TWO QUESTS FOR EDMUND BURKE, CONTINUED

"6 During the 1957 meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society, an annual assembly of free-market economists and business leaders, Hayek refuted The Conservative Mind in Kirk's presence but without naming him. "7 Oakeshott not only decerebrated con- servatism and complicated its genealogy but, in reviewing The Conservative Mind, also decentered Burke: "It is . . . true that Burke was provoked by an acute situation [the French Revolution] and that he had to meet opponents who occupied carefully chosen ground; but the disposition they represented had already been fully revealed in seventeenth-century England, and Burke's thoughts were composed of an appropriate selection of long-current and well-tried notions. Donald Winch in Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750-1834 (1996) linked several of Burke's late sententiae with a draft pamphlet denying that governments should feed their starving people and presented Burke as the missing link between Malthus and Smith.