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

by Yuval Levin

For more than two centuries, our political life has been divided between a party of progress and a party of conservation. In The Great Debate, Yuval Levin explores the origins of the left/right divide by examining the views of the men who best represented each side of that debate at its outset: Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. In a groundbreaking exploration of the roots of our political order, Levin shows that American partisanship originated in the debates over the French Revolution, fueled by the fiery rhetoric of these ideological titans.

Levin masterfully shows how Burke's and Paine’s differing views, a reforming conservatism and a restoring progressivism, continue to shape our current political discourse—on issues ranging from abortion to welfare, education, economics, and beyond. Essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Washington’s often acrimonious rifts, The Great Debate offers a profound examination of what conservatism, liberalism, and the debate between them truly amount to.

Genres: History, Politics, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Biography, Political Science, American History

296 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

American political analyst, public intellectual, academic and journalist. His areas of specialty include health care, entitlement reform, economic and domestic policy, science and technology policy, political philosophy, and bioethics.
He is the founding editor of National Affairs, director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a contributing editor of National Review and a senior editor of The New Atlantis.
Levin was vice president and Hertog Fellow of Ethics and Public Policy Center, executive director of the President's Council on Bioethics, Special Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy under President George W. Bush and contributing editor to The Weekly Standard. Prior to that he served as a congressional staffer at the member, committee, and leadership levels.
He holds a BA from American University and a PhD from the University of Chicago.

Reviews

[Brad Lyerla · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finished THE GREAT DEBATE a few months ago and have been pondering it since. I enjoyed the read very much, but the more that I have considered the content, the less I like Levin's book. Levin compares and contrasts Edmund Burke with Thomas Paine in order to explore the notion that Burke is the father of modern conservatism and Paine a founder of modern liberalism.

Levin, who is a University of Chicago trained conservative, knows good scholarship and sets a high bar for himself in this work. I respect that and found his arguments to be clear and thoughtful. THE GREAT DEBATE is a very easy read because Levin writes with crystal clarity. That is nice and I gave five stars to THE GREAT DEBATE in my initial evaluation. But as I continued to ponder its merits, I found that I liked it less than I first thought.

Levin clearly adores Edmund Burke, who was a remarkable thinker and whose contributions to political philosophy deserve to be better known and understood. I find myself in comfortable agreement with Burke on many subjects. The core of his approach to political philosophy was a rejection of ideology in favor of tradition, custom and the tried and true. That is, don't vary from what has worked except where past practice cannot be sustained and where a clear alternative exists that offers improvement. In modern parlance, Burke teaches that thinking inside the box most often is wise. It is proven. It has sustained itself through repeated success. One should think outside the box only where the need to do so is compelling. He teaches that there is risk outside the box and that risk must be approached with caution.

All of this makes sense to me, so far as it goes. But it doesn't sound conservative to me. It sounds moderate.

Thomas Paine, on the other hand, was a radical and an ideologue. Paine was not concerned with tradition or the past or even peace and stability, it seems. Instead, he was concerned with absolutes. In particular, he focused on the absolute rights of individuals -- a popular subject in Paine's day. He was convinced that the governments of his time must be remade to reflect the dignity and moral authority of individuals, and to hell with the established order. Of course, the target of his criticism was a privileged class based on noble birth rather than on merit. That's a target most of us share a distaste for today and is a reason why some of us don't find Paine to be terribly revolutionary. Changes to western politics that occurred in the two hundred years after Paine make much of what he wrote feel temperate to our modern sensibilities.

Levin seems to take Paine's measure pretty accurately. Although for me, he lays the criticism on too indiscriminately when he wants to tie Paine's radicalism to the Enlightenment. This is an interesting subject, and Levin is right to note it, but he oversimplifies in my judgment. After all, James Madison was as much a product of the enlightenment as Paine. As was our constitution, a profoundly nuanced document that could not have been written without the wisdom of the Enlightenment. So there is something complicated going on that is not accounted for in Levin's criticism of the Enlightenment's conception of government based on a social contract -- which deeply influenced Paine. And let me say, I agree with Levin that the social contract theory makes little sense either as a description of reality or as a thought experiment to explain the origin of government.

Levin does not do a convincing job of connecting Paine's conception of the Enlightenment to current day liberal politics which is a primary goal of his book. It is true that liberals today think that people often can be improved with some help from the government whereas conservatives doubt this. This is something that Levin seems to think can be traced back to Paine's pro-Enlightenment bent. But I am skeptical. Paine is not concerned with social welfare so much as the glorification of individual merit. And that's more of a conservative value today than a liberal value.

But my main criticism of THE GREAT DEBATE is Levin's estimation of Burke. I do not see Burke as founder of the modern party of conservation -- at least not the style of conservatism that has taken root in the US over the last 50 years. I see Burke as a voice of moderation against unreasoned change. That was an important influence within conservatism until the cold war, a voice that distrusted ideology and embraced experience, wisdom and caution above inflexible philosophy.

Nor does Levin successfully account for Burke as a reformer. Burke opposed the death penalty. He opposed cruel penalties for sodomy. He wanted the government to protect the rights of religious minorities. He was "soft" on colonialism and famously took the side of the Americans in their opposition to King George. Today, he would be considered a moderate, not a conservative.

Perhaps, the explanation partly is that 'conservative' in England has meant something slightly different than in the US. Consider Winston Churchill. He is a good candidate for the leading conservative of the 20th century. Yet, he favored government involvement in housing, healthcare, education and other social services. In the UK, there has been less conservative commitment to governing as little as practically possible. Conservatives there have acted with caution and regard for private economic activity over public, but where the government seems positioned to solve a problem, there is less ideological objection to using the tool of government to address the problem. That seems in line with Burke's opposition to absolutes.

Or, perhaps, Levin's fairly conventional understanding of today’s liberal/conservative dichotomy is partly incoherent. An important feature of liberal democracy that Levin fails to highlight is the fractured understanding of the theory/praxis dichotomy that developed after the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment brought with it a conviction that theory (philosophy) and praxis (politics) can be harmonized. Classical philosophy had concluded the opposite.

What the Enlightenment failed to resolve is whether the harmonization will be in favor of philosophy or in favor of politics. Because Conservatives and Liberals do not divide neatly on this subject, the line between the two is greatly blurred. Some Liberals think that Reason should dominate and a fair number of Conservatives agree. (Paine probably is in this camp too.) But other Liberals would politicize philosophy and some Conservatives agree with that. (Here is where Burke seems to fit best.) The result is a very messy stew that defies easy and reliable description. That too may explain, in part, Levin’s failure to provide a fully satisfactory description of where Burke stands in relation to Paine.

[Riku Sayuj · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Perfect Omelet

A good investigation of the origins of the great liberal political debate. Levin takes us to the original arguments and shows us how at a distance the great but nebulous political divides of our day take a much more concrete shape. Of course the author is slightly right-leaning and this bias shows through in his characterizations. For instance even though the book claims to be about the Right & The Left, in fact it is about the moderate Right & the Radical Left. Once that is how the lines are drawn, it is an easy guess as to which position can be made to sound more reasonable. It should be a fair contrast moderate Right vs moderate Left or Radical right vs Radical Left. In any case, the excuse that can be made is that Burke was in fact a moderate Right (he was Whig after all, so we might even say he was of the Left but leaning Right) and Paine was clearly a revolutionary radical.

Levin tries to show that Paine has a overly simplistic picture of history and political institutions and believes that reason can help us create perfect societies. Burke is shown as a realist who accepts society is too complex to be radically reengineered without too many eggs being broken to create the perfect omelet. In fact you might never create the perfect omelet no matter how many eggs you break.

The Paine Vs Burke debate is fascinating and is well captured, and from my limited knowledge I might even say that it seems accurate. But to import those themes into the modern political debate is to make the Left seem much more radical and unrealistic than they really are. Paine's times called for radical measures and commonsense (if you would excuse the usage) would clearly have indicated that Pane's position and not Burke's sentimental defense of the monarchy was more reasonable back then. A full fledged revolt might seem more unreasonable now but that is only till the crisis becomes large enough to make it seem reasonable again.

