Conservative Politics and Laissez-Faire Economics?

Abstract

Edmund Burke is commonly understood as having championed free markets, thereby revealing debts to his contemporary Adam Smith. Numerous scholars have identified a tension between this aspect of Burke’s thinking and his politics of tradition and conservation. This article argues that this reading of Burke is untenable because it relates Burke and Smith in doctrinal terms, at the cost of ignoring the divergent ways in which they constructed their arguments. Once this phenomenon is brought to view, the supposed contradiction in Burke’s thought dissolves: Burke’s so-called political economy was just as indebted to common-law legal thought as was his thinking on government. Thus, instead of construing phenomena such as wages in relation to price-setting markets, Burke described wages as determined by time and convention, the same forces at the center of his account of political institutions. The recovery of abstraction as an object of study may lead to a general revision of the historiography of political economy, not least because its status was contested then and remains so now.