THERE IS NO TENSION IN DESTROYING SHORT-SIGHTED CURBS ON LIBERTY:

Burke's thought has often been invoked on both sides of this conservative fusion between traditional order and market liberty. On the one hand, his 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France offers a classic statement of a traditionalist conservatism suspicious of change, rationalism, and individualism, and dedicated to the maintenance of order, hierarchy, and virtue. On the other hand, his 1796 pamphlet Thoughts and Details on Scarcity reads like a gospel tract for laissez-faire liberalism, trumpeting the need to unleash the creative destruction of markets driven by rational self-interest and to clear away well-meaning but ultimately short-sighted traditionalist curbs on market liberty. Accordingly, Collins bookends his work with very close readings of both texts, revealing nuances in each that soften the apparent contrast highlighted by earlier generations of Burke scholars. The intervening chapters fill out the picture with a rich and complex sketch of Burke's lifetime of forays into the then-developing discipline of political economy, most of them emerging in the context of practical politics during his three-decade service in Parliament.

What emerges from this mosaic is a portrait of a man who was a true friend of market liberty, sharing many of the convictions voiced concurrently by Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations, but also a prudent statesman who understood that the market served society, not society the market. Burke's conservative traditionalism, far from contradicting his market liberalism, flowed from the same basic intuition about human finitude and the need to learn from experience. Just as political wisdom was derived from the collected judgments of centuries, so economic wisdom was more likely to be found diffused throughout the multitude of private economic agents responding to market signals than in centralized, top-down efforts to fix prices or quotas.

Collins compellingly argues that we should read Burke as holding with remarkable steadiness to broadly consistent principles throughout his long career as a writer and politician, while also recognizing that he was a true statesman, not an armchair philosopher. Sometimes this meant yielding to established interests when there was no way around them, or accepting piecemeal reforms in place of sweeping overhauls; but such pragmatism, after all, was part and parcel of Burke's brand of conservatism. It also meant a fine-grained attention to empirical reality rather than allegiance to abstract principle. Thus for instance Burke supported necessary and beneficial foreign trade monopolies like the East India Company and intellectual property monopolies in the form of copyrights or patents, while as a general rule excoriating monopoly as a sacrifice of economic efficiency and the public good to private interest. He rejected public granaries as an unwieldy solution to crop shortages in the UK, while endorsing them as good policy in Geneva. Perhaps most importantly, he drew a firm distinction between internal trade--on which he was as ardent a champion of free trade and market liberalization as Adam Smith--and foreign trade, on which he carefully subordinated the arguments for free trade to considerations of national security, national interest, and national honor. Aptly summarizing Burke's trade philosophy, Collins comments: "The wealth of nations was a worthy aspiration, but the honor of nations was an even nobler aim."

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