Sunday, December 20, 2015
OUTLINE: Levin, Yuval. The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left.
The Great Debate
Edmund
Burke, Thomas Paine and the Birth of Right and Left Part One
All
citations from…
Levin, Yuval. The
Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left.
Edmund Burke
• Lived
1729 – 1797
• Born
in
• House
of Parliament (Whig) from 1765 – 1794
• Supported
the American Revolution, vehemently opposed the French Revolution
Thomas Paine
• Lived
1737 – 1809
• Flunked
out of school, tried and failed at several jobs then migrated to
• Became
a journalist in
• Spent
much of the revolutionary years of his life in
• Died
impoverished and almost friendless due, in part, to his radically deist views
and his attack on Christianity in “The Age of Reason.”
Nature and History
[In
Common Sense] “…Paine takes his time getting to the American crisis
(which does not really appear until the pamphlet’s third section) and instead
launches into a thought experiment he insists is essential to grounding any
theory of politics: “In order to gain a clear and just idea of the design and
end of government, let us suppose a small number of persons settled in some
sequestered part of the earth, unconnected with the rest, they will then
represent the first peopling of any country, or of the world. In this state of
natural liberty, society will be their first thought.” (p44)
(Quotes
from Yuval Levin are in Arial font.)
Nature and History (Paine)
“Every history of the creation… however they may vary in their opinion
or belief of certain particulars, all agree in establishing one point, the
unity of man; by which I mean that men are all of one degree, and consequently
that all men are born equal, and with equal natural right, in the same manner
as if posterity had been continued by creation instead of generation, the
latter being only the mode by which the former is carried forward; and
consequently every child born into the world must be considered as deriving its
existence from God. The world is as new to him as it was to the first man that
existed, and his natural right in it is of the same kind.” (pp.45 – 46)
(Block quotes from Paine and Burke in Bookman Old Style.)
Nature and History (Paine)
“A nation is composed of distinct, unconnected individuals, [and] …
public good is not a term opposed to the good of individuals; on the contrary,
it is the good of every individual collected.” (p46)
Nature and History (Paine)
“A great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect
of government. It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural
constitution of man. It existed prior to government, and would exist if the
formality of government was abolished.” (pp. 47 - 48)
Nature and History
“The
beginnings of any society, Burke writes, are almost certain to involve some
sort of barbarism (not to say crime). But over time, by slowly responding to
circumstantial exigencies, societies develop more mature forms – a process
that, as Burke puts it in the Reflections on the Revolution in France,
“mellows into legality governments that were violent in their commencement.” A
return to beginnings would thus not offer an opportunity to start anew on
proper principles, but would rather risk a reversion to barbarism. “There is a
sacred veil to be drawn over the beginnings of all governments,” Burke argues,
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.”
(p.53)
Nature and History (Burke)
“The pretended rights of
man, which have made this havoc [the French Revolution] cannot be the rights
of the people. For to be a people, and to have these rights, are things
incompatible. The one supposes the presence, the other the absence of a state
of civil society.”
* * *
The idea
of a people is the idea of a corporation. It is wholly artificial; and made
like all other legal fictions by common agreement… When men, therefore, break
up the original compact or agreement which gives its corporate form and
capacity to a state, they are no longer a people; they have no longer a
corporate existence; they have no longer a legal coactive force to bind within,
not a claim to be recognized abroad. They are a number of vague loose
individuals, and nothing more.” (p.55)
Nature and History (Burke)
“I cannot conceive how any
man can have brought himself to consider his country as nothing but carte
blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases. A man full of warm
speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he
finds it; but a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he
shall make the most of the existing materials of his country.” (p.56)
Nature and History (Burke)
“By a constitutional policy,
working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our
government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and
transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of
fortune, the gifts of providence, are handed down to us, and from us, in the
same course and order. Our political system is placed in a just correspondence
and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence
decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts; wherein, by the
disposition of a stupendous wisdom, molding together the great mysterious
incorporation of the human race, the whole at one time is never old, or
middle-aged, or young, but in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on
through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression.
Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what
we improve, we are never wholly new; in what we retain, we are never wholly
obsolete.” (p.65)
Justice and Order
“Burke turns out,
therefore, to be neither a utilitarian proceduralist nor a natural-law
philosopher. He does not believe that man-made law is the final authority and
that only consequences matter. Nor does he believe that political life is an
expression of unchanging Christian truths. The regime, he suggests, does not
owe its legitimacy directly to God, and neither is every whim of the sovereign
legitimate. He proposes, rather, a novel notion of political change that
emerges from precisely his model of nature and his (again, rather novel) idea
of prescription. And yet over time, this idea points us toward a standard of
justice and judgment beyond pure utility.” (p.76)
Justice and Order (Burke)
On Wise vs.
Unwise Governance
“These
are matters incapable of exact definition. But, through no man can draw a
stroke between the confines of day and night, yet light and darkness are upon
the whole tolerably distinguishable. Nor will it be impossible for a Prince to
find out such a mode of government, and such persons to administer it, as will
give a great degree of content to his people, without any curious and anxious
research for that abstract, universal, perfect harmony, which, while he is
seeking, he abandons those means of ordinary tranquility which are in his power
without any research at all.” (p. 80)
Justice and Order (Burke)
On Different
Forms of Government
“
Justice and Order (Burke)
“Those levelers
therefore only change and pervert the natural order of things. The load the
edifice of society by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure
requires to be on the ground. The association of tailors and carpenters, of
which the republic (of
Justice and Order
“Thomas Paine, of
course, could hardly disagree more with Burke than he did on this point.
Paine’s work was the very embodiment of the radical egalitarianism that Burke
feared. Paine believed that every man stands in an equal relation to his origin
with every other, and therefore that none is entitles to reign supreme.” (p.88)
Justice and Order (Paine)
On Hereditary
Monarchy and Aristocracy
“Male
and female are distinctions of nature, good and bad the distinctions of heaven,
but how a race of men came into the world so exalted above the rest and
distinguished like some new species, is worth inquiring into, and whether they
are the means of happiness or misery to mankind.”
Justice and Order (Paine)
On Hereditary
Monarchy and Aristocracy
“In all
cases they took care to represent government as a thing made up of mysteries,
which only themselves understood; and they hid from the understanding of the
nation the only thing that was beneficial to know, namely, that government is
nothing more than a national association acting on the principles of society.”
(p. 88)
Choice and Obligation
“For
Paine, the natural equality of all human beings translates to complete
political equality and therefore to a right to self-determination. The formation
of society was itself a choice made by free individuals, so the natural rights
that people bring with them into society are rights to act as one chooses, free
of coercion. Each person should have the right to do as he chooses unless his
choices interfere with the equal rights and freedoms of others. And when that
happens – when society as a whole must act through its government to restrict
the freedom of some of its members – government can only act in accordance with
the wishes of the majority, aggregated through a political process. Politics,
in this view, is fundamentally an arena for the exercise of choice, and our
only real political obligations are to respect the freedom and choices of
others.” (p.91)
Choice and Obligation (Paine)
“Suppose twenty
persons, strangers to each other, to meet in a country not before inhabited.
Each would be a Sovereign in his own natural right. His will would be his law,
but his power, in many cases, inadequate to his right; and the consequence
would be that each might be exposed, not only to each other, but to the other
nineteen. It would then occur to them that their condition would be much
improved if a way could be devised to exchange that quantity of danger into so
much protection; so that each individual should possess the strength of the
whole number.” (p. 93)
Choice and Obligation (Paine)
“As all their
rights in the first case are natural rights, and the exercise of those rights
supported only by their own natural individual power, they would begin by distinguishing
between those rights they could individually exercise, fully and perfectly, and
those they could not. Of the first kind are of thinking, speaking forming and
giving opinions, and perhaps are those which can be fully exercised by the
individual without the aid of exterior assistance; or in other words, rights of
personal competency. Of the second kind are those of personal protection, of
acquiring and possessing property, in the exercise of which the individual
power is less than the natural right… These I consider to be civil rights, or
rights of compact, and are distinguishable from natural rights because in the
one we act wholly in our own person, in the other we agree not to do so, but
act under the guarantee of society.” (p. 93)
Choice and Obligation (Paine)
“First, That every
civil right grows out of a natural right; or, in other words, is a natural
right exchanged. Secondly, That civil power properly considered as such is made
up of the aggregate of that class of the natural rights of man, which becomes
defective in the individual in point of power, and answers not his purpose, but
where collected to a focus becomes competent to the Purpose of every one.
