This biography of statesman Edmund Burke (1730–1797), covering three decades, is the first to attend to the complexity of Burke’s thought as it emerges in both the major writings and private correspondence. David Bromwich reads Burke’s career as an imperfect attempt to organize an honorable life in the dense medium he knew politics to be.

Perspectives on Political Parties is a collection of primary documents that show the changing understandings of partisan politics during the nineteenth century, the first era in which parties played a central role in governing. The texts taken from British, American, German and French publication, speak to today's students and scholars of history and political science by showing the deep roots of still-current debates about representative democracy and mass politics. The reader is designed to fill a hole in contemporary teaching and scholarship by assembling hard to access sources that form the basis of modern debates about parties.

On American democracy

Political parties are taken for granted today, but how was the idea of party viewed in the eighteenth century, when core components of modern, representative politics were trialled? From Bolingbroke to Burke, political thinkers regarded party as a fundamental concept of politics, especially in the parliamentary system of Great Britain. The paradox of party was best formulated by David Hume: while parties often threatened the total dissolution of the government, they were also the source of life and vigour in modern politics. In the eighteenth century, party was usually understood as a set of flexible and evolving principles, associated with names and traditions, which categorised and managed political actors, voters, and commentators. Max Skjönsberg thus demonstrates that the idea of party as ideological unity is not purely a nineteenth- or twentieth-century phenomenon but can be traced to the eighteenth century.