by yuval levin
basic, 296 pages, $27.99
Edmund Burke, a native Dubliner from a religiously mixedmarriage, wanted to become a public intellectual, and as part of SamuelJohnson’s circle, he came to think of himself “above all as a writer ratherthan a political thinker.” Through the patronage of the great Whig leader theMarquis of Rockingham, he was elected to a seat in the House of Commons in 1765and for the next three decades would remain a central figure of Britishpolitics.
Thomas Paine, from the south of England, was imbued with the“stark moralism” of his father’s Quaker faith. His parents could afford onlythe first five years of grammar school, but the bookish Paine continued to seek“every spare moment to read, especially books of poetry, history, and science.”
When his wife and child died in childbirth, he became a taxcollector and was soon organizing his fellow officers for better pay andtreatment. This “futile effort cost him his job,” but armed with a letter ofintroduction from Benjamin Franklin, he started anew in the American colonies.A year later Paine would write Common Sense.
These men came to be regarded as two of the greatest giantsof Anglo-American liberalism, though neither would have been likely to sharehistory’s assessment of the other. Burke said of Paine that he was a man with “noteven a moderate portion of learning of any kind,” and would come to regard hima dangerous rabble-rouser as well as a careless intellect. Paine consideredBurke a lackey to the hereditary British nobility who thought of people “as aherd of beings that must be governed by fraud, effigy, and show.”
Their quarrel receives erudite, sympathetic, and evenhandedaccounting in a new “case study in how ideas move history,” The GreatDebate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left . Theauthor, Yuval Levin, is editor of National Affairs and a scholar wholike his subjects is a combatant in debates over policy.
Following the biographical first chapter, Levin presents theBurke–Paine debate thematically, with each of the next six chapters devoted toa big disagreement over a set of foundational concepts: nature and history,justice and order, choice and obligation, reason and prescription, revolutionand reform, generations and the living.
The problem of generations deserves particular scrutiny. AsLevin points out, “more than just another theme of their dispute, it forms akind of unifying thread among the themes.” The generational problem, I wouldargue, is ultimately a dispute about the nature of nationhood.
Burke famously saw society as “a partnership not onlybetween those who are living, but between those who are living, those who aredead, and those who are to be born.” Therefore, to sustain the nationalcommunity, he believed that “what we owe the future above all is not freedom butrather the accumulated wisdom and work of the past.”
Paine has been traditionally viewed as relatively naiveabout the intergenerational loyalties needed to sustain a nation, and Levin byand large agrees. But Paine’s view is richer than commonly admitted: “A nation,though continually existing, is continually in a state of renewal andsuccession. It is never stationary. Every day produces new births, carriesminors forward to maturity, and old persons from the stage. In this everrunning flood of generations there is no part superior in authority toanother.”
According to Levin, Paine believed all generations stand infundamental equality with one another. There is no generation that has aprivileged position from which to inspire, guide, or bind any other generation.Therefore, in Paine’s words, “the vanity and presumption of governing beyondthe grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.”
This, Levin thinks, effectively precludes the possibility ofnationhood because it treats nationhood as a “repetitive” exercise rather thana “cumulative” project. Paine’s vision lacks the destiny of historicalinheritance and sobering responsibility for a national future, both of whichmake politics a long-term project rather than a matter of episodicplebiscites.
This goes too far. Paine indeed believed the nation was“never stationary,” but he also saw it as “continually existing.” Every livinggeneration has the right and the opportunity to fight anew for the basicprinciples of justice, but that right is also an obligation.
There is in Paine an unmistakable call to every generationto stand up for what is theirs, which provides its own kind ofintergenerational common purpose. Abraham Lincoln, for example, beckoned hisown generation to give “hope to the world for all future time” by decisivelyclaiming fundamental rights for all those laboring in America. Principledcommitment can make a people—but only if each generation claims for itself thenatural freedoms human beings are given when they enter this world. We have themoral and political freedom to not simply inherit, but repossess.
Burke demurred, proudly noting that the English Parliamentof 1688 pledged permanent allegiance to the monarchy (“we do most humbly andfaithfully submit ourselves, our heirs and posterity, for ever”). His nationalvision is in practice dependent on a strong and stable line of noble familiesable to perpetuate themselves. The nobility are like “the great oaks that shadea country.” Were these noble generational links to be broken, Burke speculated,“men would become little better than the flies of a summer.”
This commitment to hereditary rule has always made Burke’sproject difficult to translate into American terms, though Russell Kirkmanfully tried. The Great Debate is in some respects another attempt atthis kind of translation.
Levin wants to show that Burke was at core not areactionary, or a mere establishmentarian, but a reformer and a gradualistpreoccupied with the proper ordering of the future. He acknowledges towardthe end of the book that the Burkean “tradition of conservative liberalism . .. has only rarely been articulated in American terms” and that we would be hardpressed to find it in the contemporary right’s rhetoric.
Modern American conservatism, with its origins in William F.Buckley’s anti-statist synthesis of the postwar period, never developed arecognizably Burkean vocabulary in defining itself against the New Dealconsensus. Ironically, contemporary conservatives build more readily onfoundations laid by Paine than by Burke, which is why there’s a radicalism inquarters of the modern American right from which Burke would have recoiled.
For this reason, The Great Debate should be read as aphilosophical corrective to the anti-statist modes of American conservatism andas an encouragement to those trying to build on the basis of what we’veinherited, including the governmental innovations of the twentiethcentury.
Danilo Petranovich teaches in the Yale department ofpolitical science and the directed studies program.