Thirdly, That the power produced by the aggregate of natural rights, imperfect
in the power in the individual, cannot be applied to invade the natural rights
which are retained in the individual, and in which the power to exercise is as
perfect as the right itself. We have now, in a few words, traced man from a
natural individual to a member of society, and shown, or endeavored to show,
the quality of the natural rights retained, and of those which are exchanged
for civil rights.” (p. 94)
Choice and Obligation
“For
Burke, human nature can only be understood within society and therefore within
the complex web of relations in which every person is embedded. None of us
chooses the nation, community, or family into which we are born, and while we
can choose to change our circumstances to some degree as we get older, we are
always defined by some crucial obligations and relationships not of our own
choosing. A just and healthy politics must recognize these obligations and
relationships and respond to society as it exists, before politics can enable
us to make changes for the better. In this view, politics must reinforce the
bonds that hold people together, enabling us to be free within society rather
than defining freedom to the exclusion of society and allowing us to meet our
obligations to past and future generations, too. Meeting obligations is as
essential to our happiness and our nature as making choices.” (p.92)
Choice and Obligation (Burke)
“Of this I am
certain, that in a democracy the majority of the citizens is capable of
exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority, whenever strong
divisions prevail in that kind of polity, as they often must; and that
oppression of the minority will extend to far greater numbers, and will be
carried on with much greater fury, than can almost ever be apprehended from the
dominion of a single scepter. In such a popular persecution, individual
sufferers are in a much more deplorable condition than in any other.” (p. 99 -
100)
Choice and Obligation (Burke)
indispensably to perform. Parents may not be consenting to their moral
relation; but consenting or not, they are bound to a long train of burthensome
duties towards which those with whom they have never made a convention of any
sort. Children are not consenting to their relation, but their relation,
without their actual consent, binds them to its duties, or rather it implies
their consent because the presumed consent of every rational creature is in
unison with the predisposed order of things. Men come in that matter into a
community with the social state of their parents, endowed with all the
benefits, loaded with all the duties of their situation. If the social ties and
ligaments, spun out of these physical relations which are the elements of the
commonwealth, in most cases begin, and always continue, independently of our
will, so without any stipulation, on our part, we are bound by that relation
called our country, which comprehends (as it has been well said) “all the
charities of all.” Nor are we left without powerful instincts to make this duty
as dear and grateful to us, as it is awful and coercive. (p. 102)
Choice and Obligation (Burke)
“This is a choice not of one day; or one set of people, not a tumultuary
and giddy choice; it is a deliberate election of ages and of generations; it is
a constitution made by what is ten thousand times better than choice, it is
made by the peculiar circumstances, occasions, tempers, dispositions, and
moral, civil, and social habitudes of the people, which disclose themselves
only in a long space of time. It is a vestment which accommodates itself to the
body. Nor is prescription of government formed upon blind, unmeaning prejudices
– for man is a most unwise and a most wise being. The individual is foolish;
the multitude, for the moment, is foolish, when they act without deliberation;
but the species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it always
acts right.” (p. 104)
Choice and Obligation (Burke)
“I cannot too
often recommend it to the serious consideration of all men who think civil
society to be within the province of moral jurisdiction that if we owe to it
any duty, it is not subject to our will. Duties are not voluntary. Duty and
will are even contradictory terms. Now though civil society might be at first a
voluntary act (which in many cases it undoubtedly was) its continuance is under
a permanent standing covenant, coexisting with the society; and it attaches
upon every individual of that society, without any formal act of his own…Men
without their choice derive benefits from that association; without their
choice they enter into a virtual obligation as binding as any that is actual.
Look through the whole of life and the whole system of duties. Much of the
strongest moral obligations are such as were never the results of our option.
