by Shaun Rieley
When Russell Kirk published The Conservative Mind in 1953, Edmund Burke was a relatively obscure figure in British parliamentary history. Since that time, he has risen in stature, in no small part because of Russell Kirk’s placement of Burke as the fountainhead of his Anglo-American conservative genealogy. As “the father of conservatism” (as some have called him) many on the American right have looked to his writings for guidance, though others have leveled sharp critiques, such as Leo Strauss’ famous treatment of Burke in the final chapter of his magnum opus Natural Right and History, also published in 1953.
Now comes Yuval Levin with – to my mind – one of the most important books of the past year, and a substantial contribution to Burke scholarship. Educated at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, where Leo Strauss taught for many years, Mr. Levin bucks the Straussian critique in his new book entitled The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right, and presents an fairly easy-to-read interpretation of the writings of both men, noting at the outset that he is a conservative – thereby intimating that he is a Burke partisan. Nevertheless, his treatment of both Burke and Paine is fair, and as he presents a convincing case that much of what comprises the modern left-right divided can be traced, in one way or another, to the very public debate that occurred between these two formidable thinkers in the late eighteenth century.
Mr. Levin himself is a formidable thinker as well. Having worked as a White House staffer subsequently earning a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought (the book began life as his doctoral dissertation), Mr. Levin is intimately familiar with American politics, from the highly abstract to the mundanely concrete, and is eminently capable of drawing the lines between the two. As he notes in the preface:
“I make my living as a combatant in policy debates…I am a think-tank scholar who studies health care, entitlement reform, the federal budget, and similarly wonkish fare…[but] making sense of these debates requires more than an immersion in the technical details. It requires a sense of how the different policy dilemmas that confront our society relate to one another and why they so frequently divide us as they do.” (p. ix)
To understand this, Mr. Levin points to the late eighteenth century as a time of great upheaval, both in practical politics as well as political philosophy, represented in the American and French Revolutions and the Anglo-American debate about the French revolution.
Now comes Yuval Levin with – to my mind – one of the most important books of the past year, and a substantial contribution to Burke scholarship. Educated at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, where Leo Strauss taught for many years, Mr. Levin bucks the Straussian critique in his new book entitled The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right, and presents an fairly easy-to-read interpretation of the writings of both men, noting at the outset that he is a conservative – thereby intimating that he is a Burke partisan. Nevertheless, his treatment of both Burke and Paine is fair, and as he presents a convincing case that much of what comprises the modern left-right divided can be traced, in one way or another, to the very public debate that occurred between these two formidable thinkers in the late eighteenth century.
Mr. Levin himself is a formidable thinker as well. Having worked as a White House staffer subsequently earning a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought (the book began life as his doctoral dissertation), Mr. Levin is intimately familiar with American politics, from the highly abstract to the mundanely concrete, and is eminently capable of drawing the lines between the two. As he notes in the preface:
“I make my living as a combatant in policy debates…I am a think-tank scholar who studies health care, entitlement reform, the federal budget, and similarly wonkish fare…[but] making sense of these debates requires more than an immersion in the technical details. It requires a sense of how the different policy dilemmas that confront our society relate to one another and why they so frequently divide us as they do.” (p. ix)
To understand this, Mr. Levin points to the late eighteenth century as a time of great upheaval, both in practical politics as well as political philosophy, represented in the American and French Revolutions and the Anglo-American debate about the French revolution.
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