Burke Versus Paine, the Argument That Defined Left and Right for Good

If you have ever wondered why "left" and "right" mean what they mean, the answer involves furniture. In the summer of 1789, members of France's new National Assembly who favored keeping a strong royal veto took to sitting on the right side of the hall, and those who wanted to strip the king of it sat on the left. The seating chart outlived the Assembly, the monarchy and the republic. Political science has been using a French seating plan ever since.

But a seating plan is not a philosophy. The philosophy came a year later, from two men who had once been friendly, both of whom had defended the American cause, and who now looked at the French Revolution and saw opposite things. Edmund Burke published Reflections on the Revolution in France in November 1790. Thomas Paine answered with Rights of Man in March 1791. The exchange that followed set the terms of the left-right argument so completely that you can still map most modern quarrels onto it. Here is the comparison, the history, and why American conservatives can honor both the Revolution of 1776 and the man who opposed the Revolution of 1789 without contradiction.

Two men who had been allies

Burke was born in Dublin in 1729, the son of a Protestant lawyer and a Catholic mother. He made his career in London as a writer and a Whig member of Parliament, and from 1774 to 1775 he was among the most eloquent defenders of the American colonists in the House of Commons. In his speech on conciliation with America in March 1775, he urged Parliament to stop trying to tax people who had never been taxed by it and to respect the spirit of liberty they had inherited from England itself.

Paine was born in Thetford, England, in 1737, the son of a Quaker corset maker. He failed at several trades, including excise officer, and arrived in Philadelphia in 1774 with a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin. In January 1776 he published Common Sense, a pamphlet that argued in plain language for independence and against monarchy itself, and it sold on a scale no American publication had approached. In December 1776, with Washington's army in retreat, he began The American Crisis with the line "These are the times that try men's souls."

So both men took the American side. Paine even visited Burke at his country house in 1788 while promoting a design for an iron bridge. Then came the Bastille, and the friendship did not survive it.

The exchange, in order

• November 1, 1790: Burke publishes Reflections, in the form of a letter to a young Frenchman, arguing that the French revolutionaries are destroying a society to rebuild it on abstract theory and will end in despotism.
• March 1791: Paine publishes Rights of Man, Part I, a point-by-point answer defending the Revolution and the principle that every generation may remake its government as it sees fit.
• August 1791: Burke replies indirectly in An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, arguing that his own principles are those of the Whigs of 1688 and that the new Whigs who praise France have abandoned them.
• February 1792: Paine publishes Rights of Man, Part II, extending his argument into proposals for social programs funded by taxation and an attack on hereditary government everywhere.
• December 1792: Paine, who has already left for France, is tried in absentia in England for seditious libel and convicted. He has been elected to the French National Convention.

Then the Revolution answered both books. In January 1793 Paine argued in the Convention against executing Louis XVI and proposed exile to America instead. He lost. By the end of 1793 he was in the Luxembourg prison as a suspect, and he was released in November 1794 only after the American minister, James Monroe, claimed him as a citizen of the United States. While in France he wrote The Age of Reason (published in parts in 1794 and 1795), a deist attack on organized religion and the authority of the Bible. He returned to America in 1802 and died in New York on June 8, 1809. Burke had died in 1797, having seen the Terror he predicted.

The table

Here are the two men on the questions that mattered most.

Let me take the four most important rows in turn.

Rights: abstract or inherited?

Burke was not against rights. He was against rights stated so abstractly that they could justify anything. In the Reflections he says that he does not deny the real rights of men in theory, but the rights men have in civil society are the advantages for which society was made: to live by the law, to the fruits of their industry, to the acquisitions of their parents, to the nourishment and improvement of their children. Rights, for Burke, are concrete and secured by institutions. That is why he could support the Americans: they were demanding the specific rights of Englishmen, written in charters and common law, which Parliament was denying them.

Paine thought this was backward. Rights belong to every person by nature, he argued, and any government that does not secure them has no legitimacy, however old it is. In Paine's view, Burke cared more about the trappings of the old order than about its victims. His most famous line against the Reflections targeted Burke's lament over the treatment of Queen Marie Antoinette: "He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird."

The dead and the living

This is the deepest disagreement, and it has an American echo. Paine wrote in Rights of Man:

Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.

Burke had already answered it in the Reflections. Society is indeed a contract, he wrote, but not a contract like a partnership agreement in trade in pepper and coffee, to be dissolved at the fancy of the parties. It is a partnership in all science, in all art, 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 same argument happened privately between two Americans. In September 1789, Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison from Paris that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living, and proposed that no law, constitution or debt should bind for longer than a generation, which he reckoned at about nineteen years. Madison replied in February 1790 with a Burkean answer. Improvements made by the dead, he pointed out, benefit the living and give the living an obligation; debts may be incurred for purposes that benefit those who come later; and a constitution that expired every nineteen years would invite factional chaos and destroy the veneration that gives a government stability. Madison won that argument. The Constitution has no expiration date.

Reason: a bank or a blueprint?

Paine trusted reason to design a government the way an engineer designs a bridge: start from first principles and calculate. Burke thought political reason was a different thing. Individuals are fallible, and what any one person can reason out in a lifetime is small compared to what a civilization has learned by trial and error. That is the root of his doctrine of prescription, explained in Burke's Doctrine of Prescription Says Old Institutions Deserve a Hearing, and of G. K. Chesterton's later description of tradition as giving votes to our ancestors, developed in Chesterton Called Tradition the Democracy of the Dead, and He Was Right.

