The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left.

• Author: Kuznicki, Jason
• Position: Book review

The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

Yuval Levin

New York: Basic Books, 2013, 296 pp.

The French Revolution changed politics forever--in part, of course, because nearly everyone believes that it did and because we have generally acted accordingly. Since 1789, Western political views have been understood to fall into two broad camps: The left bases its claims on reason, a universal notion of human rights, and the pursuit of direct, immediate reform; the right privileges tradition, the continuity of the social order, and change only when absolutely necessary for that order's upkeep. Both profess to love liberty. Post-1789, one can hardly do otherwise.

Yuval Levin's The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left is a product of, and a commentary on, this admittedly fertile terrain. The book traces, with copious reference to original source material, the sharply divergent worldviews of Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke, writers who have since become avatars of left and right. Anyone who wants a thoughtful, well-organized picture of these two remarkable public intellectuals should pick up Levin's book, which maps their disagreements in a set of clear, thematic chapters ("Nature and History," "Justice and Order," "Choice and Obligation," and so on). Levin's lucid exposition shows even the casual reader why left and right have been such intellectual touchstones. Here you will find a powerful set of tools for analyzing both the French Revolution and the world of today.

Libertarians, of course, dispute the left-right paradigm. Whatever its strengths, we find that, at best, it tells only part of the story; at worst, we find that it obscures the really fundamental questions. We worry that limiting our discourse to left and right leaves no general and principled rejection of state power in favor of voluntarism. On this view, we may like to think that Burke and Paine alike were foes of tyranny, which they surely were, and that, because they were friends of the American Revolution, both were not so far from us. So if libertarians have affinity for Burke and Paine, then where are we on the left-right continuum? The middle? That doesn't seem right.

Thus, one libertarian critique of Levin's work nearly writes itself: What if, in politics, there are--or should be--more choices than two? Why this arbitrary classification?

A more subtle libertarian critique might run as follows: What if the...