We need the Paines and the Burkes.

The Burkes will keep order and resist radical change and try to do prescriptive, incremental change so as to keep up with changing demands of the world, trusting their institutions to do much of the heavy-lifting. But when they fail, the Paines will call for revolution passionately and articulately. And more often that not it is that call that will galvanize the Burkes out of their plodding action and speed up their adaptation. So to dismiss even the radical Left as childish and without enough appreciation of the realities and complexities of political and social life is a mischaracterization. Quite often it could be the other side who is lacking the imagination to see that times have moved on and fast adaptation is needed -- as is the case today, for instance, with the changes in climate presenting us with an unprecedented challenge which our existing institutions are not well-quipped to confront adequately. It is a balance that has to be maintained and in that sense Burke's call for partisanship in politics might be a useful standard to hold on to after all. Of course all this would depend on the Right and Left being reasonable to each other and willing to engage in constructive debate.

Otherwise we would be left with repression and revolts and not much to show for it all. No omelets at all, let alone any perfect ones. Just a lot of broken eggs.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a clarifying book. In today’s Kardashian Kulture, even the well-informed, who know who Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke were, cannot generally give a cogent description of their thought, much less a point-counterpoint description of their fundamental ideas and disagreements. I know I certainly couldn’t. That is, until I read this book, which brilliantly does exactly that: distils Paine and Burke to their essences, both in the abstract and in direct comparison to each other.

Levin thereby performs a great service for the reader. Burke and Paine both wrote prolifically and frequently in response to specific political issues of the day. Their language is hard to penetrate for the modern reader (especially Burke’s, with constant use of subordinate clauses and what we would consider run-on sentences). It would be a daunting task for an amateur to attempt to reduce either thinker to a summary, and (in Burke’s case again especially), difficult for a professional. But Levin does it for us, and using the device of highlighting areas of disagreement, makes the thought of each man much more plain.

“The Great Debate” is an apolitical book. Levin takes no sides, though he points out more than once that the ideas of Paine, rather than Burke, have always been dominant in America, and still are on both the Left and Right today. His goal is not to recommend either man, but to show how the ideas of each man embody, from their deepest roots, a different vision of Man and the World, and to show what the implications of those different visions are. So this is a book of political philosophy, not a book of politics.

As an aside, you may need a big box of Kleenex by your side when you read this book. That’s not because the content is sad. It’s because the miserable level of political discourse today, compared to that shown in this book, is enough to make you cry. To wail, rend your clothes and cover your head with ashes, actually. And that’s compared to today’s *professional* political discourse. If you compare it to the flatworm-level thinking found on platforms like Facebook, you are more likely to skip the Kleenex and move straight to suicide.

Anyway, Levin begins at the beginning, by contrasting Paine’s and Burke’s view of the origins in nature of political order. Paine believed that in the beginning, man was an individual with free choice, equal in choices to his fellows. Unlike in a Hobbesian world, though, he was pretty happy. But some men chose to join together, for benefit and for sociability. This proto-society, however, was not a government; instead, it was more like a Nozickian paradise. After that, these men chose to form a government, in order to restrain some and to encourage others to perform their duties. Any rights exercisable by the individual without assistance, “rights of personal competency,” were retained by the individual. For other rights, such as rights of personal protection, men agreed “to act under the guarantee of society,” subordinating their free exercise of the right, but perhaps only temporarily, until they chose otherwise.

The natural consequence of Paine’s view of the state of nature is that any government that did not involve continual free choice of the people was usurpation (and involved some pre-historic barbarism against free political choice). Paine believed that any revolution was therefore merely rewinding the film to an earlier point, before things went wrong, to be replayed from that point. And each generation must therefore choose anew to renew their form of government. Or choose not to, which Paine thought likely, in light of his highly optimistic view that only in his own time were the scientific principles of day-to-day good government finally being discovered and applied.

Burke didn’t disagree that all modern governments probably began with some form of unpleasantness of man against man (although he thought Paine’s idea of noble individuals choosing to band together was not accurate history). But he believed those dubious beginnings did not undercut their legitimacy. However a government started, its current form has developed over time in response to legitimate questions legitimately responded to by the society, thus vitiating any injustice in how it began. And you cannot rewind the film, for that does not renew the people. Rather, it destroys the people, creating “a number of vague, loose individuals, and nothing more.” Society will not be regenerated. “In the wake of such a dissolution, Burke argues, there will be no rules or methods by which a new regime could form: no protections of property or persons, no reason to follow a leader or adhere to majority rule, no means for ‘regenerating.��”

Paine said explicitly that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Burke thought this is a pernicious fantasy, and the best we can do is use existing materials to make the existing world better. Of course, Burke was not at all opposed to change (he was a leading reformer on many issues), rather to precipitous radical change, particularly that grounded in abstract theories. “Burke thus offers a model of gradual change—of evolution rather than revolution. In a sense, he sees tradition as a process with something of the character that modern biology ascribes to natural evolution. The products of that process are valuable not because they are old, but because they are advanced—having developed through years of trial and error and adapted to their circumstances.” (Burke further believed that attempting to remake society on the basis of pure reason will unleash passions, i.e. vices, unrestrained by the structures of a mature society, which places restraints upon the natural behavior of human beings. Burke therefore endorsed chivalry. Paine ridiculed this view as sentimental trash and an excuse for bad behavior by those with the power.)

After this examination of roots in nature, Levin turns to each model’s implications for addressing demands of justice, and order. Paine was, of course, all about abstract justice as an imperative flowing from the natural state of man. What constitutes justice was, for Paine, easily recognizable by the thorough exercise of rationality and a modern scientific approach. A government of the equal continuously consenting is just and does justice. Anything else is not (and if a government were to act unjust, as for example tyrannously, in a free society of rational men the problem would be self-correcting). For Paine, this was the only type of order that can be just.

What Burke thinks of justice is more nebulous. He has often been criticized for being, in essence, a relativist—he does not often appeal to a standard of justice, other than endorsing a model that defers to the developed and prescribes gradual change. Such gradual change occurs not by reference to an external ideal standard like Paine, but by its own success results in a more just society than the alternatives, on average and over time.

Even so, Burke has some, if amorphous, objective standard of justice. He was not driven by a natural law conception of justice, and he did not appeal to religion as a source of law (instead, he seemed frequently to endorse religion on a utilitarian calculus with regard to the state, though he himself was religious). “Burke’s view of nature and of human nature suggests to him that the standards of justice that are to guide political life are rather discoverable—to the extent we can know them at all—implicitly through the experience of political life itself.” “Burke’s idea of a just society is not an end state that is the ultimate goal of all political change. Rather, a just society provides space for thriving private lives and a thriving national life within the bounds of the constitution by allowing for some balance of order and freedom.”

And as far as social order, though men are naturally equal, social inequalities are inevitable—and highly desirable, for they lead both to better government by those raised to it, and to social institutions that prevent tyranny, both of the government and of majorities. Paine, of course, thinks this is silly, and that social inequalities resulting in increased political power and participation for any individual or group are pernicious.

Flowing from Burke’s and Paine’s thoughts on nature, order and justice, Levin then examines the implications of each man’s thought for social and political relations and commitments—what he calls “choice and obligation.” This is probably the area in which Burke’s ideas are best known. Paine is a libertarian’s libertarian—“Each person should have the right to do as he chooses unless his choices interfere with the equal rights and freedoms of others. . . . Politics, in this view, is fundamentally an arena for the exercise of choice, and our only real political obligations are to respect the freedoms and choices of others.”

Burke, on the other hand, believed that each person was exactly not free to do as he chose. Instead, he was bound by a web of obligations to others, living, dead and yet to be born. Moreover, in Burke’s view, Paine’s idea of what amounts to radical democracy has repeatedly been proven to be disastrous—the popular will is irrational, frequently vicious, short-sighted, and ignorant. Burke reasons from the reality of human beings; Paine in essence denies human nature (and, as Levin points out, this divide remains among views on “the social issues” today—what Paine sought was “liberation from the implications of those facts [of human nature] and that character [of human procreation]—leading to attacks by Paine and many others since on the family as the “primary obstacle to an ethic of choice.” If you are bound to your family, as Burke would have it, you lack choice, so the family must be destroyed, which is easily visible as the prime goal of the cultural Left today.

