Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

What sound like fights between capitalism and socialism or between “religious traditionalism and secular cosmopolitanism,” turn out to be battles between “progressive liberalism” and “conservative liberalism,” echoes of the more than 200-year-old dispute between Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke. That’s the argument of Yuval Levin, the editor of the journal National Affairs and a former aide to both House Speaker Newt Gingrich and President George W. Bush. He provides a valuable service by dusting off the writings of Burke and Paine and by clearly, concisely, and accessibly summarizing them in a way that highlights their relevance to contemporary politics and policy. Burke, a member of the British House of Commons, was, by Mr. Levin’s telling, a gradualist reformer, a “forward-looking traditionalist” wary of the dangers of unchecked democracy, conscious of the ignorance and fallibility of mankind, and respectful of obligations to family and nation. Paine, a pamphleteer influential in the American Revolution, was, by Mr. Levin’s account, a utopian who emphasized free choice and the consent of the governed, opposed monarchy, was skeptical of religion, had confidence in new structures based on reason, and was impatient in confronting injustice. Part of why both men are still remembered is their skill as writers. Mr. Levin provides enough quotations and excerpts for readers to understand why. Paine is known not only for his “Common Sense,” which helped launch the American Revolution, but also for “The American Crisis:” “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France” and his other writings also includes some keepers: “What is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness…” Mr. Levin acknowledges that, 200 years later, America’s right-left arguments don’t always map so neatly onto the Burke-Paine diagram. I found myself recognizing the libertarian hero Milton Friedman of “Free To Choose” fame in Mr. Levin’s description of Paine’s emphasis on the individual and choice. Levin refers once to “the often communitarian Burke” and “the often libertarian Paine,” which makes some mischief with the book’s subtitle’s case that Burke is the father of the right and Paine is the father of the left. Today’s left, Mr. Levin writes, “could learn from Paine’s insistence on limits to the use of power and the role of government.” Today’s conservatives, in Mr. Levin’s view, are “far too open to the siren song of hyperindividualism,” and “could benefit by adopting Burke’s focus on the social character of man.” Mr. Levin, clearly an admirer of Burke, makes the case that he was not “merely a defender of the established order” but also “a leader in almost every reform effort,” who favored moderating excessive punishments in British criminal law, ending the slave trade, and making British law more friendly to dissenters from the Church of England. Yet Mr. Levin doesn’t flinch from recording some of Burke’s more abject fawning on the British nobility. The monarchist Burke and the religious skeptic Paine, an early supporter of the bloody French revolution, might seem to be unlikely models for today’s American politicians of either party. But Mr. Levin has made a convincing case that, 200 years later, we can still learn from both men.