The Great Debate

Yuval Levin “The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and the Birth of Right and Left” Basic Books, 2014, 231 pp.

Tough reading.  Lots of quotations written in the18th century, a style quite different from the present.  Also, the book tends to repeat the same points over and over, probably because the original authors repeated their premises over and over in their many writings and correspondence.  But…again, I did read the whole thing, about 10 to 20 pages per sitting.

My Notes:

Pg. xi:  This book looks at Anglo-American politics during the age of America’s founding and the French Revolution through the contrasting opinions of Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, whose thoughts and actions helped define, respectively, the right and the left at their origins.    

Pg. xiv:  Burke was an Irish-born English politician and writer, a man of intense opinions with an unrivaled gift for expressing them in political rhetoric.  He was his era’s most devoted and able defender of the inherited traditions of the English constitution.  A patient, gradual reformer of his country’s institutions, he was among the first and surely the most adamant and effective critics of the radicalism of the French Revolution in English politics.

Thomas Paine, an English-born immigrant to America, became one of the most eloquent and important voices championing the cause of independence for the colonies, and then, as revolution brewed in France, he became an influential advocate of the revolutionaries’ cause as an essayist and activist in Paris and London.  Paine fervently believed in the potential of Enlightenment liberalism to advance the cause of justice and peace by uprooting corrupt and oppressive regimes and replacing them with governments answerable to the people.  He was a brilliant and passionate advocate for liberty and equality.

 “The Great Debate” between Burke and Paine, Yuval Levin demonstrates, has persisted to this day in the form of the great divide between right and left. Levin is uniquely qualified to deal with both the political and philosophical aspects of that debate, then and now. As a writer, editor, and former policy staffer in the White House (where he dealt with such “wonkish” issues, he explains, as health care, entitlements, and the budget), he is himself a combatant in that debate.

Pg. 14:  A famous quote of Paine’s: “He who never was hungered may argue finely on the subjection of his appetite, and he who never was distressed may harangue as beautifully on the power of principle.  But poverty, like grief, has an incurable deafness, which never hears; the oration loses all its edge; and ‘to be or not to be’ becomes the only question.”

Pg. 18:  While Paine was traveling with Washington and the army in 1776, he penned an essay that came to be known as “The American Crisis.”  The first of these papers opens with what may be Paine’s most famous lines: “These are the times that try men’s souls.  The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country, but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.  Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered, yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.  What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value.”

Pg. 50:  Paine maintains that only power willingly granted is legitimate, and only a government by consent is just.  All power exercised over a nation must have some beginning.  It must either be delegated or assumed.  There are no other sources.  All delegated power is trust, and all assumed power is usurpation.  Time (tradition) does not alter the nature and quality of either. 

Pg. 52:  Burke mocks the idea that people can make any progress by assuming that all of human history has in essence been a failure because all existing governments have been corruptions of our original natural condition.  The beginnings of any society are almost certain to involve some form of barbarism.  But over time, by slowly responding to circumstantial exigencies, societies develop more mature forms—a process that mellows into legality governments that were violent in their commencement.  There is a sacred veil to be drawn over the beginnings of all governments because there is little to be learned by exposing them, and there is a very real risk of harm in the exposure itself—especially the risk of weakening the allegiance of the people to their regime by exposing its imperfect origins.

Pg. 175:  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.  This dispute, which Burke and Paine made so explicit, is another version of the disagreement about whether political thought must consider abstract, solitary, rational individuals or must take up particular human societies in their social and historical settings.  The question forms a unifying thread throughout the Burke-Paine debate.  As they argue about reason, Burke and Paine disagree about the given past and its relation to the present—about whether the circumstances that greet us when we enter the world can legitimately make demands on the way we think about politics.

Pg. 192:  In light of Burke’s vehement opposition to the French Revolution, many today too easily dismiss Burke as merely a defender of the established order.  But the facts of his career and the nature of his case against the revolution plainly argue otherwise.  Burke was a leader in almost every reform effort undertaken in Parliament during his three decades in elected office.  He sought to reform the nation’s finances, trade, and restrictions on Catholics and dissenters.  He sought to moderate the excess (especially the excessive punishments) of the criminal law, to rein in the East India Company, and to bring the gradual end of the slave trade.  And he effectively backed the American Revolution.  But he always approached the reform of existing institutions from a regard for their pedigree and their worth, seeking to build on what worked to correct what  did not, rather than to overturn the foundations of the regime and begin again.

 Pg. 224:  Ten years after his death, Paine’s remains were surreptitiously removed from his New Rochelle grave by William Cobbert, and English radical who sought to take the body to Britain and erect a glorious memorial to his hero.  But Brittian would not allow it and Paine’s remains were eventually lost.  Their final disposition remains unknown.