ABSTRACT
Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. It is the second which will be attempted, in this essay,1 to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and subsequently to his Letters on a Regicide Peace. In i960 the present writer published in The Historical Journal an essay entitled ‘Burke and the Ancient Constitution: a problem in the history of ideas’ ,2 in which it was argued that important passages in the Reflections, together with passages from other speeches and writings by Burke, should be understood in the context of a tradition of common-law thought established in the age of Sir Edward Coke, and that they contained explicit and conscious allusions to this tradition and to their own place in it. The present essay will argue that comparably important passages in the Reflections and the Letters can similarly be situated in a quite distinct tradition of thought, which will be termed ‘political economy’; but it will not be much concerned to inquire into the relations between the two traditions, or the possible consistencies and inconsistencies in Burke’s text or thought occasioned by the fact that they are both present there. It seems more important to establish that Burke can be read in both of these contexts than to inquire whether he can be read in both of them simultaneously;
the premises from which he argued and the messages which he may have transmitted can be given a thick description if we apply the first only of the procedures just distinguished. There is more to the method of interpretation followed both now and in 1960, however, than the singling out of one thread and then another in the texture of Burke’s writings. A better analogy is the selection of one and then another facet from, and through, which a multi-surfaced and translucent artefact may be viewed. Burke’s response to revolution looks different when considered as that of a common-law consti tutionalist, and as that of an exponent of political economy; the prime need is to establish that it can be looked at in both ways.
