burke's pro-empire views and their implications (e.g. on his conceptions of civilization and his attitudes toward African-American slaves and Amerindians), we cannot expect to understand fully his conservatism. At the same time, until we recognize and acknowledge Burke's conservative bona fides, we cannot possibly comprehend the extent, nature, or meaning of his imperial defences. Put another way, he suggests that when Burke's conservatism is misunderstood, it is often because those same interpreters overlook or mischaracterize his writings and attitudes toward empire, fallaciously portraying him as an anti-imperialist sympathetic to universal natural laws of equality or human rights.Footnote ⁶

In fact, O'Neill argues, Burke ‘rejected as philosophically absurd and politically disastrous basic liberal notions such as natural human equality and declarations of universal individual rights’. Rather, to justify – both in theory and practice – Britain's imperial ambitions, Burke drew on his ‘conservative understanding of civilization and the civilizing process’ (p. 169). European civilization, as Burke understood it, had been built on two foundational pillars of tradition and hierarchy: a natural (landed) aristocracy and organized religion. O'Neill hopes that this formulation will be recognizable to readers familiar with Burke's writings on the French Revolution. After all, ‘what makes Burke's conception and defense of empire intellectually coherent and consistent with his interpretation of the French Revolution’, O'Neill writes, ‘is his underlying view of history as a civilizing process’ (p. 45). O'Neill places a great deal of weight on this matter – or question – of Burke's intellectual consistency, which is important for establishing that Burke had ‘a particular theoretical notion of empire’ – in the singular (p. 41).

For O'Neill, Burke's theory of empire was grounded in two core beliefs: first, that ‘empire required unquestioned sovereignty and the necessary subordination of the imperial periphery to the metropolitan core’; and second, that ‘the degree of liberty and self-governance afforded to particular peoples in the empire necessarily varied greatly and, hence, required equally varied modes of governance’. The first point, which is intellectually and practically prior to all others, amounts to a ‘theoretical principle of imperial hierarchy and subordination’ that applied no matter whether the periphery in question was to the west or to the east (p. 12). The second meant that, at the same time, Burke believed that empire was ‘deeply contingent and variable’: Britain's approach to seeking imperial rule would, for example, differ depending on ‘the nature of the people over whom it was exercised’ (p. 43). In chapter 1, O'Neill unpacks this theoretical notion or ideal of empire, which he traces out in three geographically oriented chapters on North America, India, and Ireland.

Richard Bourke's Empire and revolution: the political life of Edmund Burke, which demonstrates several distinct phases in Burke's imperial thinking and argues persuasively that Burke never advocated exclusively for conservatism, falsifies many of the historical claims behind O'Neill's emphasis on Burke's ‘particular theoretical notion of empire’.Footnote ⁷ Nevertheless, O'Neill's arguments remain valuable for suggesting that political theorists and historians would do well to afford the relationship between conservatism and imperialism more attention.Footnote ⁸ His arguments in this direction rest on a proposal that two concepts of empire often seen to be in opposition may not necessarily be so. Burke, O'Neill argues, drew on the imperial defences of what historian Sir David Cannadine calls ‘Ornamentalism’ when he ‘sought to stress sociological similarities between the imperial core and its periphery’. At the same time, Burke also drew on what Edward W. Said has called ‘Orientalism’ when he ‘aimed to emphasize radical differences’ between the core and periphery (p. 169).Footnote ⁹ In chapter 2, for example, O'Neill describes how Burke saw the western British empire in North America through both lenses: he applied a logic of Ornamentalism (i.e. saming) to the British North American colonists and a logic of Orientalism (i.e. othering) to Amerindians and enslaved Africans and African Americans. He applies the same frames of Ornamentalism and Orientalism to his investigation of Burke's writings on India and Ireland. In both instances, he reveals Burke to be a proponent of British imperial rule, even if he was at times critical of actual imperial policies on the ground. Through such analysis in chapters 3 and 4, O'Neill concludes that ‘Edmund Burke developed a theoretical defense of the British imperial project wholly outside the theoretical parameters and assumptions of liberalism’ (p. 169).