Levin does not confine himself to mere explication, though he does not insert himself into the point-counterpoint overmuch. For example, Levin points out that Burke’s conception of organic growth provides no “clear principle by which to limit the scope of government action to limit coercion.” (This is not to say that Burke thinks a tyranny is acceptable—rather, he focuses on the good of the polity as a whole, instead of an abstract, binary limitation on government action). Paine, on the other hand, insisted on a written constitution to limit government—though, being a believer that good government would evolve naturally, he never considered what would happen if that written constitution were simply ignored and its words turned into a dead letter, as the American Constitution is today.

But to me, Burke’s lack of a line in the sand, beyond which the government cannot pass, is his main failing as his thought is applied to the modern world. In Burke’s time, though despotisms and tyrannies were well-known, no person could have conceived of the reach and power of the modern state, which can (and has) dictate every action and thought of each member of society, on pain of death. Paine’s thought provides a clearer path to resistance both against the modern totalitarian state, and also against the vastly over-powerful and over-intrusive modern American state.

Burke, seeing the modern American state, would be horrified at the idea it should be torn down. Rather, of course, he’d desire wise statesmen to make evolutionary changes to bring it back to a state that was beneficial to society. Those wise statesmen seem to be lacking, and to the extent they exist, they have no power. Yes, you could argue that Burke’s belief in a web of intermediary institutions could perform the same function, in lieu of the actions of statesmen, and Burke would say better that than the abstract theory of destruction and regeneration that Paine offers. But those intermediary institutions themselves have been deliberately destroyed in America by a toxic cocktail of governmental undermining, ideological leftist attacks, and simple general coarsening and lessening of the culture, as can be read in a range of works, from Nisbet’s “The Quest For Community” through Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” to Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart.” So if neither wise statesmen nor intermediary institutions are to be seen, it is difficult to see how Burke’s vision would be capable of restoring America, and perhaps Paine’s approach of revolution, violent or not (Paine was indifferent), is the only possible path to restoration.

Finally Levin then turns to the practical impacts of these frameworks, with a key emphasis on whether action should flow primarily from theory (Paine) or from what is existing (Burke). Burke thinks theory distracts statesmen from the goal of good governance; ignores the actual circumstances, which are infinitely complex in all instances; and leads to extremism by necessarily demanding perfection. Paine, of course, is all about the exaltation of theory and its reduction to practice, from beginning to end. Levin refers to this as a “dispute between universal principles and historical precedents—between a politics of explicit knowledge and a politics of implicit knowledge.”

But again, a problem with Burke in the modern world is that his focus is on, in his words, his “profound reverence for the wisdom of our ancestors, who have left us with the inheritance of so happy a constitution and so flourishing an empire.” But what if that is not our inheritance in modern America? What if, instead, we have a Cthulhu-like horror, the result of a hundred years of feeding Leviathan and the crushing of the ancient liberties of each man, woman and child? What if we are not flourishing at all, and our ancestors have handed us a poisoned chalice? At what point would Burke say that Paine is right, and radical change IS necessary? (Paine, writing at the dawn of what he hoped would be the “Age of Reason,” would be equally disappointed by modern America, but for different reasons, given that he thought modern thought would inevitably lead to convergence on good government and happiness for all.)

Perhaps Burke answers this himself, in one his (innumerable) criticisms of the French revolutionaries: “If the last generations of your country appeared without much luster in your eyes, you might have passed them by, and derived your claims from a more early race of ancestors.” As always, Burke isn’t opposed to change, but to radical wholesale change based on theory. Perhaps we should take his advice to heart, and attempt what seems at first like radical change, but is really a rewind, not to Paine’s individual men of solipsism, but to the last time America functioned as it was originally designed. That’s probably the time of Calvin Coolidge, before Franklin Roosevelt and his minions began the systematic uprooting of the entire constitutional system in the service of power accretion and the exaltation of envy, a process accelerated and made malevolent through the dubious thought of modern intellectuals ranging from Saul Alinsky to John Rawls.

If we did that, if we were able to rewind our governance to the time of Coolidge, we might end up with an (re-)evolved institution that actually was a good society from the point of view of governance. It would be based more on theory than Burke would like, since the past is unrecoverable, and as the saying goes, you can’t go back. An attempt to go back to precisely the way it was is bound to failure. But evolving backward to a better governance past would at least be based on something solid. We could start by realizing and declaring that 90% of what the federal government is unconstitutional and will stop. Such a radical step, even if justified on pseudo-Burkean grounds, seems very unlikely. But every substantial change in governance seems unlikely until it happens. What Paine wanted, revolution in America and France, seemed unlikely too—more unlikely than this, probably. Under the right circumstances, maybe an American Rewind could be implemented by a new Coolidge.

So perhaps what we can draw from the book is not that either Paine or Burke was right, but that their thought can inform what changes are necessary or desirable in a late-stage, sclerotic state. Levin, of course, draws none of these conclusions about the America of today, but his masterful drawing of each man’s thought is immensely valuable to any reader.

[Peter · Rating 2 out of 5]

A well written study, in which a conservative Israeli think-tanker defends do-nothing right-wing stances as principled, by interpreting the thoughts of an ancient British conservative who was properly appalled at the violence and chaos of the French revolution.

The research takes us through certain key doctrines of modern American conservatism (i.e., meaning late 1970s de-regulation and the rise of neo-capitalism to Clinton’s new way, to Newt Gingrich’s Contract of Adhesion with America), namely, a holy reverence for Anglo-American style capitalism, a respect for historical myth, a celebration of emotion/religion, and a bone-headed devotion to business as usual as the norm, as reflected in the various writings of Mr. Burke. Mr. Paine appears primarily only as a foil to the calmer Burke. Paine was at his best when he was on a rant, and he became more outspoken the older he became.

Burke was for gradual change, and did not have the confidence in rational thought-based politics that Paine did. I get that. I don’t have much confidence in rational thought-based politics either, but what is the alternative? A monarchy? To sit on our hands as aristocrats (by either Thomas Jefferson’s definition of aristocrats or John Adam’s experience of actual aristocrats) take over the republic and use it solely for their own ends? I think not.

To anyone who has ever played Monopoly, you know what happens if you do not alter the rules. Most of the players go bankrupt and one or two end up dominating the board. That game is a model of modern America, the difference being (1) you cannot step away from the board, and (2) there is an established system for changing the rules—self-government. Currently, however, one political party merely celebrates how wonderful the existing rules are (“Look at all these wonderful hotels!” they say. “Aren’t railroads and utilities a blessing!” “We wouldn’t have these things if the Democrats were in charge,” they claim); the other political party is just realizing, after more than forty years of this BS, that something needs to be done before there really are only a few players dominating the board again.

Although Levin completed this book only five or six years ago, could the author not anticipate what would happen as the extreme right wing took over the GOP? Or perhaps he is just fine with the state of politics today. I hope he is not surprised when it all ends up coming back to haunt him, much like the fate of the German Jews who celebrated Germany and criticized England during the First World War.

Because when you let loose a leopard, you should not be surprised when it ends up eating your face.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, if I learned anything from reading this book, it was that Burke was not a looker.



At least, not when contrasted with Thomas Paine.



This wonderful observation brought to you by the front cover of the book. Good thing there wasn't television in the 1800s.

