Abstract

The re-issue of Professor Cobban’s book on Edmund Burke is a cannonade in the war of skirmishes which still goes on between the disciples of the late Sir Lewis Namier and his critics. One of the casualties in the fighting was Edmund Burke, who had the misfortune to have lived, as a man of ideas, during a period in which Namier claimed that political ideas were at a discount. Burke’s political philosophy was written oft as the rationalising of a party hack who thought that earth had not created anything more fair than the Marquess of Rockingham. However, he has found numerous defenders, among them Professor Cobban, well known as a critic of Namier. His book dates from 1929, a year before the publication of The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, and its second edition appears a year or so later than the second edition of Namier’s masterpiece. It is a useful, competent introduction to the main ideas of Burke and those of Wordsworth, Coleridge and the Lake School of Poets. It suffers however by comparison with Namier, with Halevy’s book upon Burke’s ‘rival’, Jeremy Bentham, and more pertinently with Professor Cobban’s mature writing, such as In Search of Humanity or his contributions to the Cambridge Modern History. It also looks dated, when the onward march of Burkiana, notably the Burke correspondence, is taken into consideration. The book has great merit, however. It takes Burke seriously as a political thinker, and this is all to the good but, like Burke himself, it is vague where precision is called for. A good book on Burke is badly needed. It is a pity that Professor Cobban was unable to fill the gap by rewriting this work.