Where did the Right and the Left come from?

The pamphlet war between the 'conservative' Edmund Burke and the 'radical' Thomas Paine remains with us in unexpected ways, shows Yuval Levin in The Great Debate

Jesse Norman

Edmund Burke (left) and Thomas Paine, caricatured by Gillray and Cruickshank respectively Basic Books, pp.304, £18.99

What is the origin of left and right in politics? The traditional answer is that these ideas derive from the French National Assembly after 1789, in which supporters of the King sat on one side and those of the revolution on the other. Yuval Levin in The Great Debate, however, argues not for seating but for ideas: that left and right enter the Anglo-American political bloodstream via the climactic public clash in the 1790s between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, the prime movers in a pamphlet war that convulsed opinion and engaged readers on two continents.

If this is right, then the touchstone of modern political debate in Britain and America is not capitalism v. socialism, or religious fundamentalism v. cosmopolitan secularism, but an earlier and deeper disagreement over the nature of the modern liberal political order itself.

In late 1790 Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France. That revolution had been celebrated from the first amongst intellectuals, radicals and bien-pensants in Britain, and many people naturally assumed that Burke the great reformer would join his protégé, the Whig leader Charles James Fox, in acclaiming it. It came as a profound shock for them to read the Reflections — both a profound statement of political philosophy and a devastating critique of revolution itself.

To none was the shock greater than to Thomas Paine, who had made his name as the author of the revolutionary tract Common Sense in 1776. Now he saw that Burke’s book demanded a rapid and equally trenchant public response. The result was The Rights of Man. There followed dozens of further pamphlets, as opinion divided over the issue, while the revolution in France descended — as Burke had predicted — into anarchy, terror and war.

Levin, editor of National Affairs magazine, described as a ‘one-man Republican brains trust’, sets the scene well. On the one hand we have Burke, the ‘philosopher in action’. Here is a man who combines deep learning and reflection with a mastery of the facts at hand, is always conscious of the limitations of individual human reason and sees society as a priceless providential inheritance, which each generation must maintain and enhance for posterity. On the other hand there is Paine, whose hatred of authority in any form is so great that it extends even to acknowledging previous thinkers (‘I scarcely ever quote; the reason is, I always think’). He is a man who rejects the claims of tradition and convention and seeks to reconstitute government and society itself according to abstract reason.

Continue Reading