  The name of Edmund Burke (1730–97)  [1]  is not one that often figures in the history of philosophy  .[2]  This is a curious fate for a writer of genius who was also the author of a book entitled A Philosophical Enquiry. Besides the Enquiry, Burke's writings and some of his speeches contain strongly philosophical elements—philosophical both in our contemporary sense and in the eighteenth century sense, especially ‘philosophical’ history. These elements play a fundamental role within his work, and help us to understand why Burke is a political classic. His writings and speeches therefore merit attention as examples of attention to both ideas and to history, and of the role of this attention in practical thought. His work is also, as we see shall see at the end of this entry, an achievement that challenges assumptions held by many of our contemporaries. One way or another, then, Burke is a vitally important figure. Yet there is very little academic writing about Burke and philosophy outside of that Enquiry. This is a significant omission from the history of political thought, for at least three reasons. One is that though much has been written about Burke, including work placing him in relation to other political writers, yet how he thought has not been made clear. A second is that the rational content of his thinking has not been made evident, precisely because its philosophical component has not been identified. Thirdly, because the manner and content of his thought have not been identified in the way the case warrants, we read of Burke's ‘mystic spirit’ (Spurgeon 1922, p. 100) or the ‘irrationalism’ of his writing (Butler 1984, p. 35). This matters not only with respect to historical truth, important though that is, but also because Burke is sometimes treated as a symbolic or instructive figure for contemporary political action (cf., e.g., Norman 2013), and in significant ways marks an instructive contrast with some current ways of thinking. This being so, it is especially important to get the historical figure right. 