His pioneering work marked the beginning of a more sophisticated approach to the history of the social sciences, one that did not treat the past as being of interest only in so far as it anticipated the present.
It involved a study of the attractions of evolutionary theories, chiefly those of Herbert Spencer, Sir Henry Maine, and Edward Burnett Tylor, to 19th century social theorists.
In that work he proposed that the 19th-century historians William Stubbs, John Richard Green, and Edward Augustus Freeman were historical scholars with little or no experience of public affairs, with views of the present which were romantically historicised, and who were drawn to history by an antiquarian passion for the past and by a patriotic and populist impulse to identify the nation and its institutions as the collective subject of English history, making "the new historiography of early medieval times an extension, filling out and democratising, of older Whig notions of continuity.
In another chapter, under the title The German inheritance: a people and its institutions, Burrow referred to the earlier historian Edward Gibbon, who had been writing in the reign of the Hanoverian monarch George III of the United Kingdom at the time of the American Revolutionary War.
[4] The image chosen for the front cover of A Liberal Descent was the sculpture of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in Saxon Dress executed by William Theed (1804–91) for the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore[5] In the book Burrow wrote of 'peremptory and legalistic constitutionalism changing into subtler political persuasiveness', and of 'the intersection of personal and public mythologies'.
In studies of Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, William Stubbs, Edward Augustus Freeman and James Anthony Froude, Burrow attempted to place them in a cultural and historiographical context; and sought to establish the nature and limits of the self-confidence which the Victorians were able to derive from the national past, with reference to three great crises of English history: the Norman conquest of England, the English Reformation and the 'Glorious Revolution' of the 17th century.
The theme of the inscription on the plinth of the statue, alluding to the poet's lament for the passing of 'Sweet Auburn' Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village may also be seen in connection with what Burrow mentions in the later book The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848–1914 (2000): "'...the growth of great cities with mass population....