Edmund Burke has been one of the few political thinkers to be treated seriously by international theorists. According to Martin Wight, one of the founders of the English School of international theory, Burke was ‘[t]he only political philosopher who . . . turned wholly from political theory to international theory’. The resurgence of interest in Burke as an international theorist did not, however, generate any consensus about how he might be classified within the traditions of international theory. Wight variously divided thinkers into trichotomous schools of Realists, Rationalists and Revolutionaries, Machiavellians, Grotians and Kantians, or theorists of international anarchy, habitual intercourse and moral solidarity; more recent international theorists refined or supplemented these categories to construct similar trinitarian traditions of Realism, Liberalism and Socialism, and of Empirical Realism, Universal Moral Order and Historical Reason. Burke’s place within any of these traditions has remained uncertain. Debate over whether he was a realist or an idealist, a Rationalist or a Revolutionist, has concluded variously that he was a ‘conservative crusader’, or a ‘historical empiricist’, a belated dualist or a Cold Warrior before the fact, or, most egregiously, ‘a proto-Marxist, or more precisely proto-Gramscian’ theorist of hegemony. The fact that Burke so obviously eludes definition puts in doubt the analytical utility of closely defined ‘traditions’ of international theory.

Burke’s relationship to conceptions of reason of state provides a more precise example of the confusion within such taxonomies. According to one historian of international theory, Burke ‘laid the foundations’ of the ‘conservative approach to International Relations . . . informed by the two modern notions of state interest and necessity, by raison d’état’; however, in the words of another, ‘Burke . . . was vehemently opposed to the idea of Reason of State and did not subscribe to the view that national interests override moral laws.’ The assumptions on which each of these judgments rests are clearly incompatible: on the one hand, that a ‘conservative approach’ in the realm of foreign affairs implies an espousal of reason of state defined as the primacy of ‘state interest and necessity’, that Burke did, indeed, acknowledge; on the other, that reason of state is defined more exactly as ‘the view that national interests override moral laws’, and that Burke did not hold such a view, so could not therefore be defined as a reason-of-state theorist.