Abstract

Though usually skeptical of a foreword written by the author's friend, this reviewer agrees entirely with Russell Kirk's judgment of this book. This densely documented but highly readable study of Burke is indeed a "first-rate contribution to the discipline of politics" by a "temperate and painstaking scholar." It shows clearly the fruits of thirty-five years of research by one of Burke's most eminent living interpreters. It also provides further proof for the reading Stanlis has been offering of his subject since his first book in 1959, Edmund Burke and the Natural Law. There Burke is depicted as an explicitly Christian critic of the Enlightenment influenced by Scholastic and Ciceronian natural law. In contrast to Alfred Cobban and other Burke scholars who emphasized their subject's pragmatic statesmanship and appeals to circumstance, Stanlis was struck by Burke's references to the "eternal frame of the universe" and to "the one great, immutable pre-existing law, a law prior to all our devices."