In more seriousness...this was a worthwhile read. It is a really good overview of the political philosophy of both Burke and Paine. It also spends a solid amount of time establishing the historical context and biography of both thinkers, which adds to the analysis of their thought. The author credibly represents both and even acknowledges counter-arguments to his claim that Burke represents the beginning of the modern American conservative and Paine the modern American liberal.
This was a very easy book to pick up and requires no prior knowledge of either thinker. But the appeal to wider audiences cuts both ways. I am rather familiar with both men and the political theory of their time and so personally went in looking for more analysis of the claim that these two "birthed the right and left." However, the book spends the majority of its time explaining Burke/Paine and less on how those ideas connect directly to modern politics. The author speaks quite generally when referring to the political spectrum.
I suppose this achieves some ends: it forces the reader to draw a few conclusions on their own and does not risk offending anything overly much by grossly mischaracterizing their political views. But for me, it also left the story half finished.
I'd also have preferred more analysis centered around the claim that these two birthed the right and left, rather than that they more generally represented viewpoints that became the right and left. Were they truly that unique for their time?
But of course, to fully satisfy me, it would probably need to be twice as long and would no longer appeal to general readers!
Regardless, worth a read if interested in tracing the foundation of the political thought of modern politics.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Question

In confronting the society around us, are we primarily grateful for what works well about it and moved to reinforce and build on that, or are we mainly outraged by what works poorly and moved to uproot and transform it?

This is one of the differences between the thinking Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. Yuval Levin’s book explores these kinds of differences to help us understand the thinking of conservatives and liberals today.

Introducing The Cast

Thomas Paine is the author of Common Sense, which gets credit for re-framing the American Revolution from a tax dispute into a struggle over basic principles. Edmund Burke was a member of the English parliament for the Whig party. He was an active reformer who opposed the oppressive behavior of the East India Company and the treatment of the American Colonies. While Paine and Burke were on much the same side on the American question, they parted company over the French Revolution. Paine lived in France as an active supporter, while Burke wrote his Reflections on the Revolution in France in opposition.

The story is seen through the eyes of Yuval Levin, who tell us, “I’m a conservative, and I would not pretend to leave my worldview at the door while I explore the foundations of our political order…. I strive here to tell their stories in a way that both liberals and conservatives today might recognize as meaningful and true, and from which both might learn something about themselves and their political adversaries.” I think he delivers.

[Note: I will quote Levin in a “plain font”, while using an “italic font” for original quotes from Paine and Burke.]

Paine the Individual in a Libertarian Garden of Eden

Paine is well known for his opposition to religion, as the following illustrates:

“Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented,” he wrote, “there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity… The most detestable wickedness, the most horrible cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.” It is absurd and insulting to God himself, he contends regarding the origins of Jesus, “to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married.”

Paine relies on reason above all, and is critical of revealed religion because he evaluates their texts as rational documents and finds them wanting. But not only does he believe in God (he is a Deist), this God is central to his core of his political beliefs.

“The error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity respecting the rights of man,” Paine explains in Rights of Man, “is that they do not go far enough into antiquity. They do not go the whole way… All men are born equal, and with equal natural right, in the same manner as if posterity had been continued by creation instead of generation, the latter being only the mode by which the former is carried forward; and consequently every child born into the world must be considered as deriving its existence from God. The world is as new to him as it was to the first man that existed, and his natural right in it is of the same kind.”

Apparently God created us as free individuals, in a sort of libertarian Garden of Eden. Although he claims the mantle of reason and science, he starts from an idealistic fantasy that modern anthropology rejects as complete nonsense. He is assuming that the nature of humanity is unchanged since the beginning of time, and the experience of history is nothing but a catalog of human failures to apply the proper principles to politics. Thus, he famously tells us, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” A new society can be Intelligently Designed by rational people (like himself) playing the role of God.

This viewpoint may seem revolutionary, but it is actually based on a static, unchanging view of original human nature. Once we have applied reason to design the perfect society, there is no reason for any further change, and the former revolutionary becomes a reactionary.

Although Paine’s starting premise is totally false, which is a problem when constructing a rational argument, that does not necessarily negate his conclusions. He may be right for the wrong reasons.

Burke the Social Evolutionist

Burke is seen as a great defender of religion, but he does so only in terms of its function to provide stability to society. The rational consistency of the texts is of little concern. As Levin puts it,

“Religion, and especially an established church, helps to give people the kind of sentimental attachments and peaceful habits necessary to sustain a political order grounded in generational continuity and prescription. Covering the state in sacred garb also helps to shield its origins and protect it from rash and extreme reform or revolution. And finally, religion also helps the poor deal with their condition. To deprive them of this source of consolation is to make oneself ‘the cruel oppressor, the merciless enemy of the poor and wretched.’ Burke therefore writes about religion almost exclusively in terms of its use to society and the state rather than as a path to divine truth.”

Burke sees people as part of a complex, interconnected society rather than as separate individuals. He takes a more evolutionary and materialist approach of how society actually functions both now and in the past. As he writes (long before Darwin),

“We must all obey the great law of change,” Burke writes. “It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation. All we can do, and that human wisdom can do, is to provide that the change shall proceed by insensible degrees. This has all the benefits which may be in change, without any of the inconveniences of mutation.”

Burke looks upon his society the same way many of us view the natural environment: a complex life-giving ecosystem that we interfere with at our peril.

Tending the Mind of a Society

Psychology tells us that while our rational mind thinks it is in control, in reality much of who we are takes place in the many competing and sometimes conflicting parts of our unconscious mind. Burke seems to recognize this fact when he says, “Politics ought to be adjusted not to human reasoning but to human nature, of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part.”

Civilization can be seen the same way, with a rational government trying to manage a complex society with many conflicting and non-rational factions. Paine wants to use reason to re-design the entire society. “It is time that nations should be rational, and not be governed like animals, for the pleasure of their riders,” he tells us. Burke warns that changing the “riders” will have unintended consequences on a complex society we do not really understand. Thus he declares, “A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.”

The Limitations of Burke’s Conservative Philosophy

Although Burke recognizes the complex and evolutionary nature of society, he does not take the next scientific step and try to understand it. Rather than examine the origin of traditional arrangements, he would rather uncritically glorify them, as can be seen in this letter to some aristocrat: “You people of great families and hereditary trusts and fortunes are not like such as I am, who, whatever may be the rapidity of our growth, and even by the fruit we bear, and flatter ourselves a little that, while we creep on the ground, we belly into melons that are exquisite for size and flavor, yet still we are but annual plants that perish with our season, and leave no sort of traces behind us. You, if you are what you ought to be, are in my eye the great oaks that shade a country, and perpetuate your benefits from generation to generation.”

Perhaps he should have recalled his wisdom given in a different context, “Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.” Thomas Paine’s short answer to this sycophantic drivel was, “I smile to myself when I contemplate the ridiculous insignificance into which literature and all the sciences would sink, were they made hereditary; and I carry the same idea into governments.”


A Moral Compass and the Connection with the Past

Paine accuses Burke of lacking a code to define moral life, worrying more about the pace of change than its direction. Levin replies that Burke agrees that a standard of justice must guide political life. “It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.” He differs in his view of our ability to know and discover that standard, which we can know only through the experience of history. Whether this is the wisdom of humility or an excuse for preserving privilege is left to the reader to decide.

Paine’s view is we can know precisely what needs to be done, but only by liberating ourselves from the burdens of history and seeking for direct rational understanding. This is the key to understanding another difference between the two. Paine tells us, “Time with respect to principles is an eternal NOW: it has no operation upon them; it changes nothing of their nature and qualities,” and “Each age and generation must be free to act for itself.” Whereas Burke sees the task of any generation to preserve and, where necessary and possible, improve what that generation has been given by its predecessors, with the aim of passing the benefit along to its successors. Each generation must live with a sense of its own time as transitory— more or less the opposite of an eternal now.

The problem with Paine’s disconnect with the past is that it suggests a corresponding lack of concern about the future. Burke’s too deep connection with the past will keep us stuck there.

Reflections on the Left and Right Today

Levin concludes that, “To this day, progressive voices argue that our political system must empower expertise to directly address social and political problems with technical prowess. And today’s conservatives argue that we must empower institutions (like families, churches, and markets) that channel the implicit knowledge of many individuals and generations and that have passed some test of time and contain in their very forms more wisdom than any person could possess.”

But he also acknowledges that some conservatives use Paine’s rhetoric in calling for an overthrow of the welfare state that liberals want to defend. Thus he says, “The rhetoric of some key domestic debates therefore sometimes seems almost like a mirror image of the original left-right debate.”