For O'Neill, the stakes of situating Burke's defence of empire in North America, India, and Ireland far outside the bounds of liberalism are high. Doing so matters because the ways in which Burke approached defending empire would ‘long outlive him’. As O'Neill puts it, Burke's conservative logic of empire ‘prefigured’ Britain's imperial project for the centuries to come (p. 1). It would, he argues, ‘serve as a conceptual bridge for the most influential imperialist arguments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ (p. 46). O'Neill does not pursue the impact of Burke's writings on Britain's later imperial defences. But he does use his study of the relationship between Burke's conservatism and his defence of empire (and vice versa) to make a very pointed argument about the normative stakes of claiming Burke's influence in the twenty-first century. Burke's theoretical defence of the British imperial project, O'Neill argues, reveals how at odds Burke's political philosophy (his conservatism) is with modern commitments to equality, self-determination, cultural difference, and individual liberty. As a result, those of us in the twenty-first century should be wary of claiming or desiring his influence. We should, in O'Neill's mind, reject Burke as a ‘philosophical ally’ (p. 178).

As ardently as O'Neill rejects Burke as a suitable philosophical ally, professor of political theory and American politics Robert J. Lacey embraces him and presents Burkean conservatism as a remedy for political ailments of the twenty-first century, particularly in the United States. In Lacey's telling, however, understanding Burke's conservatism and its influence requires an additional modifier: pragmatic. Unlike the conservatism of what he calls movement conservatives – those politicians and ideologues affiliated with ‘C’ Conservative political parties and organizations – pragmatic conservatism ‘is not an ideology or a creed but a philosophical temperament’. If movement conservatives have dogma, pragmatic conservatives have political philosophy. Pragmatic conservatives are those who ‘have carried on the Burkean tradition and adapted it to the modern age’ (p. 2). Only they, Lacey argues, can claim Burke, the first pragmatic conservative, as a forebearer. Throughout, the normative stakes of these points are clear: Lacey wants to show what modern conservatism – and perhaps politics more generally – could be, if only there were more pragmatic conservatives and if only pragmatic conservatism's rightful place in a political canon or tradition was restored.

What made Burke a pragmatic conservative? What, for that matter, makes for a pragmatic conservative? Pragmatic conservatives, writes Lacey, ‘seek a middle way’ through the extremes and polarization of modern political life (p. 2). They derive lessons of importance from experience rather than from abstract theories or ideologies. Because they believe in the innate sinfulness of individuals, pragmatic conservatives seek to cultivate tradition or shared habits to counteract it. Following Burke's famous exhortation that a ‘state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation’, pragmatic conservatives desire sufficient flexibility to adapt to changing situations.Footnote ¹⁰ They embrace reform and evolution based on careful consideration of the historical experiences of their culture, rejecting only revolution or radical, reactionary transformation. Pragmatic conservatism is, moreover, defined by intellectual humility and co-operation. As Lacey explains, pragmatic conservatives set aside any assumptions (of the sort movement conservatives have) that they hold ‘a monopoly on truth or justice’ with God firmly on their side (p. 13). Instead, pragmatic conservatives derive truth from the malleability of experiences, not rigid principle. And they pursue justice, not as atomistic individuals with nothing other than abstract notions, but rather through co-operation drawing on shared experiences within their communities.

