The poet Wallace Stevens detailed “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” There are at least as many ways of looking at “party.” In his lucid and encyclopedic history of ideas about political party during Britain’s “short eighteenth century,” Skjönsberg avoids much of the muddle (and invective) that has bedeviled the topic, while remaining attentive to what Stevens termed the “beauty of inflections.”The Persistence of Party deepens and enriches a familiar story—about Whigs and Tories, Court and Country, partisan enmity and legitimate opposition—with detailed attention to a series of key texts and thinkers, combining broad strokes with intricate detail to produce a vivid panorama. Parties (or “factions”) can, of course, be viewed negatively. But eighteenth-century thinkers—far more so than present-day political theorists—reached sophisticated accommodations with and for them. Their attitudes to party, “although they could be damning,” Skjönsberg concedes, “were more multifaceted and complicated than scholars have often thought.” Party was not just a fact of organization but also a matter of “flexible and evolving” principle. Familiar perspectives from the partisan trenches meet here with visions of “harmonious discord” (the phrase derived from Montesquieu).Following an overview of “Contexts and Discourses,” Skjönsberg turns to the neglected Dissertation sur les Whigs et les Torys (1717) by French Huguenot exile Paul de Rapin-Thoyras. A “milestone” in political theory, Rapin’s Whig history offered the first defense of “balance between parties” as critical for sustaining a mixed constitution. In his detailed taxonomy of Torys Outrez (High Flyers) and their moderate counterparts, Rapin showed how the respective parties negotiated differences and seeming contradictions. Tories, for example, were “proud, haughty, and passionate,” combining structural advantages with ideological flexibility and a willingness to reverse their principles (plus ça change . . .). Parties emerged as a fixture of national political life that might, at best, maintain a desirable equipoise, offsetting the pull toward extremes.Viscount Bolingbroke spurned “party passion.” But he differentiated between national parties that sought “to address general grievances” and factions only interested in maximizing their own power. Far from seeking “a party to end all parties,” as some have proposed, Bolingbroke “condoned and indeed advocated a systemic opposition,” Skjönsberg maintains, as he works to “explode the persistent myth of Bolingbroke as the paradigmatic anti-party thinker.” As Bolingbroke’s Patriot King maintained, it was crucial that “a people may be united in submission to the prince, and to the establishment.” But that work (only published, in the first place, to correct the version circulated by Pope) also concluded that a people might “yet be divided, about general principles, or particular measures of government.”David Hume saw party attachments as irrational and party rage as destructive. He was especially critical of “speculative principles” based in religious dogmatism. But he also saw parties, like other passionate enterprises, as unavoidable. Skjönsberg deftly steers around existing scholarly efforts to pin down Hume’s own sympathies. Amidst heated debates over Jacobite threats and Whig corruption, the core purpose of his essays was “to sound a note of moderation” and to thereby “pacify party animosity by revealing the strengths and weaknesses of both parties’ ideologies and worldviews.” Taking cues from Rapin, whom he also cited, Hume’s evenhanded way of discussing politics and comparing parties (including in his histories) set him apart from his contemporaries, establishing a “gold standard for all subsequent debaters aspiring to moderation amid tribal strife.” Though Skjönsberg does not say so, Hume emerges as a kind of mirror image to Swift, whose visions of tribalism, by contrast, seem to consign us to perpetual schism, conflict, and bitter feeling.Edmund Burke, for his part, had a lot of feelings on the matter. The concluding four chapters track his career-long investment in party, from a newly discovered early essay through the aftermath of the French Revolution. Far from promoting factious self-interest, Burke maintained in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770) that parties “had to sacrifice personal ambition for loyalty and principle.” But the man “who had written so fervently and eloquently of party loyalty and unity would eventually become responsible for creating a fundamental schism.” Members of a party could disagree, but only up to a point. Whig support for the French Revolution could only lead to the formation of a new party—and the demise of the old one.“Partial acceptance of party” was, Skjönsberg demonstrates, “established political wisdom” by the time Burke wrote. Burke nonetheless did “more than anyone else to make party allegiance honourable.” He was also a victim of his own consistency. In a likely allusion to the Dunciad (where Pope referred to the cackling birds that warned of Rome’s downfall), Burke referred late in life to “us poor Tory geese.” If principled commitment to constitutional stability meant this lifelong Whig would now be deemed a Tory, so be it. Burke’s ties to the Scottish Enlightenment, in particular his “close intellectual affinity” with Adam Smith, add a further layer to Skjönsberg’s nuanced portrait. Burke aligned with the Scots in placing importance on sentiment and “opinion” and in recognizing the value of respectful disagreement and “mutual resistance.” Despite differences, they were “at one in downplaying rational deliberation and putting a premium on unintended consequences.”The book’s core frames are political, historical, and constitutional. The richly detailed discussions of texts and their backgrounds, while perhaps forbidding for the uninitiated, serve both as historical essays and textual commentaries, with added chapters helpfully filling in political developments between landmark works. Aside from tantalizing glimpses at sociability, cultural and wider contexts are not the focus here (though the discussion of Hume points, for example, to our gregarious natures and love of debate). Religion continues to trump political economy here, as the overriding concern. Thematic chapters or sections might have lent more cohesion in places. The abundance of footnotes to individual texts can at times make key debates with the scholarship hard to parse. But this book is full of stimulating discussion and any chapter offers, in its own right, a rich and beguiling window onto its slice of the wider period.Trying to theorize party can be like herding cats—or catching one of Stevens’s elusive blackbirds. Skjönsberg’s descriptive method, combining healthy quotation with Skinnerite attention to ideas in their argumentative context, does justice to the elusiveness of its subject. This approach has the added merit of bringing out subtle but pointed differences. John Brown was in favor of “Variety and Freedom of Opinion” but not factions. Hume, by contrast, viewed such divisive groupings as inevitable, given our innate self-interest— something Smith set out to overcome. Hume also believed that a “decline of principle” had “brought about a more stable politics” (and blunted extremism). But Burke, for his part, “bemoaned” the loss of substantive differences—until divisions within his own party became an incurable “disease.”A striking number of the figures concerned here were not English. Rapin was French—and wrote to educate Europeans. Burke was born in Ireland, Hume in Scotland. Skjönsberg himself is Swedish (occasional interludes fill in Sweden’s very different history during this period) and he is unafraid to tout England’s exceptional status while keeping its idiosyncrasies—if not pathologies—in view. The chapters, harmoniously balanced in their own right, with solid prose and tight conclusions, build out into a fascinating story of concord and discord, true to the productive dysfunction that parties, at their best, represent. The myriad ways of looking at party laid out in this excellent book can only have continued salience, as we continue to puzzle over why we are so polarized—and to ask whether our divisions might, in some ways, be what binds us together.