Edmund Burke. By RossCarroll. London: Polity. 2024. 224 p. £17.99. ISBN: 978‐1‐5095‐3865‐2.

Ross Carroll approaches Edmund Burke as a political theorist (10). This perspective does justice to the complexity of Burke's thought. Carroll explicitly distances his analysis from conservative appropriations of Burke and offers a concise yet substantial account of Burke's political theory and an accessible point of entry for students of his thought. He is candid about the book's limits — omitting Burke's economic and religious ideas — but uses this selectivity to focus on themes prominent in recent scholarship, especially imperial governance. Rather than a thematic biography, the study organizes Burke's ideas into six chapters on civil society, representation, reform, liberty and revolution and the imperial questions of conquest and responsibility. The themes cohere around three concerns: Burke's constitutional principles, his opposition to the French Revolution and his reflections on empire. Carroll rightly observes that ‘throughout his career Burke consistently affirmed the central role played by parliaments in the political life of a free people’ (37). For Burke, parliament was a deliberative assembly whose members acted as representatives rather than delegates of the ‘people out of doors’. A believer in ancient constitutionalism and mixed governance, he upheld the aristocracy as a mediating body between Crown and people. Carroll recalls Burke's analysis of the 1760s, when the Rockingham Whigs denounced Lord Bute's alleged secret influence and George III's efforts to weaken party organization, and Burke's call for the revival of party as a principle of constitutional balance (41). Burke's contribution, Carroll notes, was ‘not to offer a new concept of party but rather to place his readers on guard against anyone who equated collective resistance to despotism with faction’ (44). Carroll next turns to Burke the reformer. He rightly emphasizes that Burke was ‘concerned with religious toleration and liberty of conscience’ (64) yet withdrew his support for dissenters and atheists during the French Revolution, regarding them as politically subversive and destructive of the Church's role as a pillar of the state (67). Burke was equally a reformer of civil administration and royal influence, seeking to ‘rein in the ability of the Crown to encroach upon the independence of the legislature’ (70), and he presented himself as a ‘moderniser’ of an ‘outdated system of office-holding that had long ceased to have any relevance to a modern commercial society’ (70). He remained, however, opposed to parliamentary reform, fearing that it would erode the aristocratic connection he sought to preserve. The author also draws attention to Burke's ambitious but unsuccessful attempt to reform the slave trade (77–83). Carroll identifies several principles central to Burke's approach: the importance of timing, the need to leave ‘some business unfinished’, and the inclusion of a ‘principle of growth’ that allows reforms to take root before they are extended (72–73). While ‘consensus about Burke's status as a reformer remains elusive’ (83), Burke emerges as a moderate reformer and the author succeeds in recovering the distinctive features of Burke's reformism: its measured pace, attention to consequence, and holistic view of constitutional change (85). Turning to the French Revolution, Carroll notes that ‘Burke firmly denied any necessary connection between freedom and revolution’ (87). For Burke, the preservation of liberty was a practical concern within the sphere of politics, not a speculative pursuit for philosophers detached from it. The Reflections was both ‘a blistering attack on the French Revolution’ and an account of ‘what is required for free government to flourish’. Burke insisted that the safeguarding of freedom depended as much on the construction of stable institutions as on the rejection of absolutism (89). On this basis, he judged the revolutionaries to have failed, having created fragile and inefficient political structures (94–97). Carroll identifies three principles underpinning Burke's conception of freedom: its compatibility with restraint; its social character, as a force to temper passions and curb excesses; and its intergenerational nature, consisting of inherited liberties and privileges embedded in a specific social order (91–92). In turn, Burke's rejection of democracy, Carroll argues, rested again on three claims: that democratic societies were vulnerable to distinctive forms of despotism; that democracy could imperil freedom; and that democrats confused equality with liberty (97–98). Overall, Burke repeatedly defended ‘conservation as a principle rather than a reactionary impulse’ (100). In the final two chapters, Carroll turns to Burke's imperial thought, focusing on his reflections on conquest, governance, and moral responsibility. He examines Burke's criteria for legitimate conquest — restricted military objectives, restraint in the use of force, and eventual reconciliation with the new political order (117–29) — and his views on how the British Empire should be administered, particularly in Ireland and India. In Ireland Burke argued that dismantling the system of ‘civil and political exclusion [of Catholics] did not imply a democratic levelling of all distinctions of rank and privilege, a “frantic democracy”’ (135). A committed unionist, he argued that his rational for relaxing the penal laws and other disabilities imposed on Catholics was pragmatic: unless remedied, he feared that the Catholic resentment against the Protestant Ascendancy would harden into general hostility towards British rule (137). In this respect he pursued a via media between the Castle Party and the Catholic radicals and Jacobins. India presented a different case. There, Burke argued, the despotism of the Company imposed distinct political and moral responsibilities upon the British legislature. From 1781 onwards, the more he learned about the Company's operations, ‘the more convinced he became that Company rule was tyrannical and corrupt’ (146). Under Warren Hastings' direction, the Company had become a ‘different kind of conqueror’, marked by three particularly odious traits: it ‘saw greater profit in perpetuating disorder’; its officials showed ‘no interest in establishing a permanent presence in the land’; and it displayed a striking ‘homogeneity’ of outlook (152). During Hastings' impeachment, Burke argued that the governor had violated the ‘laws of nations’, the ‘laws of Parliament’, the authority of the Company's ‘Court of Directors’, and not least ‘the laws and rights of the Indian people themselves’ (152-53). For Burke, British ‘inattention to India was not only morally corrosive; it also undermined Britain's most basic interests as an imperial power’ (163). Parliament, he contended, could not ‘begin to manage an expansive empire if [it] did not expand [its] political imagination to match that ambition’. The neglect of Indian affairs, he warned, was not only irresponsible but reflected a ‘lamentable shrinking of British intellectual horizons.’ As he had earlier remarked of America, ‘a great empire and little minds go ill together’ (163). After summarizing the principal tenets of Burke's thought, Carroll's most original contribution appears in his concluding reflections on Burke's political ethics. For Carroll, Burke teaches that a sound political ethic must first acknowledge the impulse to dominate as an inescapable human failing; second cultivate vigilance against overconfidence and stress the importance of self-distrust, both individual and collective; and finally resist the corrosive cynicism that denies the very possibility of virtuous political conduct (175–76). All in all, Carroll's study thus offers a lucid and engaging presentation of Burke's political thought, equally useful to students of eighteenth-century Britain and the interested reader.