The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right by Yuval Levin (Basic Books 2014), 235 pages.
Yuval Levin’s well-written Great Debate is full of useful material, understandable explanation, and interesting reflections. It flows along smoothly and even entertainingly, unless that is a cuss word in serious circles. Levin goes through the Burke-Paine controversy in good order, with copious and apt quotations. He creates a real sense of what was at stake in this “great Anglo-American debate”: an argument that opposed justice and progress to order and conservation (as these partisans saw things). Here is a “disagreement within liberalism” that still plagues us today.
Each man was a theorist and an activist. Educated outside the Anglican Establishment, each had risen socially. They shared associates, had met, and were correspondents for a time. Arriving in London, the Irish-born Edmund Burke (1729–1797) showed great literary talent. Falling in with the Rockingham Whigs, he spent nearly three decades in Parliament. With five years of formal schooling, the English-born Thomas Paine (1737–1809) was a staymaker (a maker of whalebone strips for corsets) and excise man before finding his niche as a political writer. Taking up the American cause, Paine wrote Common Sense and The Crisis Papers, and found employment in the revolutionary struggle.
While Burke had advocated conciliation with America in the 1770s, the French Revolution put Burke and Paine at odds. Reacting to the radical, pro-French tendencies of certain English Whigs, Burke penned Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Paine replied with The Rights of Man (1791 and 1792).
Cruxes of matters: Paine
Rather than follow the book chronologically, let us examine the large patterns of ideas that Levin unearths. For Paine, men are naturally equal individuals, full stop. They form society out of self-interest, and their resulting social relations lack inherent authority. Individual consent alone justifies any social “contract,” and the public good is reckoned by adding up private goods. Government’s only rightful job is to apply principles discovered by individual reason to external circumstances. Together, science, learning, and commerce will rescue mankind from the endless mistakes recorded by history, and republican governments grounded on election and popular sovereignty will follow the orderly, abstractly lawful examples of nature. Not surprisingly, Paine’s allegiance to ideas crowded out patriotism. (So far, Paine might seem to be writing Cliff’s Notes on John Locke, but American philosopher John Wild in Plato’s Modern Enemies and the Theory of Natural Law argued that in terms of pre-17th-century natural law, Paine was actually much sounder than Locke.)
Government was no great mystery, but merely needed correct principles and methods. In the war between reason and ignorance, scientifically verified truth would overthrow existing religion and irrational prejudices. Liberated thinking would ensure correct choices. Republican political forms allowed for rapid, cumulative learning; hence there was no need for mixed government (that is, some combination of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy), continuous political parties, or checks and balances within a republic. Quite consistently, Paine favored centralized government for America. Anticipating Marx, he praised commerce as a force that would uproot existing social relations.
With a legal document for its constitution, Paine’s ideal government would broadcast its ideological principles and could always undergo further simplification. To overthrow injustice and build this new order, Paine embraced revolution. The French Revolution only failed, he wrote, because it was “incomplete”! Absent bad governments, peace would prevail and soon enough, a federation of republics might abolish war. The resulting Age of Reason would realize “the Adam of a new world.”
Burke
Burke saw human nature as realized within society. Social customs and practices were men’s “second nature.” Real improvement came about within a particular society’s cultural inheritance and relied on internally derived standards and measures, including historically acquired rights. Like liberty, justice was embedded historically and locally. Prescription — a word Burke often invoked — presumed the superiority of institutions tested in actual governing — the outcome of accumulated social choices. Born into existing social relations, men necessarily had duties they had not willed. For Burke, any real social contract bespoke these complex relations and was, therefore, quite unlike “a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee.…” Good government, whatever its form, was better than government merely ideal. Inequalities were necessary, and as important intermediate institutions, fixed social classes worked against despotism. On similar grounds, Burke defended political parties.
Taking abstract reason as severely limited, Burke opposed “metaphysical” speculation in politics. Government was practical; its end was happiness. It was better to do right, even under incorrect theory. Dealing with actual cases, politics could sometimes achieve untheorized precision. Projects of geometric remodeling unsettled society and asked that every existing practice defend itself, whereas prescription went hand in hand with prudence, whose standard was good and evil, not truth or falsehood. On this view, English liberty was an entailed inheritance. The common law duly ratified its orderly change and growth. Burke himself had been deeply involved with piecemeal reform in the penal law, the conduct of the East India Company, and the status of Catholics in Ireland, i.e., engaged (as he saw it) in the “Old” Whigs’ practice of conservation and correction.
For Burke, the rights claimed by Paine simply did not exist, the Revolution of 1688 notwithstanding. In the 1770s it was Parliament that broke with prudence and drove Americans to revolutionary measures. Burke shrouded social beginnings “in a veil”: a state’s origins most likely rested on successful historical crimes, and a literal “return” to beginnings might therefore be perilous. Revolution’s gains could never offset the harm of unleashing those fanatical madmen who thought nothing of wasting their own provinces.
What mattered more than some “founding” moment was the later stepwise emergence of an organic regime. Burke’s claim that old institutions long-adapted to sundry societal pressures embodied accumulated wisdom allowed him to narrow greatly the supposed gap between nature and artifice. A nation that actually tried to return to its origins would merely abolish itself by unleashing untamed appetites. Rationalists overlooked sympathies and sentiments embodied in myth and ended by making sophisticated apologies for violence. So acting, France had decomposed into a faction. Britain might be next.
A friend of Adam Smith, Burke made a negative defense of capitalism, or commerce: excessive regulation was disruptive and poverty was inevitable. Levin believes Burke wrongly linked capitalism with stability. Paradoxically, Levin writes, Burke could favor less regulation because he distinguished less between society and state.