As for foreign policy debates, George W. Bush’s Iraq war channelled Thomas Paine – they wanted to begin Iraq anew, based on the rational principles of democracy. No one listened to the spirit of Edmund Burke, who would have reminded us that destabilizing the complex society of Iraq would have similar disastrous consequences to those of the French Revolution.

A Worthwhile Study

I think this book succeeds in exploring how society works and how we should try to change it. It does rather exaggerate the differences between Paine and Burke. While Paine was active in the French Revolution, the book fails to mention that he tried to moderate its behaviour, almost at the cost of his life. And Burke did consider the necessity of revolution, saying (not quoted in this book), “The speculative line of demarcation, where obedience ought to end, and resistance must begin, is faint, obscure, and not easily definable. It is not a single act, or a single event, which determines it. Governments must be abused and deranged indeed, before it can be thought of; and the prospect of the future must be as bad as the experience of the past.”

Still, one gets the feeling if we followed Burke’s counsel we would still be living in the squalor of the Middle Ages. We need the spirit of Paine to move forward. Just don’t put guys like that in charge.

[Song · Rating 5 out of 5]

读这本书，突然明白了什么叫做文化发达和政治昌明。对中国20世纪革命的评论，埃德蒙·伯克在200年前就对着法国大革命说完了。为什么国内没有人介绍伯克的思想和对革命的见解？21世纪的中国政治评论家们对中国革命只能说出一鳞半爪的评论，伯克早就系统性地分析评价完了，而且句句精准，直击要害。这些知识和见解，都在汉语文化圈外产生，至今都还是“200年前诞生的新知”。

[Drtaxsacto · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke almost 50 years ago. I will confess that I am more a Burkean than a Paineista. Levin does a careful analysis of the work of these two 18th century writers in a compare and contrast mode that I found quite interesting.

Burke grew up as an Irishman - when we visited Dublin I was able to sit in his study carrell at TCD. Paine grew up in more humble circumstances but had the luck to have a couple of patrons - much of what he wrote was self learned but in many of his writings he had a brilliant ability to turn a phrase. Before I read the book I had known that the two had actually met - although I did not that they carried on a long public set of debates.

Burke was convinced that change in society needs to be fundamentally incremental while Paine for the most part believed that every generation had both the opportunity and the right to begin anew. Thus, for example, Paine was a strong supporter of vigorous inheritance taxes - because he thought each generation must start from scratch. A good deal of Paine's writing is a reaction to hereditary leadership - after all he wrote in support of the American and French revolutions.

Much of Burke's writing is a predecessor to writing like Madison's Federalist #10 - which warned of the dangers of factions and Hayek's the Knowledge of Time and Place. He sees the inability of humans to understand the entire picture of life - thus he argues that the natural interactions of human behavior (in his case also based on time between generations) brings together knowledge which would not be available to individuals.

Paine argues that individuals can and should always be able to recast their situation and are uniquely conditioned to renew everything almost any time they wish.

The conflict of bounded versus unbounded rationality is an important underlying issue in a good deal of political thinking. Charles Lindblom in Politics and Markets (http://www.amazon.com/Politics-Market...) would be a good companion for Levin's book.

Levin's key strength is a willingness to break down key concepts and then to offer a detailed compare and contrast approach. If you are at all interested in thinking about the underlying issues which divide political systems - this a a superb book to get you to think about those issues.

[Bakunin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book which really helped clarify the difference between conservatism and certain strains of the enlightenment. Burkes contention is basically that we do not create society but we are born into it. We should therefore not think that we are smart enough to remake society according to abstract principles. Society is instead a sort of contract between the dead, the living and the unborn. This does not mean that Burke doesnt favor change: he does, but incremental change. (There is an italian saying: chi va piano, va sano; he who walks slowly also walks safely).
Paine on the other hand believes that we can create a rational society and that stupidity should not be preserved just because it is old. Every individual is born with the ability to use reason and no one should be able to encroach upon our natural rights. Individuals should be able to do whatever they like provided they do not infringe on the rights of others.
Levin does a great job in explaining these ideas and I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of political thought!

[Otto Lehto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paine and Burke were powerful thinkers and rhetoricians who inserted their views surgically into the central debates of modern politics, from the American crisis to the French revolution. This book is a lean, precise, and analytical account of the central passions and reasons of their philosophies. It achieves what it sets out to do. I was positively surprised by its evenhanded narrative.

The Great Debate is a book that, like most others, is not without its biases, but it is extremely self-conscious about them. Books about political ideology are usually themselves deeply ideological; this embedded engagement of authors and readers is itself a process worth self-exploring. The author of this book is an avowed Burkean, and this is reflected in how the debate between Burke and Paine is narrated and how the tensions in their worldviews are resolved. The author fails to rise above the partisan perspective when he regularly paints Burke as the more prudent of the two, but he manages to wrestle with his avowed biases in a curiously competent manner. The evenhanded outcome may seem full of effortless grace - but I'm sure it was painfully wrought in the editing room from the original manuscript through an extirpation of its Burkean extravagances...

Although the book is Team Burke (and Team Republican), Paine's liberal position is adequately and comprehensively presented. The Painean rationalist case for liberal individualism and egalitarianism is correctly underlined, as is its deep connection to the metaphysical, epistemological, and normative commitments of the Radical Enlightenment. The only major problem is the book's insufficient and limited historical understanding of the broader philosophical ideas that motivated Paine's radical views on all things. This makes the radicalism of Paine seem almost completely de novo, which gives too much credence to Paine's own delusions.

A historian of the era will know that many of the contemporary bubbling ideas inspired the constitutional principles of the American Founding Fathers, especially Madison and Jefferson, whose supposed conservative prudence is adulated by so many contemporary conservatives... So who made America? It is impossible to say, since the American experiment is an outgrowth of both currents of radicalism and conservatism, mixed in different degrees. Contrary to Burkean reformism, the Enlightenment ideas about constitutionalism, republicanism, secularism, and revolution were, in 1776, a radical leap into the unknown that laid the necessary foundation of contemporary U.S. conservatism. But, contrary to Paine's hyper-rational theory, the ability to SUSTAIN an allegiance to those radical principles has entailed the encouragement of Burkean prejudice. This is evident in flag-waving patriotism and blind allegiance to the Constitution. From this, I might propose that Paine better explains the origins of the USA, but Burke its future.

Overall, the book is written with analytical clarity and minimal ideological jargon. It can be recommended both to students of the subject and novice readers. More importantly, the Great Debate is palatable to both "Team Paine" and "Team Burke." It reflects a clear and present bias in its avowedly American and Burkean commitments, but this is OK, since it delivers a cool overview of the archetypal dialogue between THE conservative reformist and THE radical revolutionary. The debate is not over.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book's thesis is highly patchy and under-developed, but if you want to learn about Paine and Burke, it is very good. Levin is a conservative who clearly favors Burke, but he's fair to both and points out strengths and weaknesses on both sides. He also doesn't set them up as totally opposed, given that they are both within the rights-based liberal tradition, although he does see them as founding figures of left and right politics today. The big gap in the book is that he doesn't make any historical effort to trace their influence across time; rather, he asserts that modern progressive and conservative politics resemble or mirror key assumptions and principles from Burke and Paine.

I'm going to sketch out the strengths and flaws of each dude and suggest a synthesis, as I think a functioning political system would have liberalism and conservatism as yin and yang. Paine is a classic Lockean liberal with a stronger revolutionary bent. For Paine, all politics must proceed from rational principles; any tradition or hierarchy that doesn't serve the ultimate good of individual rights and welfare must be rapidly realigned. He is a democrat but also a technocrat; there must be enlightened, rational leaders who can institute these changes in society. He is a classic social contract thinker, reasoning toward a more just society from the principles of natural rights, consent, and a certain antipathy to tradition. He's much more in line with the hyper-rationalist Enlightenment of the French than the Scots and Americans, somewhat ironically.

