Book review: The French Connection
How the Revolution, and two thinkers, bequeathed us ‘right’ and ‘left.’
The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left By Yuval Levin
Re viewed by GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law. So, too, extreme situations make bad policy and worse philosophy. The French Revolution was just such a situation; compared with the French, the English and American revolutions are almost unworthy of the title of revolution. No one took the measure of the extremity of that revolution better than its contemporaries Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. And nobody drew the most far-reaching, antithetical, and enduring political and philosophical lessons from that revolution.
“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. He is also a credentialed political philosopher, having earned his
doctorate from the Committee on Social Thought at the University
of Chicago
Edmund Burke does not make that task easy. On the contrary,
he almost defies it. He made no secret of his contempt for “metaphysicians.” “I
do not enter into these metaphysical distinctions,” he wrote in his defense of
the American Revolution. “I hate the very sound of them.” Twenty years later,
the French revolutionaries provoked him even more: “Nothing can be conceived
more hard than the heart of a thoroughbred metaphysician. It comes nearer to
the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than to the frailty and passion of a
man.”
Nor was it only philosophy in the formal “metaphysical”
sense that he derided. On one occasion after another, he expressed his distrust
of “principles” and “abstractions.” “History is a preceptor of prudence, not of
principles,” he declared.
Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for
nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour
and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and
political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.
The issue is complicated by the charge leveled against
Burke, in his time and since, that he was inconsistent, most notably in his
support of the American Revolution and condemnation of the French Revolution.
Burke anticipated such criticism when he described himself, in the concluding
words of hisReflections on the Revolution in France France
does not astonish me so much as the revolution in Mr. Burke.” Nor did it
satisfy Thomas Paine, who opened the preface to Rights of Man by
explaining that he had thought of Burke, the defender of the American
Revolution, as “a friend to mankind,” and, as their acquaintance had been
founded on that ground, he would have found it “more agreeable .. to
continue in that opinion, than to change it.”
And then there is the temptation to reduce this debate of
ideas to a clash of personal and class interests: Burke the defender of the
status quo, Paine the inveterate dissident and rebel. Burke, born into a
respectable Irish family, well-bred and well-educated, quickly gained entrée
into the intellectual and political elite of London ,
and thus to the seat in Parliament that made him a commanding presence in the
country. One might well suppose that his motives were less than disinterested,
that he had compelling personal reasons to oppose the French Revolution. The
assault on the French establishment—the monarchy, aristocracy, and church—was,
after all, an invitation to a similar assault on the established institutions
in Britain, in which Burke had a vested interest, so to speak.
So, too, Paine seemed fated to be the defender of the
principle as well as the fact of revolution. His poor English family provided
him with the most minimal formal education, obliging him to seek a livelihood
in one trade or another, in one town or another. When he found a position as an
itinerant excise officer, he was fired for agitating for better pay and
conditions for his fellow workers. With his personal life in shambles (his
first wife died in childbirth, his second left him because of poverty), he
sought refuge in America .
By then self-educated and powerfully self-motivated, he became a passionate
voice, first for the American revolutionaries against a foreign tyrant, and
then for the French against their native oppressors.
Biographers may have no trouble casting Burke and Paine in
their respective roles. But their debate over the French Revolution has a life
of its own, which is why it continues to resonate today, more than two
centuries after that momentous event. Levin confronts the full challenge of
this debate by probing the principles and philosophies, sometimes explicit,
more often implicit, that animate it, making it as vital today as it was
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