The hands of time
Levin takes the proper relation of generations as especially problematic in liberal societies. This question, he believes, unifies the whole dispute: Burke’s gradual, internal reform versus Paine’s programmatic revolution. Politically, Paine wished for an “eternal NOW,” where different generations do not constitute a single, continuous people. Here, hereditary institutions seem irrational, while republican forms permit both change and continuity within reasonable bounds. These forms thus make it possible to escape “the ravages of time,” thereby furnishing the “constant maturity” that liberalism requires. Even though politics is necessarily present-minded, republicanism can supply ongoing consent consistent with “temporal individualism.”
Burke, with his cross-generational “contract,” urged respect for established orders, including the nobility. Those now living bear responsibility for the future. The argument about past and tradition leads back once more to community versus individual, and disagreement over the “status of the past in political life” is thus a battle over how best to manage change. Here Paine, writes Levin, was a “rationalist, technocratic, and progressive,” Burke a reformist; but the debate (Levin holds) remains one within liberalism.
Levin recommends “a progressive liberalism and a conservative liberalism.” Paine’s idea that the state should liberate individuals led on to modern liberalism’s welfare state and, today, the American Left combines “material collectivism and moral individualism.” The American Right shows “a deep commitment to generational continuity” (Levin is surely dreaming a bit), even if rightists use Paine’s (or Jefferson’s) language and lack all Burkean sensibility when urging “that we must empower … families, churches, and markets” to utilize accumulated (and dispersed) knowledge.
Observations within, or without, liberalism
But if this debate was within Anglo-American liberalism, how did it come into being? Historian Edmund Morgan’s Inventing the People (1988) describes how the 17th- and 18th-century English gentry turned the rhetoric of popular sovereignty (or self-government) into a weapon against the king. For them of course, Parliament was the “self” that governed; it actually was the sovereign people. The king was along for the ride and no others need apply. Alas, there were others — Levelers (so-called), radical Whigs, Paine, and the North Americans — who learned to deploy the imagined “people” against Parliament. (Morgan details how centralizing Federalists deployed operationally empty slogans about “the People” against the states in 1787-1789.)
At a later stage in these arguments, Burke served as interpreter and spokesman for the gentry and their claims, as philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has noted. An outsider who broke into England’s elite, Burke understood the social structure that that elite controlled better than they understood it themselves. Ruth Bevan’s very interesting Marx and Burke: A Revisionist View (1973) compared Burke’s sociological acumen with that of Marx. But what use did Burke make of those gifts?
Certainly, Burke’s rather thoroughgoing economic (i.e., laissez-faire) liberalism seems somewhat out of phase with his professed traditionalism — so much so that it leaves his broadsword defense of the English ruling classes on rather shaky footing. For there, the rulers’ “rascally, paltry origins” (as Paine said) were nakedly obvious: from Henry VIII’s confiscation of monastic lands to the Whig Oligarchy’s self-rescue in 1688, when they deposed James II. The origins of their properties and power were, that is, entirely too recent for Burke’s purposes. A defense of established oligarchic agrarian capitalism couched in the language of feudal reciprocity necessarily missed its mark by miles, coming just when industrial capitalism (paired with a commercial empire built by constant overseas wars) loomed on the horizon. Burke’s gasconade about antique chivalry fit well with his complaints about an age of “sophisters, economists, and calculators.” But as J.G.A. Pocock in Virtue, Commerce, and History (chapter 10) shows, Burke tended to denounce the inflationary bankers, debt-mongers, and suchlike characters he spotted in France, while passing over great heaps of them readily found in Britain.
John Taylor of Caroline, a Virginian contemporary of Burke and Paine, pictured the English state as “a confederation of parties of interest … the church of England, the paper stock party, the East India company, the military party, the pensioned and sinecure party, and the ins and outs, once called whigs and tories,” arrayed under the monarchy and excluding the bulk of the people. Thus “no British nation” existed aside from these organized interests (An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States).
Burke’s real contributions survive in the works of Friedrich Carl von Savigny, G.W.F. Hegel, Robert Nisbet, Michael Oakeshott, and others. There was one genuinely interesting conservative after Burke, but he was (damn the luck) an agrarian radical who also owed something to Paine, namely, William Cobbett (1762–1835).
Paine would seem to have fared better than Burke, ideologically speaking. There is no end to latter-day liberals who claim parts of his legacy. From the first, the American republic-for-expansion (Machiavelli’s concept) obsessively promoted commerce and business enterprise. When, some years ago, Tony Blair talked up “Enterprise Britain,” he too acted within a broad liberal tradition. Both governments might claim Paine’s authority. But there is a missing link. American progressives (those latter-day “Adams of a new world”), and their “conservative” enemies alike, are all deeply entangled with a left-wing English Protestantism of which the deist Paine was a perfect representative in his way. (It seems an oversight that the words Protestant and Dissenting Protestant hardly appear in Levin’s book; nor Gnosticism, come to that.)
Last word
Where does this leave us, then, as heirs of a famous debate? In simplest terms, we must remain impressed with many of Paine’s complaints about the old order but also with Burke’s sense of the manifold dangers of revolution. One tends to agree with essayist William Hazlitt’s (1778–1830) friend, the Rev. Joseph Fawcett (1758–1804), “who had Paine’s ‘Rights of Man’ and Burke’s ‘Reflections on the French Revolution’ bound up in one volume; and who said that, both together, they made a very good book.”
This article was originally published in the December 2014 edition of Future of Freedom.