The English and Their History, by Robert Tombs (New York: Knopf; 1,024 pp., $45.00).  This superb, and superbly readable, book is a model of historical writing for a general readership, outstanding for its concision, clarity, and even-handedness.  The strong narrative component easily accommodates a tremendous amount of detail without ever becoming weighed down by it, while never losing touch with the book’s formative themes: the historical experience of the English people, and their memory and understanding of that experience.  Tombs believes that “most nations and their shared identities are modern creations, the products of literacy, urbanization, and state-led cultural and political unification,” yet he acknowledges that ancient nations (mostly on the edges of Western Europe) do exist, and among these is the English nation.  It is often said in the present ideological era that the United States is a nation dedicated to an abstract principle, or rather a collection of principles—a concept Tombs, whether consciously or not, reformulates in the case of England, the idea of which indeed preceded the reality, but rather in the sense that the English became aware of themselves as a distinctive culture, beginning with the arrival of Augustine from Rome in 596 and the creation of “a single Church of the gens Anglorum.”  Also in a time when the moral legitimacy of nations and their histories is being questioned, Tombs sensibly observes that

 

Some people debate whether we should feel pride or shame in England’s history.  Logically, one is impossible without the other. . . . Better than either pride or shame . . . would be to accept responsibility: both for repairing and compensating for the failings of past generations, and for preserving and handing on their achievements.

        —Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Adam Smith: His Life, Thought, and Legacy, edited by Ryan Patrick Hanley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 571 pp., $45.00).  This is an excellent and very useful compendium of every conceivable aspect of modern scholarship’s understanding of the life and work of the author of The Wealth of Nations, as represented by 23 academic essays written with a refreshing clarity and directness and devoid of academic jargon.  For centuries, free-market liberals have invoked Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” as a justification for free trade, laissez-faire, and what Michael Polanyi called an economy “disembedded” from society and made a law unto itself.  In fact, Smith’s thought is far more comprehensive and complex than it is given credit for by his admirers and critics alike.  Adam Smith was interested in moral and social philosophy, in matters of freedom and inequality, and in the implications a free-market economy has for these things.  Thus, Professor Hanley claims, Smith is highly relevant to the political debates of the 21st century.  I am particularly impressed by James Buchan’s “The Biography of Adam Smith,” Elizabeth Anderson’s “Adam Smith on Equality,” David Schmidtz’s “Adam Smith on Freedom,” and Gordon Graham’s “Adam Smith and Religion.”  A very distinguished collection, indeed. 

        —Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke, by Richard Bourke (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1,001 pp., $45.00).  Following on the heels of David Bromwich’s superb The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke, a very hard act to follow, this enormous book does not disappoint.  Professor Bourke’s title reflects his reminder that Burke was not a formal philosopher but a practical one, an active politician whose thought was forged in the white-hot battles of a distinguished political career and not in the confines of his study, while taking what he needed from the great modern political theorists, as well as the classical ones.  Bourke identifies two principal themes of Burke’s thinking, around which he organizes his analysis and this book: “the Spirit of Conquest” and “the Spirit of Liberty”—i.e., the ancient tyrannical disposition and the modern one toward rights, liberties, and articulated, balanced government.  Burke died in 1797 in a sort of mental and emotional agony, convinced that what he held dear—religion, property, prescription—was not only threatened by contemporary events but likely to be vanquished entirely.  Bourke argues that, on the contrary, while the French Revolution was indeed an historical watershed, it did not destroy the fundamental institutions of society; whereas Burke’s rhetorical analysis in the course of more than 30 years actually reveals “durability amidst change” in the civilization for whose existence he feared.          

        —Chilton Williamson, Jr.