Narrates the life and elucidates the political legacy of Edmund Burke, whose views on constitutional government, political party, and sociopolitical reform are fundamental to Western civic heritage. Though lacking the élan of Rousseau or Johnson, Burke’s wisdom pertains in the mid-20th century. Drawing on numerous Burke scholars, Kirk makes particular use of Peter Stanlis’ summary of Burke’s objectives:

• To maintain the structure of the British state
• To define the limits of British monarchy
• To extend the role of the House of Commons
• To expound the role of the political party
• To extend civil rights and economic opportunities to all citizens, including throughout the Empire (according local custom)
• To defend the historical traditions and order of Europe (i.e., Greco-Christian West) versus the Enlightenment
• To solve problems (i.e., to do justice) with an eye to custom (often ‘prudence’) and equally the ethics of prevailing legal norms

As early as 1746, Burke worried that decadent Western elites would succumb to leveling rationalism. As a parliamentarian, his initial impact owed to advocating self-government in Ireland and America, restraint of the British monarch (‘economy’) and simultaneously promotion of the political party, and social justice in India. His moral imagination and literary genius revealed his approach: ability to reform, disposition to preserve. Thoughts on Our Present Discontents first propounded the role of party harnessed to national interest (i.e., accountability to the public), because rising ‘popular interests’ would no longer abide conventional monarchy or aristocracy; but party needed to surmount the taint of faction. Burke always opposed arbitrary power and so the turn to opposing Jacobinism evidenced his recognizing rationalism’s inciting a European civil war. Reflections on the Revolution in France demonstrated the natural ends of Enlightenment government: the destructive energy of all radicals and the insistence on absolute submission to will. Contesting the notion that Burke ‘gave to party what was intended for mankind’, Kirk shows Burke’s political philosophy in fact formed the initial and most enduring defense of Western civilization. Meanwhile, the defection of the Old Whigs to the Tories created the first and oldest political party (contra Jones, Invention of Modern Conservatism). Elsewhere Kirk is concerned to demonstrate Leo Strauss’ misreading, in Natural Right and History, of fatalism: though seeming to concede he could do no more, in fact Burke’s works during the 1790s anticipate Churchill in locating perseverance in the English public and rallying them to it. Valuable as one of the clearer biographies, Kirk settled the debate over whether Burke was a conservative.