Stewart’s Boswellian memorandum of Burke’s politics: a note on Stewart’s ‘Memorandum of a Visit to Lord Lauderdale with Mr Burke and Adam Smith’

Dugald Stewart’s memorandum provides a glimpse behind the curtain of the publications and institutions often associated with the eighteenth-century public sphere. In this memorandum, Stewart recounts an evening he spent at the seventh earl of Lauderdale’s estate with the earl, his son James Maitland, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith and Andrew Dalzel. While brief, these notes suggest a potential Boswellian influence on Stewart’s later biographical work and provide insights into Burke’s political thought. These insights include potential support for what Paul Hindson and Tim Gray call ‘Burke’s dramatic political theory’ and raises further questions concerning the extent of Burke’s alignment with Smith’s theory of political economy.