About twenty-five years ago, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I sat down to have a beer with a friend who also happened to be a client. His name was Jesse Norman. He was a tall, strapping Englishman, fresh from Wall Street, where he’d been working at an investment bank putting together gigantic deals, the kind with nine or more zeroes.

Jesse wasn’t your typical investment banker. True, he had the academic chops: a First-class honors degree from Oxford in Greats, a famously punishing Classics curriculum. And he had social connections to match his education.

But he didn’t really care about money. His interest in big deals was more in the personalities and ideas, in liberating energy and capital for great purposes.

Which is why his stint on Wall Street only lasted a few years. I met him soon after he’d turned his back on an astronomical salary to come to Cambridge and run a non-profit.

Amassing wealth didn’t interest him, but chess did. He was an amateur, but a very talented one. Jesse’s the only person I ever met who beat a Grand Master in a match. Granted, it was one of those matches where the Grand Master was playing against twenty people at the same time. But still.

One of my best friends from college worked at the same non-profit, and thought Jesse and I might hit it off. So he introduced us, and we did hit it off — sort of. Jesse liked me, and I liked him, but we weren’t exactly in the same league. He was an order of magnitude smarter, not to mention well bred, wealthy, and absurdly successful. Whereas, at the time, I was making kitchen cabinets and furniture, and plugging away at my first novel.

But I was an odd bird, and Jesse collected odd birds, so he figured out a way to help me: he commissioned a custom chess table. He didn’t really need one, but he figured I’d do a decent job, and the price was right — at the time, I needed the work!

After I delivered the table, we sat down over a beer and talked about our ambitions. I told him I wanted to be an artist. He said, quoting what was apparently a Homeric ideal, “Olsh, I want to be a doer of deeds and a sayer of words.”

Twenty-five years later, he seems to have achieved his goals. Jesse’s now a Member of Parliament for Hereford and South Herefordshire.

So that goes in the “doer of deeds” column.

But it’s the “sayer of words” that I want to address today. In between the banking career and the life in politics, Jesse somehow managed to add “philosophy professor” to his C.V. In the past decade or so, his writing has shifted to the realm of politics — politics being, in the highest sense, philosophy in action. In fact, his ideas have helped shape the modern conservative movement in the U.K.

His latest book is titled Edmund Burke: the First Conservative. I confess, I didn’t know much about Burke, who served as a Member of Parliament from 1765 to 1794, before I read it. If I knew anything about him, it was that he was a staunch supporter of the Colonists’ defiance of the Crown in the years leading up to the American Revolution.

But it turns out that Burke was hugely influential in British politics, despite the fact that his associates were rarely in power in the thirty years he served in Parliament. In fact, Burke’s efforts to keep a minority coalition of like-minded politicians together, so they could act in concert, led directly to the creation of the first political party. Before Burke, politicians tended to act primarily in self-interest, forming factions when it was expedient, but atomizing when their moment of power passed.

It was Burke who first enunciated a set of principles that in and of themselves could bind individual politicians together, a political philosophy that would serve as a beacon while his associates were “wandering in the desert,” so to speak, but guide their policies when they were once again holding the reins of power.

These principles will be familiar to American conservatives: first of all, a deep respect for the social order, and for the institutions, both personal and social, that we are born into; the idea that individual liberty is paramount, and that there must be a check on the exercise of sovereign power; a belief in private property as the bedrock of a healthy state; a skepticism of the power of science to say anything meaningful about economics or social behavior; a healthy respect for the role of emotions in decision-making; and finally, an attitude towards public service that has its roots in humility, probity, and personal religion.

But unlike today’s extreme Libertarians, Burke believed that the preservation of society as a whole was just as important as the preservation of individual rights; and unlike the most extreme Tea Partiers, Burke believed that ideological purity was infinitely less relevant than common sense; and unlike modern Neoconservatives, he was respectful of foreign cultures, and deeply skeptical of military adventures abroad.

Jesse’s book is as much about a way forward for Republicans and Tories as it is a look backwards at one of the founders of the conservative movement. I may not agree with all of Burke’s politics, but I can recommend Edmund Burke: the First Conservative wholeheartedly as a first-class work of history, and a fascinating account of public life by a doer of deeds, not just a sayer of words.