The way that Bromwich brings out how Burke's career as a public intellectual begins with a systematic meditation on the aesthetic category which mounts the fiercest possible challenge to the foundations of his later prescriptive politics, so reliant as they are on a positive redescription of prejudice as the habit of reasonable action, prepares us for later moments in his study, when earlier and subsequent comments are juxtaposed, and the flexibility in Burke's opinions is brought out. For instance, in 1790 Burke, replying to Richard Price's sermon "On the Love of Our Country", elaborated what would become a famous interpretation of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as a defensive manoeuvre brilliantly calculated to disguise or camouflage the revolutionary potential in the various acts of resistance to James II which had led to his violent deposition (itself tendentiously described as an "abdication"). But in November 1771, writing in reply to William Markham, the Bishop of Chester and tutor to the Prince of Wales, and defending his conduct in public life against Markham's attacks, Burke had acknowledged that his party was one of "resistance", and had gone on to argue that the Glorious Revolution had in some way incorporated the principle of resistance as an intrinsic part of the British constitution; for 1688 "could not be supported unless some lesser modes of opposition could also be justified". There is a similar tension between Burke's well-known later scepticism about natural or inherent rights (as expressed in Reflections on the Revolution in France, where they are contrasted with specific, defined, and explicitly granted legal rights) and his description of the Rockingham Whigs in A Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol as a party committed to "a tradition of progress in the expansion of English rights".

Often a close attention to shifting circumstances can unlock a thread of consistency stretched between apparently opposed utterances.  Considering Burke's Speech on the Reform of Representation, probably delivered in 1784, Bromwich notes how its rhapsodic treatment of the British constitution —

Our Constitution is like our island, which uses and restrains its subject sea — in vain the waves roar. In that Constitution I know, and exultingly I feel, both that I am free, and that I am not free dangerously to myself or to others. I know that no power on earth, acting as I ought to do, can touch my life, my liberty, or my property. I have that inward and dignified consciousness of my own security and independence, which constitutes, and is the only thing which does constitute, the proud and comfortable sentiment of freedom in the human breast.

— contrasts with the more pungent Whiggism of the Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, though the two texts were separated by barely five years.  But in 1782 Burke had set his shoulder to a different political wheel — now he was trying to recall the exponents of moderate reform to their senses. As Bromwich says, "That makes a plausible case for his consistency."

If Burke on close and careful inspection was not all sail and no anchor, as his detractors maintained, what are the constant elements in his thought? Bromwich identifies two areas of important recurrent concern. The first is a nuanced formulation of the proper role of the people in the political life of a nation. As one might expect, it is a position tensed between two simpler, but more damaging, poles:

The people, says Burke, should not be trusted as advisers on policy or even necessarily as true reckoners of their interests in the short run, but they are always the best judges of their own oppression — so much so that we ought to fear any power on earth that sets itself above them.