How Burke Became Conservative

Noting the way reputations change over time provides a starting point for considering how the search for a usable past can lay a foundation for a political movement. Edmund Burke's eventual transformation into the founder of conservatism in the English-speaking world offers an intriguing example of that dynamic. In Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1830–1914, Columbia University historian Emily Jones explores how the idea of “Burkean” conservatism—a philosophy upholding the authority of tradition; an organic, historical conception of society; and the need to defend order, religion, and property—emerged as developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries recast Burke's views in a particular form. Whereas Yale University's David Bromwich frames his recent intellectual biography around the question of what it meant to think like Burke in his own time, Jones asks what made it possible for later generations to claim him as the founder of conservatism.