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