Conservative Politics and Laissez-Faire Economics
The Burke-Smith Problem Revisited
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 13085571 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ryan Walter (0000-0003-1907-001X, The University of Queensland, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 271-295 |
| Publication date | 2020-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Critical Historical Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2326-4462 • E-ISSN: 2326-4470 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/710696 |
| OpenAlex | W3106707321 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 19 |
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
Contradiction · Convention · Economics · Epistemology · Historiography · Laissez-faire · Law and economics · Market economy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Positive economics · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Philosophy · Political Theory and Influence · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought
That Noble Science of Politics
Protestant Natural Law Theory
The Economy of the Word
The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law
Seduced by System
The Enthusiasm of David Ricardo
Political Arithmetic and War in Britain, 1793–1815
Slingsby Bethel's Analysis of State Interests
Mercantilism Revisited
The Burke-Smith Problem and Late Eighteenth-Century Political and Economic Thought
II. On Edmund Burke's Doctrine of Prescription; or, An Appeal from the New to the Old Lawyers
Adam Smith and conservative economics
The Machiavellian Moment
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,5 |
| Citation span | 2024 - 2024 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |