In 2006, Stanley Kurtz, writing at National Review Online, lamented that conservatives had given up on the culture. Rather than talking about the importance of social conditions to a stable society, conservatives had yielded that ground to the left. The devotion of the left to multiculturalism and various forms of “cultural studies” made such talk unnerving to conservatives, who preferred the supposedly separate spheres of politics and economics. Moreover, conservatives too often simply asserted absolute rights against what they saw as liberalism’s cultural relativism. But, aside from being alien to conservatism, such language was not a long-term electoral winner. “Let’s get back,” Kurtz wrote, “to Burke and Tocqueville—not as a way of rejecting the notion of individual rights, but as a way of understanding the social and cultural foundations required to make a rights-based democracy work in the first place.”

Kurtz was prescient, for an Edmund Burke revival of sorts has been underway. David Bromwich’s book is one of a new clutch of studies about the great Whig statesman, including a biography by the British Conservative MP Jesse Norman. William Byrne has produced an interesting study titled Burke for Our Time, focusing on the importance of aesthetics and sensibility to his subject’s political views. Drew Maciag has traced the contested history of Burke in America, where followers from utilitarians to traditionalists have tried to claim him. Most recently, Yuval Levin has received praise for