The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left by Yuval Levin (Basic, £18.99)
“American politics these days,” Yuval Levin writes, “can seem impossibly complicated.” It can also seem toxically polarised—between conservatives and liberals, “red” states and “blue” states, Republicans and Democrats. Levin’s proposal in this engaging and provocative book is that the roots of this division—which often appears to have as much to do with culture as it does with policy—lie in the 18th century, in the debates between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine over the French Revolution.
It’s not clear, though, that Paine’s dispute with Burke—which Levin rightly sees as having its roots in two radically divergent conceptions of human nature—is an especially clarifying optic through which to observe the contemporary American scene. In fact, Levin acknowledges as much. And the book is none the worse for his doing so.
Indeed, what he ends up showing is the extent to which the differences between the “progressive liberalism” of Paine and the “conservative liberalism” of Burke fail to map on to the distinction between left and right as it is currently understood in the US. Levin reminds us just how un-Burkean much of the conservative movement in America is. The revanchist zeal of the Tea Party would surely have horrified Burke, whose intellectual temperament and political outlook were, as Levin observes, “pious, gradualist and reformist.”
Levin is a conservative but acknowledges that many on his side are “too rhetorically strident and far too open to the siren song of hyper-individualism.” Burke, you suspect, would have approved of that diagnosis.
“American politics these days,” Yuval Levin writes, “can seem impossibly complicated.” It can also seem toxically polarised—between conservatives and liberals, “red” states and “blue” states, Republicans and Democrats. Levin’s proposal in this engaging and provocative book is that the roots of this division—which often appears to have as much to do with culture as it does with policy—lie in the 18th century, in the debates between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine over the French Revolution.
It’s not clear, though, that Paine’s dispute with Burke—which Levin rightly sees as having its roots in two radically divergent conceptions of human nature—is an especially clarifying optic through which to observe the contemporary American scene. In fact, Levin acknowledges as much. And the book is none the worse for his doing so.
Indeed, what he ends up showing is the extent to which the differences between the “progressive liberalism” of Paine and the “conservative liberalism” of Burke fail to map on to the distinction between left and right as it is currently understood in the US. Levin reminds us just how un-Burkean much of the conservative movement in America is. The revanchist zeal of the Tea Party would surely have horrified Burke, whose intellectual temperament and political outlook were, as Levin observes, “pious, gradualist and reformist.”
Levin is a conservative but acknowledges that many on his side are “too rhetorically strident and far too open to the siren song of hyper-individualism.” Burke, you suspect, would have approved of that diagnosis.
