Comment: Edmund Burke’s Constitutional Thought (by Kazunori Takahashi)
Open Research Seminar, Institute of Social Sciences, Chuo University, Tokyo, Japan, Mar, 2025.
CHIHIRO KARIYA, PhD 
Abstract
Takahashi’s Edmund Burke’s Constitutional Thought is a major contribution to both Burke scholarship and the history of political thought. By reconstructing constitutional discourse through Burke’s exchanges with Paine, Price, and Sieyès, the book offers an important alternative to Locke-centered narratives of modern political thought while convincingly explaining both the continuity of Burke’s political thought and his contrasting responses to the American and French Revolutions. Two issues invite further discussion. First, how did the American Revolution and the making of the U.S. Constitution reshape eighteenth-century constitutional discourse? Second, what are the broader political-philosophical implications of the book’s analysis of consent and contract, particularly for rethinking the contemporary significance of political thought beyond the Maruyama–Fukuda paradigm?