(p. 106 - 107)
Choice and Obligation (Burke)
“ Society is
indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts, for the objects of mere occasional
interest, may be dissolved at pleasure; but the state ought not to be
considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper
and coffee… or some other such low concern… to be dissolved by the fancy of the
parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence… It is a partnership in all
science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all
perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many
generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living,
but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be
born… The municipal corporations of that universal kingdom are not morally at
liberty… to dissolve it into an unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos of
elementary principles.; It is the first and supreme necessity only, a necessary
that is not chosen but chooses, a necessity paramount to deliberation, that
admits no discussion, and demands no evidence, which alone can justify a resort
to anarchy. (p. 107 - 108)
Choice and Obligation (Burke)
“If civil society be made for the advantage of man, all the advantages
for which it is made become his right. It is an institution of beneficence; and
law itself is only beneficence acting by a rule. Men have a right to live by
that rule; they have a right to justice; as between their fellows, whether
their fellows are in politic function or in ordinary occupation. They have a
right to the fruits of their industry; and to the means of making their
industry fruitful. They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents; to
the nourishment and improvement of their offspring; to instruction in life, and
to consolation in death. Whatever each man can separately do, without
trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right
to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill and
force, can do in his favor. (109)
Choice and Obligation (Burke)
“Government is not made in virtue of natural rights, which may and do
exist in total independence of it; and exist in much greater clearness, and in
much greater degree of abstract perfection: but their abstract perfection is
their practical defect. By having a right to everything they want every thing. Government
is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a
right that these rights should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these
wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient
restraint upon their passions . (p.110)
Reason and
Prescription
Reason and Prescription (Levin)
“If
natural equality is the crucial premise of Enlightenment-liberal politics, and
government by consent its essential form, then human reason is its great moving
force.” (p.127)
Reason and Prescription (Burke)
“Politics
ought to be adjusted not to human reasonings but to human nature, of which the
reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part.” (p.129)
* * *
“A
statesman differs from a professor in [a] university… the latter has only the
general view of society; the former, the statesman, has a number of
circumstances to combine with these general ideas, and to take into his
consideration.” (p.131)
Reason and Prescription (Burke)
“The
legislators who framed the ancient republics knew their business was too
arduous to be accomplished with no better apparatus than the metaphysics of an
undergraduate, and the mathematics and arithmetic of an exciseman. They had to
do with men, and they were obliged to study human nature. They had to do with
citizens, and they were obliged to study the effects of those habits which are
communicated by the circumstances of civil life.” (continued)
Reason and Prescription (Burke)
“They were sensible that the operation of this second nature on the
first produced a new combination; and thence arose many diversities amongst
men, according to their birth, their education, their professions, the periods
of their lives, their residence in towns or in the country, their several ways
of acquiring and of fixing property, and according to the quality of the
property itself, all of which rendered them as it were so many different
species of animals… For the legislator would have been ashamed, that the coarse
husbandman should well know how to assort and to use his sheep, horses and
oxen, and should have enough common sense not to abstract and equalize them all
into animals, without providing for each kind an appropriate food, care and
employment; whilst he, the oeconomist, disposer, and shepherd of his own
kindred, subliming himself into an airy metaphysician, was resolved to know
nothing of his flocks, but as men in general.” (pp. 131 - 132)
Reason and Prescription (Levin)
“[Burke]
is concerned that an overreliance on theory may unleash extremism and
immoderation by unmooring politics from the polity. “Their principles always go
to the extreme,” Burke writes of the radicals of his day. Because they pursue
the vindication of a principle, they cannot stop short of total success. Even
when their aims are well conceived, the radicals will not accept it a good
thing if it “does not come up to the full perfection of the abstract idea,” and
instead they will “push for the more perfect, which cannot be attained without
tearing to pieces the whole contexture of the commonwealth.” Burke believed
that when the perfect is thus made the enemy of the good, political life can
never be satisfactory, since there is no perfection in politics.” (p.133)
Reason and Prescription (Burke)
“We are afraid to put men to
live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect the
the stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to
avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.” (p.135)
* * *
“If you
apprehend that on a concession you shall be pushed by metaphysical process to
the extreme lines, and argued out of your whole authority, my advice is this;
when you have recovered your old, your strong, your tenable position, then face
about - stop short - do nothing more - reason not at all - oppose the ancient
policy and practice of the empire as a rampart against the speculations of
innovators on both sides of the question; and you will stand on great, manly,
and sure ground. On this solid basis fix your machines, and they will draw
worlds toward you.” (p.143)
Reason and Prescription (Levin)
“Thomas
Paine viewed reason as a profoundly liberating force that can help man learn
his rights and establish governments equipped to guard and champion those
rights. “There is a morning of reason rising upon man on the subject of
government, that has not appeared before,” Paine writes. “As the barbarism of
the present old governments expires, the moral conditions of nations with respect
to each other will be changed.” Paine’s self-declared purpose is to advance the
cause of this rational politics. “It is time that nations should be rational,
and not be governed like animals, for the pleasure of their riders.” Making
nations rational was in one way or another his goal in every political
exertion.” (p.150)
Reason and Prescription (Paine)
“Mr. Burke
appears to have no idea of principles, when he is contemplating government.
