Edmund Burke is known as a statesman, an orator, and, depending on the perspective, a political theorist. He is not, however, often thought of as a serious political economist. Gregory Collins challenges that thinking in Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke’s Political Economy. In his sweeping and detailed historical and economic analysis, Collins convincingly demonstrates that political economy was a major part of Burke’s thought throughout his career. Collins also uncovers key linkages between Burke’s broader political thought and his political economy. As the title itself suggests, Burke believed that markets and virtue must be harmonized to support the political good.

Burke’s legacy is still disputed, with scholars disagreeing about whether his political positions were principled defenses of right, tilting at windmills, or mere pragmatism untethered to anything at all.Footnote ¹ Scholars cannot agree whether he is a conservative paragon,Footnote ² a progressive champion of minority rights,Footnote ³ a classical small government liberal or a mere politician with a gift for gab. He has been described as everything from a principled natural rights theoristFootnote ⁴ to a misologist.Footnote ⁵ Part of the difficulty arises from the range of his writing, the topics he covered, and—perhaps most importantly—the various audiences he addressed as a thinker and statesman.

Despite the range of analyses, Burke’s political economy is rarely a focus of scholars. For that reason alone, Collins’s contribution is a worthy addition to the field. But Collins also provides a comprehensive, deeply researched, and detailed exploration of how Burke’s political economy and political beliefs interact. Collins’s account seamlessly weaves history, theory, and economy together to show how Burke’s moral understanding impacts his economic choices and vice versa. The result is a portrait of Burke as a coherent and comprehensive theorist of “moral economy” broadly, a thinker who defies ideological categorization precisely because he was so aware of the tradeoffs involved in political and social life.

Collins’s starting point is the problem that has bedeviled political philosophers as far back as Aristotle: how do we deal with the tensions between markets and social order? Markets are necessary for flourishing human societies, but they create unintended outcomes: they upend existing power structures and challenge existing norms and values. Markets—because they rely on entrepreneurial discovery and innovation—entail disruption, both good and bad. Collins frames this tradeoff in his introductory chapter as the tradeoff between liberty and virtue. One of his goals is to rescue Burke from claims of either stagnant conservatism focused on landed property or libertarian interpretations that emphasize unconstrained free markets. Collins hopes to locate Burke outside ideological boxes in the complex and nuanced space of the statesman and theorist who understands the tradeoffs involved in social and political life and whose public works and political writings balance those tradeoffs to support a flourishing society. Collins’s contention is that Burke believes norms, mores, and manners play a key role in achieving this balance between markets and social cohesion.

The book is organized into six thematic sections. A brief biography of Burke sets the stage for a discussion of his thought on markets broadly, the British Constitution, foreign trade, India, mercantilism, and finally the French Revolution. The sections are roughly chronological, but Collins moves around historical eras as necessary to highlight the central themes of Burke’s thought. This approach avoids the tendency in some Burke scholarship to assume Burke’s political thought is entirely contingent on a particular historical event or crisis. Organizing the book into broad themes allows Collins to pull out the coherent and consistent themes in Burke’s thinking while also demonstrating the way Burke adapts his principles to the exigencies of particular situations and unique contexts, like those he confronted in India.

Overall, the book has been rightly lauded as a major contribution to the fields of both historical political economy generally and Burke scholarship in particular. The comprehensiveness of Collins’s economic, political, and historical analysis will provide scholars with significant material for many years to come, whether they agree with him on all the details or not.

One relatively minor concern involves Collins’s broader assessment of where Burke ultimately fits in the pantheon of liberal political thought. In one instance, Collins seems to oversimplify classical liberalism to distance Burke from this perspective. Collins argues that Burke’s “belief in exchange economies was not driven by the premise that individuals emerged out of an abstract state of nature and assented to a voluntary contract to secure their pre-civil right to private liberty, a core premise of classical liberalism and libertarianism” (p. 522). Yet not all classical liberal theorists, particularly those in the Scottish Enlightenment tradition like Smith and much later Friedrich Hayek, require this atomistic and abstract foundation for markets.

Similarly, Collins downplays the importance of natural rights in Burke’s thinking, perhaps again to distance him from the classical liberal tradition. Yet Burke appeals to natural rights frequently throughout his work.Footnote ⁶ Rather than downplaying Burke’s belief in natural rights broadly, Collins could instead align Burke’s treatment of natural rights with his approach to economic reforms, which Collins correctly notes should be “carried out in a preexisting political and social framework, pursued in a forum of stable and deliberative institutions and protected by the secure foundations of Britain’s constitutional heritage” (p. 523).

None of these concerns are, however, central to the success of the overall work. In the end it may be irrelevant what we call Burke, and that is Collins’s ultimate point. Collins’s Burke offers us a political “third way” by working to harmonize markets and virtue, in part by emphasizing the long view of historical adaptation and gradualist prejudice. Burke provides a model by which statesmen can work to harmonize conflicting interests in a principled way, and Collins’s analysis offers a model for political theorists on how to assess the work of thinkers like Burke without forcing them into ideological frames that are more relevant to our deeply polarized present.

By rejecting simplistic ideological analyses of political figures and historical eras, we not only end up with a more accurate assessment of the past, but a better understanding of where we need to go in the future. Whether we agree or disagree with Burke’s moderate but principled stance and Collins’s moderate but principled analysis, both are a welcome model for our current age. By avoiding a simplistic dichotomous choice between markets and virtue, Collins reveals a Burke whose work is deeply relevant for our current moment.