Burke/Paine - Sometimes the deepest differences in politics aren’t about the conclusions people draw but the way they reach them.

Ghosts of Burke and Paine 

still haunt US politics

by Ramesh Ponnuru

The British statesman Edmund Burke and the Anglo-American revolutionary Thomas Paine both favored free trade, for example, but for different reasons. The radical Paine believed that free trade would spread rationality and enlightenment and thus help bring war and tyranny to an end. The conservative Burke thought that government interference with trade would likely do more harm than good.

The difference in outlook between the two men, as Yuval Levin argues in a fine new book called “The Great Debate,” underlies much of our politics more than 200 years after they wrote their pamphlets and essays.

The debate Levin describes is a family quarrel within liberalism. Both sides have sought to advance liberty as they understood it. Paine’s progressive version of liberalism championed the Enlightenment as a set of newly discovered principles for political life that needed only to be followed. Burke’s conservative version, on the other hand, thought liberty and equality were cultural achievements “built up over countless generations of social trial and error.”

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