Journal of the History of Philosophy

BOOK REVIEWS 233 evaluated chiefly by the way it performs its basic task, i.e., the provision of support for the natural economic order. Hume exerted himself to strengthen the established constitution and the Hanoverian settlement in Great Britain: he saw no inherent cause why that form and those encumbents could not provide good government. But his economic thought is sufficiently laissez faire to make him highly critical of the prevailing economic, foreign, and colonial policies. A modern theory of natural law required that Englishmen should prefer the drinking of French wine to the spilling of French blood, and advantageous trade with the Americans to costly colonial wars. This surely is the front on which Hume the scientific Whig becomes Hume the liberal reformer, a critic of prevailing policies. The concept of "philosophical politics" has disadvantages. It makes for too narrow a focus. It serves to produce a highly detailed picture, accurate as far as it goes, and it does go far; yet it is a picture which would be more authentic if supported by more of the substance of what Forbes calls Hume's "modern theory of natural law." Nevertheless, it must be said that Forbes has succeeded admirably in his main purpose: there is now no foundation for the false belief that the aging Hume softened into Toryism. Forbes undertook to give us an historian's Hume, a Hume somewhat removed from the Hume familiar to those who do philosophy; in this he has been most successful. Almost any book on Hume would be welcome in this age when Hegel keeps the presses busy. This solid work, rich with the spoils of scholarship, will be greatly appreciated by moderate men as they mark the bicentennial of Hume's death. JOHN STEWART St. Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia Edmund Burke: His Political Philosophy. By Frank O'Gorman. (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1973. Pp. 153. $6.95) This is not a book about Edmund Burke's political philosophy. A major effort of the author seems to be to show that Edmund Burke had no political philosophy. The latter will remain a point of controversy among students of Burke's political thought; but this short study by a British historian might be better titled Edmund Burke: His Political Career and Thought. In any event, the book is misleadingly titled. While it is not quite true that every age has had its own image of Burke, O'Gorman recounts that the Victorians celebrated Burke as a champion of counterrevolution and a precursor of the Victorian party arrangement of government. Early twentieth-century interpretors found him to be a party politician and propagandist; not a philosopher, but a Rockingham Whig committed to restoring the constitution established at the Glorious Revolution. (O'Gorman's own view of Burke often coincides with this interpretation.) American conservatives of the 1950s forged a third picture of Burke, attempting to depict him as a Christian natural law philosopher as committed to combatting atheistic Jacobinism as his intellectual "heirs" were to combatting atheistic communism. O'Gorman reminds us that not only does Burke's aversion to abstract ideas render this construction implausible, but his few references to ideas resembling natural law virtually rule out such a reading. Despite numerous affinities with the second version mentioned above, O'Gorman's reading of Burke is professed to be distinct: "Rather, we will relate his thought to his career and to the political or social situation which evoked it. In doing so, it will be necessary constantly to consider the extent to which the content of Burke's philosophy was affected by the pressures of propaganda" (p. 14). Chapter one calls Burke the "Philosopher of Party," but what O'Gorman actually maintains is that Burke's publicized ideas of a party amounted to little more than political apologia for the Rockingham Whigs, and that he can scarcely be said to have formulated a theory of party, much less to have anticipated the modern party system of government. O'Gorman curiously continues to attribute a theory of party to him, however, 234 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY while arguing that "Burke ransacked history" for supporting examples for his "synthesis of Rockinghamite principles, myths...