Who, then, is (or was) a pragmatic conservative? Searching for contemporary examples may prove futile, Lacey cautions. After all, the premise of Pragmatic conservatism: Edmund Burke and his American heirs is to recover ‘a lost tradition in modern American political thought’ (p. 1). The last century, however, contained, according to Lacey, several notable examples of thinkers who shared deep affinities with a Burkean conservative tradition. Lacey selects three giants of twentieth-century intellectual life for careful consideration as exemplars of pragmatic conservatism in practice in the United States: Walter Lippmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Peter Viereck. For a variety of reasons, Lacey acknowledges, each of these thinkers may not, at first glance, seem to be ‘an obvious candidate for inclusion in the conservative canon’ (p. 116). Indeed, they do not. Yet, in three chapters devoted to examining each man's political thought, Lacey successfully illuminates why Lippmann, Niebuhr, and Viereck all match his criteria for pragmatic conservatism. What remains uncertain, however, is the historical payoffs of such work in abstractions.Footnote ¹¹ As Lacey explores each twentieth-century thinker's thought with particular attention to its pragmatic conservative elements, the eighteenth-century Burke often drops to the side, even while Lacey liberally employs the adjective Burkean (as shorthand for pragmatically conservative) to celebrate what he sees as parallels between the eighteenth-century thinker and his twentieth-century American ‘heirs’.

The category of heir or descendant is indeed particularly important for Lacey, as are its normative stakes. While many of Burke's interpreters quarrel over the suitability of the label ‘father’ to characterize Burke's relationship to conservatism (in its many shades), Lacey quickly embraces Burke as the father of pragmatic conservatism and instead takes issue with the misapplication of the label ‘Burkean’.Footnote ¹² In short, given the nature of Burke's conservatism, not just anyone who claims affinities with Burke, cites his works, or otherwise invokes his name, is an heir or a descendant. They may read, admire, and praise him, but they are not ‘Burkean’. Lacey's point is to show that there are a select few, like Lippmann, Niebuhr, and Viereck, who are Burke's legitimate descendants. And there are those who are not. Put another way, Lacey is not interested, as historian Drew Maciag was, in answering more historically minded questions about who has used Burke – regardless of what their interpretation of Burke may be – as one way to investigate Burke's influence.Footnote ¹³ Rather, Lacey distinguishes between authentic and inauthentic Burkeans to show that asserting influence has political stakes. Together, the intellectual biographies of Lippmann, Niebuhr, and Viereck allow Lacey to highlight what he sees as the laudable aspects of a conservative tradition strikingly absent from contemporary politics or political discourse. But they do not make clear when, why, or how such a tradition became ‘Burkean’. In this sense, they do not bring us any closer to an understanding of the historical nature of Burke's influence.

By contrast, for the historian Emily Jones, assessing Burke's relationship to conservatism in all its forms is – and should be – primarily a historical project. She insists that the only way to understand Burke's afterlife – conservative or not – is to historicize it properly. As Richard Bourke and David Bromwich have done for Burke himself, Jones succeeds in showing that narratives of history and those of ideas cannot be told separately; that even those scholars concerned primarily with Burke's intellectual accomplishments or their reception cannot neglect the actual ways in which these ideas were manifestations of – and manifested in – actions and events.Footnote ¹⁴

Whereas O'Neill and Lacey use contemporary renderings of Burkean conservatism as impetus for their studies, Jones does just the opposite. ‘Only by letting go of Burkean and its present-day connotations’, she explains, ‘will we gain a compelling account of Burke's shifting reputation as well as the reimagining of C/conservatism in Britain’ (p. 7). Her dazzling intellectual history, Edmund Burke and the invention of modern conservatism, 1830–1914, presents such an account. Thanks to its careful, thorough consideration of ‘when and how “Burkean conservatism” was first shaped into a powerful intellectual and political force in Britain’, Jones's work stands to transform conversations about Edmund Burke and his relationship to conservatism (an intellectual tradition) and Conservatism (a political tradition) on both sides of the Atlantic (p. 2). Jones neither embraces nor dismisses Burke as a canonical figure of a C/conservative tradition.Footnote ¹⁵ Doing so is not her goal. Rather, Jones does what too few of Burke's interpreters have done: she asks questions about when and how ‘Burkean C/conservatism’ came to be and why.

