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

• Author: Montanye, James A.
• Position: Book review

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

By Yuval Levin

New York: Basic Books, 2014.

Pp. xii, 275. $27.99.

Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine were late-eighteenth-century political thinkers and prolific writers who disagreed fundamentally, both in private and in public, about the relationship between the individual and the state. Burke was an Irishman who spent the bulk of his career as a socially conservative and nominally religious member of Britain's Parliament. Paine, by contrast, was a child of the Enlightenment, a freethinker who was born in England (which subsequently convicted him in absentia of treason), and a proselytizer for political revolution in America and France (both countries granted him citizenship--America also granted him ownership of a farm that had been confiscated from an English loyalist). Burke is perhaps best known as the father of modern political conservatism, arguing (mostly consistently) for the importance of tradition and for the gradual improvement of a nation's social and political life. He also is remembered for having pronounced the death of European chivalry and for denouncing the succession of "sophisters, calculators, and economists." Paine, by comparison, is remembered as a pamphleteer who spurred Americans to revolution with talk about "summer soldiers and sunshine patriots" and later as a champion of the French Revolution's radical social and political ideals. Both men favored American independence, albeit for fundamentally different reasons owing to their differing political faiths. Otherwise, the two men's philosophical differences could not have been greater.

In The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left, the scholar Yuval Levin develops these differences in sharp and comprehensive contrast. Burke is the gradualist who believed in the necessity of maintaining and perpetuating more or less intact those social traditions that had emerged over the ages. Whereas John Locke had argued that removing God would dissolve all, Burke saw God and religion as merely one segment of a continuing thread that, if pulled, eventually would unravel society's fabric. Burke, a tireless social reformer, believed that society should be continually mended rather than ripped apart and discarded. He believed individuals owed a duty of support to those social institutions, however imperfect, that showered them with benefits. Once this duty was satisfied, the individual became the residual claimant to the fruits of effort and...