Friday, January 10, 2014

Yuval Levin’s “The Great Debate”

Image via MSNBC
For Christmas, my daughter Jill gave me the book "The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left" by Yuval Levin. I'm really looking forward to reading it over the next few weeks.

Thanks to the Morning Joe staff, I'm able to copy and paste a couple of excerpts from the book's Introduction...
Anyone tracing the pedigree of our political ideas must be struck by the importance, and by the sheer eventfulness, of the late eighteenth century. Between about 1770 and 1800, many of the crucial concepts, terms, divisions, and arguments that still define our political life seemed to burst into the world in fierce and fiery succession. This was the era of the American Revolution and the French Revolution, and we have long since fallen into the comfortable habit of attributing the explosion of political philosophy and drama of that time to those monumental upheavals...

There are no perfect representatives of the two major parties to the great debate of that age, but there may well be no better representatives than Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. Burke was an Irish-born English politician and writer, a man of intense opinions with an unrivaled gift for expressing them in political rhetoric. He was his era’s most devoted and able defender of the inherited traditions of the English constitution. A patient, gradual reformer of his country’s institutions, he was among the first and surely the most adamant and effective critics of the radicalism of the French Revolution in English politics. Paine, an English-born immigrant to America, became one of the most eloquent and important voices championing the cause of independence for the colonies, and then, as revolution brewed in France, he became an influential advocate of the revolutionaries’ cause as an essayist and activist in Paris and London...
If you'd like to learn more about this book, you can watch an interview between Yuval Levin and the National Review’s Jonah Goldberg online via C-SPAN.

To view this C-SPAN video online just click here.

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