“Ten years ago,” says he, “I could have felicitated
Reason and Prescription (Paine)
“Those two
distinct and opposite forms erect themselves on the two distinct and opposite
bases of Reason and Ignorance. As the exercise of Government requires talents
and abilities, and as talents and abilities cannot have hereditary descent, it
is evident that hereditary succession requires a belief from man to which his
reason cannot subscribe, and which can only be established upon his ignorance;
and the more ignorant any country is, the better it is fitted for this species
of Government. On the contrary, Government, in a well-constituted republic,
requires no belief from man beyond what his reason can give. He sees the
rationale of the wholes system, its origin and its operation; and as it is best
supported when best understood, the human faculties act with boldness, and
acquire, under this form of government, a gigantic manliness.” (p.156)
Reason and Prescription (Paine)
“Government
by precedent, without any regard to the principle of the precedent, is one of
the vilest systems that can be set up. By associating those precedents with a
superstitious reverence for ancient things, as monks show relics and call them
holy, the generality of mankind are received into the design. Governments now
act as if they were afraid to awaken a single reflection in man. They are
softly leading him to the sepulcher of precedents, to deaden his faculties and
call attention from the scene of revolutions. They feel that he is arriving at
knowledge faster than they wish, and their policy of precedents is the
barometer of their fears.” (p.158)
Reason and Prescription (Levin)
“This dispute between universal principles and
historical precedents - between a politics of explicit knowledge and a politics
of implicit knowledge - cuts to the core of the debate that still defines our
politics. 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 that 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.”
(p.175)
Revolution and Reform (Bekkenhuis)
Skipping this chapter
as it makes a simple point.
If one believes that inherited institutions contain the implicit wisdom
of a people throughout history with all the particularity of circumstances,
then one seeks - as did Edmund Burke - to presume the good and reform the
defects and seek to improve upon it for future generations, with the burden of
proof being on innovation.
If one believes – as did Thomas Paine - that inherited institutions, in
fact, disguise their irrationality and injustice to keep despots in power then
the only rational choice is to sweep it all away through revolution and begin
anew as did the first humans when they formed societies.
Generations and the Living (Paine)
“A nation, though
continually existing, is continually in a state of renewal and succession. It
is never stationary. Every day produces new births, carries minors forward to
maturity, and old persons from the stage. In this ever running flood of
generations there is no part superior in authority to another. Could we
conceive an idea of superiority in any, at what point in time, or in what
century of the world, are we to fix it? To what cause are we to ascribe it? By
what evidence are we to prove it? By what criterion are we to know it?” (p.208)
Generations and the Living (Burke)
“One of the first
and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are
consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life renters in it, unmindful
of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their
posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not
think it amongst their rights to cut off the entail or commit waste on the
inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their
society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them a ruin instead of a
habitation, and teaching these successors as little respect to their
contrivances as they had themselves respected the institutions of their
forefathers. (pp. 215 - 216)
Generations and the Living (Levin)
“Here
we find the true bottom of the Burke-Paine debate, and from here we can begin
to appreciate how their differences have helped to shape our own. They
disagreed about whether some basic aspects of the human condition, especially
the facts that we are all born and that we all die, should decisively shape
human societies. Paine’s assertive, confident, rationalist, technocratic, and
progressive outlook held that through the right kinds of political
arrangements, man could overcome the limits that that these facts might impose
and he could therefore reshape his world to his preferences and even end the
long-standing scourges of injustice, war and suffering. Burke’s grateful,
protective, cautious, pious, gradualist, and reformist outlook held that man
could only hope to improve his circumstances if he understood his own limits,
built on the achievements of those who came before him to repair their errors,
and realized that some profound human miseries and vices are permanent
functions of our nature - and that pretending otherwise would only make them
worse.
“Both are modern attitudes, and both are liberal too, but they disagree
about just what modernity and liberalism mean. Indeed, that very disagreement
has ultimately come to define modern liberalism.” (p. 222)
Conclusion
I’ll
pass on Levin’s conclusions regarding the trajectory from Paine & Burke to
our current politics as, following the legacy of Thomas Paine, we’ll figure
that out for ourselves. (And, by the way, Paine would hate to be cited as an
authority! ☺ )
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