Burke, on the other hand, may have founded the conservative skepticism of the social contract. There was no time when individuals got together to form a contract to protect their rights by forming a government (although in a way this is what the American Revolution was, although they were not in a state of nature beforehand). Moreover, to think if individuals as free-floating rationalists is unrealistic: human beings are deeply rooted creatures in a bunch of things they don't really choose: family, religion, culture, tradition, hierarchy, etc. They desire a connection to the past and to their descendants. For Burke, government is not about the actualization of abstract principles, as human societies are far too complicate to be remade along rationalist blueprints. You also can't come up with one universal set of principles for every society; each society is an endlessly complex organism with different histories and values that prescribe different forms of gov't. This means that reforms should be gradual and cautious; they should address discrete problems in the social structure rather than redesign society along abstract lines. Most efforts to do the latter, Burke argues, simply unmoor people from the norms and restraints that make them act civilly (religion, tradition, hierarchy, a sense of awe), leading to social breakdown, as in the French Rev.

Burke and Paine's convergence on supporting the American Rev shows their thought in action. For Paine, the Revolution was the fulfillment of universal principles that can and should apply everywhere. The natural rights of the colonists had been violated, and they were breaking the social contract and forming a new and more just one. For Burke, however, it wasn't so much the universal rights of the colonists that had been violated but their customary rights, their specific cultural customs and habits of self-government against a faraway ruler. It was the Parliament's rigid and ham-handed efforts to apply their writ in the colonies that violated these rights, which other societies which may not have this specific history and culture might lack. This is a perfect example of what Levin means in saying that Paine reasoned from abstract principles whereas Burke reasoned from history.

Of course, the reason I'm not a Burkean is that Burke's schema A. all too easily becomes a mere rationalization of the status quo, and intellectual tool for the elite to justify continued injustices B. It leaves no clear rubric, other than what has long been the norm, to judge when the actions of government are unjust. Paine's schema may be overly abstract, but he sets a clear purpose for government and clear lines who when it has overstepped its bounds and become illegitimate. It is really hard for a Burkean to say when this has happened. If, for instance, a society's political culture has been more tyrannical and centralized than Burke's English tradition, are there any grounds for saying that this must change in Burke's worldview? I think he and Levin struggle to articulate that, even though Burke himself was a reformer for his time period.

Ok, now the synthesis: Paine's philosophy provides a universal grounding and purpose for all government; it puts the rights of individuals above tradition and hierarchy; it provides an energy for change and an impatience with injustice that I strongly support. Burke then should be the voice of caution and restraint: reforming society won't be straightforward, society is too complicated a thing for any one person to grasp and tinker with like a clock, people need a sense of pride and rootedness in place and tradition, and they don't want that ripped away by reforming zealots; lastly, the revolutionary, and even the reformer, can easily get caught up in his own sense of omniscience and righteousness, leading him to domineering behavior or violence. Burke should be that voice in the back of the chariot, telling the reformer "remember, you are mortal." For instance, I think the Senate is an archaic and unjust institution, but I acknowledge that it is deeply rooted in our political system, that many parties have an interest in sustaining it as well as a competing theory of government, and that it may something I just have to accept and work within to improve society. In other words, there are crucial limits to how much we can reason from abstract principles to change long-ingrained practices. This makes political life into a "choose your battles wisely" enterprise.

I think Levin could have brought home this argument more effectively with a conclusion titled something like: Why the FOunding Fathers were more Burkean than Painean? I think this would be a doable argument, with the possible exception of Jefferson, although most of the founders were more social contract-y in their thinking than Burke. Still, this is a good book that is fair to both thinkers. I will say it is tough to listen to because it is dense as times; probably should have read this one so I could give it 100%.

[Reed Schwartz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I haven't read enough Burke (or better, Bourke) to know for sure but my sense is that Levin is anachronistically reading markets and really Hayek into Burke's writings... maybe I don't know my economic history but I would be surprised if he had articulated the theory of markets as preference aggregation machines that Levin keeps ascribing to him (not to mention the malarkey at the end where he says Paine would have supported "fix[ing] our health-care system by empowering expert panels armed with the latest effectiveness data to manage the system from the center" vs. the more "Burkean" solution of "arranging economic incentives to channel consumer knowledge and preferences and address some of the system’s discrete problems". What are we even talking about. (As real patriots know Paine actually would have supported Henry Georgism). For how much Levin favors Burke it seems like he should have put some effort into evaluating some of the historical claims or trying to think about how their context, especially wrt markets, might have differed from ours (which he totally fails to do in the conclusion re: the ACA). Very Chicago School (derogatory).

[Ryan Watkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best political books I’ve read. Highly recommended.

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great, if not particularly original, review of two great thinkers and polemicists. However, it might have made more sense for me to have skipped this book and to have just reread the two sensational authors. They are pretty accessible after all.

[Jonathan Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is politics simple or complicated? Is history a burden or a boon? Which carries greater weight: choice or obligation? These, and questions like these, are some of the disagreements that arose between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, who took dramatically different views of the French Revolution - and this, Yuval Levin argues, is the origin, with modifications, of the Right-Left division within modern politics.

So whereas Burke saw history as a boon, and fairness to the next generation required passing it on (with gradual improvements), Paine saw it largely as a burden, and fairness to the next generation often required the deconstruction of existing societal structures to better conform to absolute, abstract principles of liberty. (Paine regarded Burke's approach as condoning tyranny, while Burke saw Paine's approach as likely to worsen the situation by fomenting social chaos.) Paine saw politics as simple, evaluating institutions by easy-to-understand fundamental principles; Burke saw politics as a complicated endeavor, one that has to take into account elements of human nature beyond human reason, and in Burke's judgment, we have little access to abstract 'natural rights,' but these are approximated in the civil rights granted by the institutions of any healthy society with a long and continuous history. For Paine, choice is paramount - all political and social obligations are entered into volitionally, and hence radical democracy is the only acceptable government and all apparent obligations must be challenged; whereas for Burke, we are born into a network of social obligations that reach back to the past. (On the whole, I agreed almost equally with both of them, really.)

Levin does a stunning job of bringing both of these perspectives to light; the one area in which I'd fault him is that, other than a couple scattered paragraphs, Levin does not go into detail to trace the legacies of Burke and Paine in the development of 'conservative' and 'liberal' political traditions. A bit more brevity in exploring Burke and Paine in their own right, and more attention to this, would have produced a much more interesting volume.

[Douglas Noakes · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are a political nerd like me, you will enjoy this comparison of the revolutionary Thomas Paine and the prescriptive, reform-minded Anglo-Irish parliamentarian Edmund Burke. Both men were ideological opponents of each other--though they enjoyed a brief friendship-and had very different views of the French Revolution. Paine supported the overturning of the corrupt Bourbon regime, while Burke felt the revolutionaries were just as bad if not worse than the Old Regime. The author (Yuval Levin), a conservative, does an excellent disinterested analysis of the main ideas contained in their writings.

Although it's only 230 pages, this is not a quick read. There is much philosophy to absorb, but the prose is clear and concise.

[Wendy Ma]

This book is definitely not what I expected it to be. Although I really enjoyed the thoughtful insights in the two giant politicians' minds and learning about the two different sets of political philosophy, I expected more connection between the philosophy and current American politics. While I was able to grasped the general concepts of their beliefs, I wasn't able to link these views to the modern left and right by the end of the book.

[Mir Bal · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yuval Levin är något så ovanligt som en amerikans konservativ intellektuell. Inte för att det inte kryllar av mer eller mindre sociopatiskt lagda män (de är ju nästan alltid män) som efter att läst Atlas Shrugged kommit fram till att den fria marknad är det bästa som någonsin har hänt, samtidigt som de inte vill släppa den där idéen om att kvinnor skall stå vid spisen och att svarta människor är äckliga. Dessa män förenas av en social sadism som endast överträffas av deras motvilja mott att läsa någon form av historia eller att på ett någorlunda intellektuellt hederligt sätt engagera sig i motståndarens argument. Men denna kategorin män kan knappast klassas som intellektuella, förutom i ordets strikt marxistiska betydelse. Levin tillhör den handull personer som faktiskt gör ett hederligt försök att förstå sinna motståndare, liberalerna, vänstern (när blev de samma sak?). Och det går faktiskt hyfsat, historiskt är boken intressant och träffar ganska rätt, även om den blundar för allt som någon från andra sidan tycker är viktigt.