Modern C/conservatism, Jones points out, had to be invented, which it was, largely over the course of the 1880s and 1890s. Before the existence of modern C/conservatism, she asks, how could Burke be its head? Accordingly, Jones shows that Burke was not a C/conservative or considered to be at the head of a C/conservative tradition for almost a full century following his death. Rather, across the early and mid-nineteenth century, ‘fundamental problems with Burke's constitutional reputation’, Jones explains, ‘prevented his legacy from attaching itself (or, rather, being attached) to any particular political or intellectual tradition’ (p. 20). More specifically, she shows that Burke's embrace of 1688 as ‘the end of constitutional progress’ in Britain sat uneasily with and ‘began to look dated’ to his early to mid-nineteenth-century interpreters across the political spectrum (p. 26). At the same time, Jones demonstrates that the reconfiguration of Burke into ‘one of the principal founders of conservatism’ was not an American project of the mid-twentieth century, as several scholars have suggested (p. 228).Footnote ¹⁶ Rather, it was ‘the product of a long historical process’ in nineteenth-century Britain, ‘which gradually but decisively distilled Burke's work…into an ever-convenient political philosophy of conservatism’ (p. 2).

Jones devotes six chapters, in addition to her introduction and epilogue, to uncovering this long historical process. Chapters 2 through 5 set the stage for her arguments, in chapter 6, about Burke's full-blown transformation after the mid-1880s into the head of a political tradition of C/conservatism and, in chapter 7, about how such transformations played out in schools and education more generally. In her early chapters, Jones makes several critical observations regarding Burke's nineteenth-century reception and influence up through the mid-1880s. In chapters 2 and 4, Jones chiefly examines changes in Burke's reputation as a political thinker (as opposed, say, to a literary figure). She shows, for example, that during nineteenth-century reform debates, it was only Burke's literary eloquence that appealed to both Whigs and Tories, meaning that what Burke offered to these mid-nineteenth-century interpreters ‘was an inspiring example of a life in literature and politics, not a usable political creed’ (p. 55).

As Jones shows in chapter 4, beginning in the 1860s, Burke's ‘political reputation’ was recovered by a cohort of Victorian Liberals including John Morley and Leslie Stephen. This ‘heterogeneous group of writers established Burke as an important political thinker and reaffirmed his position as an author worthy of study on all accounts, ranging from his prose style to his statesmanship’ (p. 86). Their efforts to render Burke as a ‘morally admirable’, consistent thinker – both political and literary – predated a full-blown appropriation of his political philosophy by a C/conservative political movement (p. 112). It was these Liberal admirers of Burke, Jones explains, who first recognized the relevance of Burke's organic, historic conceptions of society for their own Victorian audiences. They drew attention to Burke's religiosity and ‘love of things established’, as well as to ‘Burke's constitutional conservatism’ (pp. 112, 86). In so doing, according to Jones, they were unintentionally beginning a long process that would unfold in the 1880s and beyond: the ‘self-conscious Conservative integration of Burke within a deliberately remodelled “Tory” or “Conservative” tradition’ (p. 113).

To explain this transformation, she addresses, in chapters 3 and 5, questions regarding Burke's reputation as an Irishman and considers Burke's place in debates, in particular, about Irish Home Rule in the 1880s. Jones shows that the 1880s were a key transitional decade for perceptions about Burke's Irishness and its significance. While before the 1880s ‘Burke was increasingly praised as a master of English prose, who blended Irish traits [i.e. wisdom, passion, madness] with English constitutionalism’, after c. 1880, she argues, debates over the question of Irish Home Rule made Burke seem more English (p. 80). As a result, Jones writes, ‘Burke's specifically Irish identity became less important as time went on’ (p. 78). In chapter 5, Jones elaborates on this point that debates about Irish Home Rule mark a critical turning point on Burke's nineteenth-century journey.Footnote ¹⁷ This was the moment, she claims, when Burke's status as a political thinker was transformed and when Burke's ‘integration within the mainstream of English thought’ occurred (p. 114). During these debates, Burke was used by those in favour of Irish Home Rule, such as William Gladstone – whose creative, if often incorrect, readings of Burke Jones illuminates particularly effectively – as well as by Unionists, such as W. E. H. Lecky and A. V. Dicey. It was the ‘extent to which Burke's works were drawn upon by both Home Rulers and Unionists’ that was principally responsible for ‘raising his status as a canonical political thinker’, Jones argues. However, in contrast to Home Rulers, like Gladstone, who could use Burke only selectively, Unionists could ‘take all of Burke’, including his writings on France. And they did so, with relish. As a result, Jones writes, Burke ‘increasingly came to be seen as Conservative and Unionist, and not Liberal, property’ (p. 154).Footnote ¹⁸

