One of the many merits of Emily Jones's Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1830–1914 is that Jones compresses the fundamentals of its thesis into its title. She argues that modern “C/conservatism” (1)—upper-case denoting the party political affiliation, lower-case the intellectual tradition—was invented in the nineteenth century, and that Edmund Burke came to be understood, in important respects, as its inventor. Jones explores how this happened: How was it that an eighteenth-century Whig litterateur, politician and orator came to be seen as having articulated a coherent political theory of C/conservatism? The central question here, then, is bracingly simple. Jones's answer is anything but, sprawling across politics, philosophy, and education, and welding these fields together in new configurations.
It is not easy to epitomize Jones's argument in a way that does justice to its range. Its center of gravity lies in the later decades of the nineteenth century: before then, Jones explains, Burke's fame rested principally on his literary style and his quotable hymns to the constitution. From the 1860s, however, Burke became a subject of serious scholarly attention, notably from the Liberal critics John Morley and Leslie Stephen. Even more importantly, in the 1880s he became a widely cited authority in the debates over Irish Home Rule, in part because Gladstone insisted that he ought to be. Rhetorical battles raged thereafter over how Burke ought to be read, but he was appropriated most successfully by Liberal Unionists, whose departure to sit alongside the Conservatives was a critical development. It meant that as C/conservatives began to search for ways of invigorating and reframing their political creed, Burke had become a more plausible resource to draw upon. At the same time, he assumed a more prominent role in educational curricula, and in academic studies of political philosophy, helped along by an emerging consensus that political modernity and the contemporary party system had their origins in the era of the French Revolution. By the eve of the Great War, Burke had been established—though never entirely without challenge—as a pillar of C/conservatism. Tracing the path towards this apotheosis also involves excursions into Irishness, Idealism, the Indian Civil Service, and a host of other issues and institutions.
Jones's book, as this summary suggests, is by no means a traditional history of political thought. It is about public discourse in the broadest sense, and Jones bases her analysis on a wide variety of printed sources, from political journalism to philosophical treatises to calendars of evening classes. She offers by turns in-depth analyses of pivotal texts and speeches and wider sampling from reviews, pamphlets, and Hansard. She deals with a topic of obvious importance in a consistently illuminating fashion, aiming to show how established party doctrines and entrenched assumptions rendered certain readings of Burke's ideas particularly persuasive. Creative reinterpretations of the careers of political giants were fundamental to the rhetorics of Victorian politics, yet coverage of this theme in existing scholarship is patchy. Burke is an unusually complex case, but Jones's holistic approach points the way forward for how problems of this kind should be handled. She furthermore largely avoids the tendency among reception histories to overstate the significance of their protagonists within wider historical processes, with only a few questionable claims slipping, through: Can it really be the case that Burke's writings were “seen to have initiated the widespread acceptance of political parties as a necessity of British parliamentary government” (22)? Similarly, Jones does not demonstrate the notion that Burke was “central” to Gladstonian arguments for Home Rule (152), and indeed, based on her own premises, it seems unlikely.
Despite her already extensive reach, Jones raises more interesting questions than she has space to answer fully. What lay behind the erection of the statue of Burke on the cover, and others like it? Jones explains that continental versions of Burke had little influence in Britain, but what about transatlantic exchanges? And did Burke play any meaningful role in the carefully calibrated languages of electoral and platform politics? We are left wanting to know more, also, about Burke's competitors within the evolving genealogies of C/conservatism: With whom—or what—was he seen to be in tension? Jones offers mentions of Bolingbroke, the younger Pitt, Peel, and Disraeli, but there is clearly a bigger picture yet to be unveiled.
Questions also arise about the relations between the different arenas of politics and thought that Jones covers. Jones demonstrates clearly that the emergence of the concept of “Burkean C/conservatism” was driven by a number of concurrent historical processes, which pointed in similar directions. But the book is slightly diffident about judging the relative significance of the various forces in play: it would have been instructive to have a more decided statement from the author on whether the canonization of Burke was at its core about Gladstonian idiosyncrasy, or scholarly recuperation, or residual Liberal Unionist sympathy for Whiggery. A somewhat fuller discussion of the book's chronological logic might have helped with this. Jones explains that c. 1830 represents an appropriate starting point because it signaled “the beginning of a new era of political and constitutional history” (9). Certainly it did, but she does not tell us in what sense (if any) that conjuncture was also a turning point for attitudes towards Burke: it feels like the narrative could usefully have started earlier. The sense in which 1914 saw “the beginning of a new period in Burke's reception history” (229) is also a little indistinct, and it would have been fascinating to see the analysis pursued further into the twentieth century.
It is a testament to the book's quality that nearly all these criticisms amount to demanding more of the same. Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism is a work of serious scholarship and methodological intent that opens new doors in the study of political reputations. And at the absolute least, it must force historians to abandon their long-standing reflexive recourse to the adjective “Burkean” in writing on modern British politics.
