Recent developments in the political economy of public finance literature have focused on the features of budgetary institutions that facilitate budgetary discipline — a sub-discipline of constitutional economics. In this literature, there has been no attempt to trace the development of economic thought on the relationship between budgetary institutions and fiscal discipline. This may be because debt accumulation in peacetime is seen as a late twentieth-century phenomenon. As a result, Edmund Burke's contribution, in his speech ‘On Economical Reform’, seems to have been forgotten. This paper highlights Burke's contribution and identifies the extent to which it captures those features of budgetary institutions that are currently recognized as facilitating budgetary discipline.