Nå, till saken. Levins huvudtes är att den moderna uppdelningen mellan höger och vänster, mellan liberal och konservativ går att spåra tillbaka till dessa två intellektuella giganters debatt. Thomas Paine och Edmund Burke. För att komma fram till det behöver han totalt ignorera de två andra huvuddeltagarna i denna debatten. Mary Wollstonecraft, som ignoreras för att hon är kvinna, och Gracchus Babeuf som ignoreras för att hans närvaro skulle rita om koordinaterna till den kartan Levin försöker tänka så fullständigt att det skulle göra den till ett kuriöst dokument och ett misslyckat försök men inget mer. Utöver detta, man måste städa upp i sinna huvudkaraktärers liv och texter så att deras liv passar hans tes.

Thomas Paine var enligt Levin i första hand en intellektuell revolutionär, som precis som vänstern och liberaler i alla tider målat upp storslagna system och teorier som inte haft mycket med verkligheten att göra för att sedan försöka implementera dem utan någon hänsyn för konsekvenserna. Levin är ärlig nog att nyansera detta genom att visa på hur Paine var redo att riskera sitt eget liv för att skydda kungafamiljen i Frankrike under revolutionen, inte för att han hade så mycket tillövers för dem, utan för att dödsstraffet stred mot hans principer.
Levins grundläggande tes till uppdelningen mellan höger och vänster är att vänstern och då framförallt Paine bygger sitt projekt på logiskt induktion. Monarkin grundades på illegitim grund, av typen folkmord och förtryck av alla som vågade protestera. Detta leder till att den inte kan legitimeras idag, inget som kommer ur en legitim begynnelse kan bli bra. vi måste skapa om vårt politiska system på en rättvisa grund, annars kommer alltid gårdagens demonoer att skrika ut. Levin gör sitt bästa för att omstöpa Paine till en blodlös logiker och intellektuell. Det misslyckas. Men bara nästan.

Högern och Burk delar enligt Levins utsago Paines hat mot orättvisor och vänsterns omsorg om de fattiga och vilja att förändra världen (även om Levine aldrig lyckas visa på det) men vill se långsamma förändringar. Högern är räd för att slitna upp de helt existerande sociala banden av rädsla för det kaos som kan komma efter. Högern har en mistro mott färdiga och stora lösningar utan vill istället göra små punktinsatser som upprätthåller det sociala kontrakten.

Allt detta kan låta fint och det är en liten del av sanningen. Men såväl Levin som den intellektuella högermannen glömmer bort en serie punkter. De gör precis det som de anklagar högern för, de abstraherar bort principerna från en faktisk verklighet.

Det faktum att Burk försvarade adelns rätt till makt och att nya personer inte skulle tillåtas träda in i denna maktsfär kan kanske ha något att göra med att han fick alla sinna pengar från den brittiska adeln. Det sociala system som han försvarar, fungerade uppenbarligen för honom. Han blev privat rik på det. Det fungerade uppenbarligen inte för så många andra. Allt prat om att försvara den social ordningen måste ta hänsyn till vilka det är som vill försvara vilken del av den. Det gör både Levin och alla högermän rädd. För under den här tiden svalt 60-80 av Storbritanniens befolkning, alla kvinnor som inte tillhörde de fem sex top procenten var prostituerade, flickor tvingas ta upp arbetet vid tio eller tolv års ålder. Folket fog som flyger och hade sedan mage att kräva förändring. Pain kom från folket Burk föraktade vad han kallade för ”de svinaktiga massornas” krav på förändring.

Mot den levda och konkreta bakgrunden blir det svårt att försvara burk. Även mot den barkunden att han försvarade slaveriet och ansåg att folket aldrig, aldrig någonsin fick kräva sin rätt, då detta skulle slita sönder de existerande sociala relationerna och det samhället som det byggt upp. Ja? Det är ju det som är poängen. Att en person som får sin lön för att försvara adeln inte tycker om detta är kanske inte så konstigt.

Trots att Levin intonerar den politiska verkligheten och den sociala verkligheten så finns det en del poänger i boken. Ja. Högern bygger fortfarande på Burk, man är redo och kommer alltid att vara det att dö för att hindra ”de svinaktiga massorna” från att kräva sin rätt. Ja, vänstern vill se en förändring. fortfarande. alltid.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to admit that I found this book useful to read for more than one reason.  Not only am I interested in studying the political history of the late 18th century, but I found that this book was very useful when it came to the problem of triangulating one's political worldview.  After all, both Burke and Paine, for all of their differences, were two different sorts of liberals, and I find that in much of my own thinking that I am not either kind of liberal, but more traditionalist than either Burke or Paine were.  It is interesting when one reads books about politics because it prompts one to think of other options besides the ones that the author is trying to contrast.  In this particular case the author spends his time writing about two liberals who nonetheless had widely divergent opinions that roughly correlate to the positions of Republicans and Democrats, and the author does a good job at pointing out how it is that these two parties disagree on so many issues by pointing out how interrelated those differences are.

This book is a bit more than 200 pages long and is divided into seven chapters.  The book begins with a preface and introduction and then shows some of the ways that Paine and Burke were similar in spending their lives in the public arena arguing and debating with others about politics (1).  After that the author explores the differences between the two concerning nature and history (2) before then looking at the relationship between justice and order (3), where the two had clear differences.  The author discusses how the two differed strongly when it came to choice and obligation in ways that are not too surprising to guess (4), as well as how reason and prescription varied in terms of their views of what was desirable (5).  The book then ends with a discussion of the contrasting views of revolution and reform, where Paine argued for drastic revolution and Burke for cautious reform (6), and also where the two differed strongly in terms of how they thought about the importance of generations passing as well as the relationship of politics to the living and dead (7).  After that there is a conclusion, acknowledgements, notes, as well as the usual bibliography and index to close this book properly.

It should be remembered, though, that to be conservative is different than to be traditionalist.  It is commonly mistaken, especially by those who are progressives, that those who are conservative want to roll back the clock to an earlier time, and frequent for conservatives to disclaim such a desire to the disbelief of progressives.  Yet it is no great thing to desire to turn around if one is going in the wrong direction, and no praise at all to conserve those traditions that have not proven themselves or have proven themselves to be wrong.  To be a reactionary against evil trends is by no means wrong, although it must be said that not all social changes are themselves evil, although I tend to be very temperamentally conservative and a great pessimist when it comes to human nature, largely because I know my own so well and that of those people of my time.  Knowing this made the book different for me than it would be for those readers who felt themselves being pit between Paine and Burke.  While I definitely prefer Burke, I found him a bit too liberal at some points for my tastes, and that is not necessarily a bad thing.

[Stephen Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really helpful and informative book that is particularly suited for Americans, but would benefit any reader interested in developing their political philosophy. Levin is an exceptional writer, and I think this book is really well organized for maximum clarity of argument.

Set in the period where Enlightenment liberalism was stirring up revolutions in Western societies, Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine publicly sparred with ideas that would shape policy debates for centuries to come. While both men supported the American Revolution, they did so for different reasons, which would rise to the foreground in their profound disagreements concerning the French Revolution.

Paine was a firm believer in the theories of the Enlightenment, and to a certain extent he believed that rational thought would usher in a new egalitarian quasi-utopia where reason would rule and mankind would know profound peace, justice, and liberty. Hereditary monarchies and many traditional institutions were the vestigial organs of a bygone era of injustice and oppression. All of them needed to be removed because any part of society not subject to the consent of those governed was, by definition, illegitimate. Thus, revolution was justified in every generation where the people did not receive the freedom and the choice to determine the structure of a government and society that would be by and for the people.