By the mid-1880s, Jones shows, Burke had acquired a reputation as a coherent, consistent, and important C/conservative political thinker. But while well underway, the transformation of Burke into the father or head of a political tradition of C/conservatism was not yet complete. For it was not until the period after these initial phases (through the mid-1880s) of Burke's transformation into a C/conservative political thinker that Britain witnessed ‘the construction of political traditions of an entirely novel kind’. It was, therefore, only in the context of new ways of thinking about, and assessing, the importance of political traditions beginning in the 1890s that Burke became – and indeed could be – seen as the father of one such tradition. Jones's sixth chapter beautifully illuminates how Burke was, beginning in the 1890s, transformed yet again as he was ‘claimed as a political thinker whose conservatism was both the basis of a specific British party political tradition and an abstract cosmopolitan political philosophy’ (p. 156).

Jones's discussion of this final layer of transformation contains many of her most striking insights derived from historicizing Burke's relationship to C/conservatism. Two examples bear mention here. The first is her attention to the irony that at the same time that ‘Burke's name became synonymous with a political philosophy of organic historic conservatism’, he was being removed in entirely new ways from his own historical context (p. 161). That is, ‘Burke's heyday as an organic historicist thinker’ in the 1890s was, in fact, ‘the product of his abstraction from his original historical context’ (p. 163). The second is Jones's discussion of how swiftly Burke was installed as the head of a seemingly timeless tradition and how quickly any debates, questions, or uncertainties about his status as such disappeared. It was not just that Burke came to be seen as the fount of a C/conservative tradition by 1914, Jones points out; it is that by 1914, Burke's status as such already seemed, and was made to seem, to date back to the 1790s. The key to successfully inventing a political tradition, she points out, was (and perhaps is) to obviate memories of a time before the tradition existed. This recognition lets Jones properly historicize Burke's influence, removing layers of assumptions about the timelessness of a conservative tradition. With respect to Burkean C/conservatism, Jones unfailingly reminds her readers, ‘both British Conservatism and conservatism, as significant bodies of thought, came into being in the years 1885 to 1914 – and it was this [development] which raised Burke into the canonical position he still enjoys as “the founder of modern conservatism”’ (p. 196).

While O'Neill and Lacey provide caveats and modification to Burkean conservatism as a way to help readers understand the stakes of his lasting influence, Jones demonstrates that we cannot begin to understand Burkean conservatism until we historicize it – until, that is, we approach Burke's relationship to C/conservatism as a problem of invention, or retrospective reconstruction, to be investigated, not as a timeless fact to be assumed. Only by ‘adopting the sceptic's point of view’, to use Quentin Skinner's half-century-old formulation, can we reasonably expect to comprehend Burke's afterlives as more than partisan abstractions.Footnote ¹⁹ Only by interrogating how political ideas are mobilized into political ideologies in new ways by each successive generation can we expect to track influence in any meaningful way.

It remains to be seen how Jones's work will shape the field of Burke studies, but it is difficult to imagine anyone writing about Burke and conservatism as they did before her groundbreaking study. She demonstrates how much more there is to say about even the most well-studied topics if we return to the foundational historical question: ‘When?’. Influence – as much as the political traditions it succours – is also an invention: a product of, not something separate from, history. In essence, Jones shows us that claims, assumptions, or denials of influence – of the sort that Burke had and has on conservative traditions – have a history of their own and until we come to terms with this history, we risk not only misinterpreting that influence – i.e. Burke's relationship to conservatism – but asking the wrong questions about it.