In this book, Greg Weiner argues that American public life is suffering from an absence of what he calls Burkean Liberalism, the commitment to government as an instrument of action that can and must do some things well, limited by the complexity of the social problems at which government should be aimed and the strategies of the approach. According to Weiner, this void has deepened since Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) exited the stage of the U.S. Senate after a long, extraordinarily impactful career in public life and academia. Viewed conversely, the author describes a political landscape in the absence of Moynihan, seen as a grievous loss because the former Labor Department deputy, ambassador, and senator was what Weiner calls a Burkean Liberal, the rare practicing political professional who could balance the poles of liberalism—aspiration and limits.

Central to Weiner’s argument is that both liberal and conservative critiques of Moynihan have been inadequate because neither has really grappled with Moynihan on his own terms. Accordingly, the author structures his study around Moynihan’s worldview for robust political life within constitutional constraints, the tragedy of misguided and culturally hobbled social policy in the midst of real need, and America’s necessary but evolving role in a world of often violent tensions (tethered to the restraints of international law), all of it shaped by a philosophical architecture designed to operate as sturdily, across generations, as Catholic doctrine. Indeed, there are deeply grounded elements, such as the concept of subsidiarity, that reveal a tree trunk with equally massive root structures below the surface and branch systems stretching toward the sun. According to Weiner, Moynihan seems to have proceeded from a fundamental belief that there is a defining role for moral purpose in public policy, stemming at times directly from a powerfully religious understanding of human endeavor and achievement, a complicated contrast to modern liberal impulses for secular detachment. Yet while Moynihan himself could operate in public life religiously, with grace and brilliance, what the rest of us can take away, at best, is a politics that the author describes as Burkean Liberalism.

Weiner’s subject is Moynihan, but the author’s critique is both institutional and theoretical. He provides rich historical insight into choices of political import where both liberalism and conservatism missed critical turns by hewing too closely to ideology, while losing awareness of the realities of public and private life in the United States. Zooming in on Moynihan, Weiner captures where we are now, a world turned upside down, where Tea Party “conservatives” are driven by revolutionary anger and resentment, taking public stances of bold, experimental risk taking traditionally associated with liberalism. The author also maps bleak urban pressures, along and between the coasts, where liberals cling desperately—and with some confusion—to traditional New Deal and Great Society programs, championed by coalitions that are every bit as demographically doomed as the bedfellows of the modern Republican Party.

Because this is a study of the place we inhabit now without Moynihan, it is also a glimpse of a world and a politics that would be possible with more Moynihans in positions of public service. There is something hopeful in that. Even if it is also a book about twentieth-century American political life as a context with twenty-first-century consequence, American Burke is most valuable as a study of the politics and person of Daniel Patrick Moynihan himself. He was more than a moment to be understood, and at times far less: a gifted, hard-working, public-spirited intellectual operating within the frame of his own sentiment and ego, and like his liberal vision, somehow both aspirational and limited.

Nowhere is this push-me-pull-you dynamic more clear than Moynihan’s theories and political commitments around race and poverty in America. “Moynihan knew—nearly from the moment the first shot in the War on Poverty was fired—that the battle would be lost, but not for the reasons commonly supposed,” Weiner writes. Often cited by conservatives as a liberal who saw the folly of feeding pathologies of dependence and the breakdown of the African American family, Moynihan’s criticism was actually that not enough government money would be spent, and that the programs would be ill-aimed through services that create social-work infrastructure instead of directly provided to poor people who needed jobs and income assistance to hold their families together. This was the Income versus Services argument, where Moynihan was squarely on the side of direct income and fixed full employment for the poor. Weiner’s chapter on the arguments and energy of this era is insightful because it provides the focus, through Moynihan, on the central political problem of framing public policy with ideology: The political discourse tends toward abstractions—markets, the state, the individual, and the collective—when, as Moynihan argued passionately, we need to be arguing concrete policy alternatives with data, and then measuring the successes or failures of our efforts with more data. He understood that the poor would become permanently ensnared, not in cycles of welfare dependence but in the eternal return of the ideological arguments themselves. And it is in this context that Weiner clarifies the great irony of Moynihan joining the Nixon administration, not because he turned more conservative on poverty and race but because of the greater possibilities for effective liberal policy under Nixon. The book is replete with such insights and corrections.

Moynihan was an extraordinary asset at a time when thoughtful analysis and argument could hold the floor. In a Senate that still deliberated great and pressing issues, and governed through them, he functioned in a lone and independent way. Like Moynihan, American Burke takes on contextual limits, as it describes the importance of the political values and skill set of a figure no longer on the scene. The claim of Moynihan’s importance and possibility is admirable, well researched, and probably right. But there is a reason why we do not have Moynihans anymore—and there was only one of him when we did have him. Assuming that he could still be elected from a liberal bastion like New York, the U.S. Senate no longer operates toward such strengths. As a senator, Moynihan could bat from either the theoretical or empirical side of the plate, but a Senate that cannot even hold hearings on a Supreme Court nominee is not a body that could utilize this Hall of Fame–level talent. Weiner details how Moynihan received attention and garnered respect and response, even in misunderstood controversies, that was far less than his actual impact. Moynihan wrote influential government reports and well-argued books; he delivered erudite speeches with wisdom and care. But did he really shape lasting policy then, and could anyone like him ever exist again in the same way?

Weiner’s study suggests that Moynihan was more of a critic than a driver of policy, but he was of a breed so rare, in terms of education, training, service, values, and gifts, that his brilliance was far beyond his impact in his own time.