On the other side of the divide, Burke was terrified by the revolutionary sentiment that was sweeping through Britain, where he served as a member of Parliament. Burke was skeptical of any political theory that would derive its principles from philosophies that would abstract mankind out of their present conditions, which is what he charged his interlocutors of doing. Society is built from long periods of slow change and institutional trust that lead to obligations between groups of people which serve everyone's mutual benefit. Burke believed the state should be viewed as an adapting biological model developed according the sensibilities and dispositions of its people, and the role of government was to identify specific, discrete issues and prescribe changes to alleviate problems in concert with the general context in which the policies are made. The Revolution in France terrified Burke because he saw how it was upending all of the institutions that gave the people their identity and solidarity, and he believed such an effort would lead to catastrophe with worse injustices than those the revolutionaries were trying to correct. As a whole, it would seem that Burke understood the limits of the efforts of individual people and small groups to create an entire system of government, and instead believed that the generations from before, in the aggregate, have considerable wisdom that should not be ignored. It is our duty in the present to maintain, or conserve, these institutions and societal forms while making gradual improvements to preserve order in the present and give structure for future generations to build on.

The conclusion of the book was particularly helpful as well, because Levin does a good job concisely showing where today's debates have continuity and discontinuity with these perspectives. This book raised a lot of good questions, gave lots of good ideas for forming answers, and generally gave good food for thought on a whole host of issues.

[Matt McCormick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yuvall Levin’s The Great Debate is a fantastic presentation of alternative views in political philosophy. Although himself a sincere conservative, both politically and socially, Levin lays out for the reader each side’s position intelligently, objectively and, at times, with a touch of humor. I attempted to read the book in the spirit in which the author wrote. Although I consider myself a thorough going Painian, I wanted to objectively understand the counter positions which would be elucidated by Burke. Levin gave me much to consider.

This analysis of two strands of Enlightenment thinking was more applicable to our own time before the last decade where the historically maintained positions of political right and left were more constant and recognizable. It better described the left and right of 2000 than 2018. However, maybe that’s another reason why I enjoyed the book so much – everyone has come to Paine’s position and done so in spades. The conservative right is ready to start a new revolution (The Tea Party) and happy to tear down multi-generational institutions once thought sacrosanct (NATO, The Justice Department). Meanwhile the political left seems ready to carry Paine’s view of naturally endowed rights to its extreme ends whereby any and all checks by government are an infringement on personal liberty (Immigration, ICE).

While I remain in the camp of Paine, having read this cogent and carefully crafted analysis, I better appreciate Burke’s concern for a society ready to abandon intuitions which served it generally well generation after generation.

[Cameron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting thesis: That the modern right & left had their roots, or at least were crystallized, in the writings and opposing positions of Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, respectively. Didn't know much about either prior to reading this--especially Burke--so my opinion on the book is to be taken with a grain of salt by anyone with more knowledge of the subject.

Burke used sound logic most of the time, essentially arguing that civilization has been developing for a really fucking long time and it's stupid to throw out everything that's good about it because you think you can build something better from scratch. The conclusions that he drew, however, sometimes seemed silly, as do so many traditionalists' views. The thing I kept wishing I could say to him was, "Yeah, slowly refining and reforming one's government over generations and, in the meantime, being happy for what you have in the present is all well and good for someone like you, i.e., a white guy who's a member of the English parliament. But trade places with any number of oppressed persons living in untenable sociopolitical situations for a while and see if you still so staunchly hold that view.

Paine starts in a weird place, essentially disavowing anything established by past generations as intrinsically oppressive of the current generation. He's so completely idealistic that many of his ideas seem laughably impractical. Maybe in some other world, the idea of each generation establishing entirely new laws and government would be great, but that's obviously not going to work in this one. At the same time, it's hard to argue with his central idea that humans all deserve liberty and fair treatment, and that hereditary government is a total sham, perpetrated by a few lucky criminal families.

[Kevin English · Rating 2 out of 5]

I listened to the first few hours of this and decided to move on. The biographies of Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine are interesting in themselves, but the rest reads like a college paper quoting the two men and comparing their views.

This book present what to me feels like a straw man argument. It puts forth a hypothesis that the modern split between left and right can trace its roots to this “Great Debate” between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. You may be surprised that the conservative author wants you to think Paine was wrong.

While modern conservatives may on a rare occasion quote Edmund Burkes, there is no pocketbook Thomas Paine that modern liberals are waving at people. Modern leftism has many influences including Marx and Durkheim. The left has come to encompass a whole troupe ideas around race, ethnic and sexual identity that are not limited to the “Rights of Man” that Thomas Paine was concerned with.

Another missing piece in Yuval Levin’s analysis is the growth and acceptance of libertarian ideas on the right which are more closely aligned with Thomas Paine’s views than Burke’s. Most libertarians reject traditional authority like nobility or religion. While anarchism was originally a product of the left, in America, it is frequently promoted by extreme libertarians. Levin is correct to point out that right vs left can also be classified as traditional vs non-traditional. However, the current debate between statists vs non-statists feeds into political debate in the USA in ways that stand outside the narrow lens this book captures.

[MacKenzie Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this was a great way to start off the year. Levin did a very good job of not taking sides which I'm sure is hard for political novels especially when writing about Burke and Paine who's stories were both very accurate and intriguing, and though based on outside knowledge I knew who he favored, as a reader, I felt he stayed pretty unbiased. I have an obsession with rhetoricians so this was brain food for me, though I lean more towards Paine's viewpoints, Levin wrote in a way where I could virtually understand why Burke was/believed what he did. Not really a political philosophy junkie, but this was great(no pun intended)!Who would've had thought two olds guys from Enlightenment-era could have summed up with their beliefs/stances what we are dealing with NOW in the present! The sub-title "the birth of left&right" is true, without spoiling their ideals too much, if you take a look at Burke's concern for a society that is willing to tear down institutions to receive liberation and Paine's views on natural-born human rights that should be secured regardless of what rules society is implementing you can see that they are very applicable in today's society:)

[Eric C 1965 · Rating 4 out of 5]

"one seems right, until another comes and examines him".

This quote from Proverbs quickly comes to mind as I read this great book. Because Thomas Paine, a man who valued reason and choice, seems to be right, and the obvious way to think about things, Common Sense he called it - until you hear what Burke has to say. We need to consider more than reason, Burke says, because man is more than reason. He has a nature, that is full of passions that need to tempered. This full consideration of man's nature, understood even by a deist like Burke, makes him seem closer to wisdom.
Yet it is hard to fight the influence Paine has had on modern democracies. But is it the reason for it's success? Ultimately, it is Burke's humility over against Paine's arrogance that wins the day and the proof that is in the consideration of history shows that prudence is the right choice.

[Chad Hogan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommend for anyone interested in the history of conservatism vs. progressivism. The title is very fitting because it definitely was quite the debate (literally between the two albeit not face-to-face) and I think both Paine and Burke made some compelling cases over complicated questions. I didn't feel like I was consistently on one side for every topic. I was fairly familiar with Thomas Paine but there were a few of his viewpoints that surprised me. I was not very familiar with Burke but wanted to understand his perspective more and this book did a good job to illuminate.

[Chrisanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll admit to skimming some of it. I was rather familiar with Paine and his arguments. Burke, however, I only knew from his essay on the sublime and was intrigued and, ultimately, thrilled at his clarity of thought(much more clear then his essay on the sublime).

I found myself surprised and agreeing with both. I liked the chapter on justice(particularly pertinent at the moment) and Levin seems to be a rising thinker around here so I was interested in his summation(and was not disappointed).

I do dispute his thesis, though. I believe the rise of the "left" and "right" has much older origins(some of which he references himself---Hobbes and Locke, for instance). But it was an interesting dive into a time and dialogue that I am always willing to learn about. Now if A Time to Build will just come off the reserve list...

[Amy T. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a bit of a slog to get through, but I'm glad I did. The author contrasts the ideas of Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke, two men who would have had a heyday on Twitter if it had existed in during the American and French Revolutions. Most interesting to me was Paine's emphasis on personal choice, an idea today's left has taken to extremes.

[Jessica Jin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book turned me into a Thomas Paine fangirl. I listened to this on a solo roadtrip and was shouting "YES!!!!!" alone in my car at some of the jabs Paine made at Burke during their career-long beef.

[Aaron]

A clear digest of their thought on politics.