Thomas Sowell gave this disagreement a modern name. He called Paine's outlook the unconstrained vision, in which human nature is perfectible and social problems yield to the right plan, and Burke's the constrained vision, in which human nature is limited and institutions must work with it rather than against it. The framework is explained in Sowell's Two Visions Explain Why Smart People Talk Past Each Other, and it is still the best map of why intelligent people in politics talk past each other.

Religion

Burke held that man is by his constitution a religious animal, that religion is the basis of civil society, and that a people stripped of it would find something worse to worship. Paine, in The Age of Reason, declared his belief in one God and his hope for happiness beyond this life, and then rejected every church, Jewish, Christian or Islamic, as a human invention: "My own mind is my own church." The book destroyed his reputation in America. Many of the same people who had cheered Common Sense would not forgive the attack on Christianity, and when he returned in 1802, he was shunned by much of the public.

The French Revolution settled this argument in its own way. Having dethroned the Church, the revolutionaries tried to replace it, first with a Cult of Reason and then, in June 1794, with Robespierre's Festival of the Supreme Being. Burke had predicted that a people stripped of religion would not become rational. They would invent a substitute. He was right.

The strongest case for Paine

Fairness requires the best version of Paine's side, and it is strong.

Paine won on many things. Hereditary monarchy and aristocracy, which Burke defended, have largely disappeared as governing institutions. Democracy and equal political rights, which Paine championed, are now the norm across the free world. Burke's lament for Marie Antoinette and the "age of chivalry" reads as sentiment about a privileged class while peasants starved. And Paine's American work was indispensable: without Common Sense, independence might have come later or not at all. If the Revolution of 1776 was right, the argument goes, then Paine's principle that a people may throw off a government that violates its rights was right, and Burke's caution was on the wrong side of history.

Here is the answer, point by point.

1. The American Revolution was closer to Burke's model than Paine's. The colonists claimed rights they had already exercised for a century and a half under their charters and assemblies. The Declaration's long list of grievances is a list of specific violations of established practice, not a theory of the world. After independence they kept the common law, their churches, their local governments and their property. Burke supported the American cause precisely because it was a defense of inherited liberty.

1. The French Revolution was Paine's model, and it failed on its own terms. Paine was nearly executed by the revolution he defended. A movement that jails its own most famous foreign champion for being insufficiently radical has refuted the claim that reason alone can safely design a society.

1. The democracies that lasted were built Burke's way. Britain extended the vote step by step over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries without a revolution. The United States amended its Constitution through Article V rather than starting over. Stable democracy has come from reform within inherited institutions far more often than from revolutionary refoundings.

1. Paine's own later proposals show where his logic leads. In Agrarian Justice (1797) he proposed a national fund, financed by a tax on inheritances, to pay every person a sum at age twenty-one and a pension in old age. Whatever one thinks of the idea, it shows the trajectory: the generation that owes nothing to the dead soon owes everything to the state.

1. Burke's lament was about more than the queen. The famous passage ends with the warning that the age of chivalry is gone and that of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded. His point was that when the restraints of honor, manners and religion are dissolved, nothing but force remains to restrain the powerful. The Terror proved it within three years.

Why Americans can honor both 1776 and Burke

Here is the bottom line for an American conservative. There is no contradiction between celebrating the Declaration and reading Burke, because Burke himself celebrated the American cause. The contradiction runs the other way: it is the Paine of 1791, not the Paine of 1776, who is hard to square with the American founding. Common Sense was a call to defend a free people's existing self-government. Rights of Man was a call to remake every government on earth from scratch. Americans took the first and, after watching France, quietly declined the second. You can see the founding generation's choice in the Constitution's long amendment process, its protection of property and contracts, and its refusal to establish any Cult of Reason.

The left-right divide that began on the benches of the French Assembly is, at its root, the Burke-Paine argument. The left trusts reason and the present generation to redesign society; the right trusts the inheritance and asks the reformer to prove his case. The defense of that inheritance as the condition of freedom is the argument of Ordered Liberty Is Not a Contradiction, It Is the Only Kind That Lasts, and the details of what Burke did and did not believe are sorted out in Seven Myths About Edmund Burke That His Fans and Critics Both Repeat.

The case in brief

1. Burke's Reflections (1790) and Paine's Rights of Man (1791 and 1792) set the terms of the left-right divide that began with seating in the French Assembly in 1789.
2. They split on the source of rights, the authority of tradition, the claims of the dead on the living, the reach of reason, revolution, government and religion.
3. Madison's 1790 answer to Jefferson's "earth belongs to the living" letter shows the American founders taking Burke's side on the bond between generations.
4. Paine's best case is that democracy won, but the democracies that lasted were built by Burkean reform, and the French Revolution nearly executed Paine himself.
5. Americans can honor 1776 and Burke together, because the American Revolution defended inherited liberty, which is why Burke supported it.

What you can do: read the first chapter of Common Sense and the "partnership" paragraph of the Reflections in one sitting, then bring both to our debate desk or to your family dinner and argue which one the Constitution of 1787 more closely follows.