Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

First, the good. Levin, a journalist, does a good job of producing a readable and interesting analysis of the differences in structure and conclusion between Edmund Burke's "conservative" and Thomas Paine's "liberal" thought. He explains the history of their dialogue on the French Revolution and what it means for how society should be organized. (Burke, a skeptical of the revolution, thought that tradition was a fairly good guide to how societies should be organized, and that any changes should be make by piecemeal changes aided by historical reflection. Paine, a proponent of the French Revolution, argued that we can best deduce how society should be arranged by reason, reflecting on what human rights are as a matter of abstract fact, etc; historical knowledge was not, for him, particularly necessary, and gradual change only delays arriving at the truly just social order.) Another good thing about this book was the organization. The book is well organized, each chapter focusing on a different area of Burke's and Paine's thought - the nature of rights, the nature and scope of human reason, what we owe to (particularly poor) others. Through this staging of chapters, a pretty clear picture emerges of how Burke's and Paine's thought make sense via their own "internal logics." (If Burke thought x, it makes sense that he'd argue y, etc.) Lastly, the book - written by a self-labeled conservative - is quite unbiased and, as far as I know, accurate. Levin does a good job arguing both side's "cases" as strongly as possible, and if you didn't know his political persuasion, my guess is that you couldn't guess. So, why deduct three stars? Because the author fails 100% to convince us that this debate is more than just an interesting exercise in comparative philosophy, and that it also reflects the essential "fault lines" between conservatism and liberalism. Part of Levin's goal - expressed even in the subtitle - is to use this debate between Paine and Burke as an explanation of the origins of current "right" and "left." And I wish Levin would have done that, because I am thoroughly unconvinced. Take two instances: abortion and gun rights. Paine - the figure representing modern liberalism appeals to natural rights more than Burke, who thought rights were social conventions that in some ways, changed over time. Not only does that not graft to the abortion debate between "left" and "right," it grafts the opposite way of what Levin would suggest. Conservatives tend to do the abstract appeals to natural rights (the right to life that we all have, even the unborn), while liberals tend to suggest that rights are more "social conventionish" such that rights - like the right to life or right to choose - can conflict, leaving us to choose the most socially beneficial result. (Another area where we can see this is debates over gun rights; conservatives are more Paineish arguers that we have an inalienable right to bear arms, while liberals tend to a Burkean argument that any right to bear arms must change shape and scope with social necessity.) Yes, those are two issues of many, but they reflect, I think, a general shape of current conservative and liberal approaches that are incompatible with the fault lines Levin sees. If anything, conservatives tend to be the ones who use appeals to abstract rights unchanging over time, while liberals tend to take the more Burkean positions that rights and justice are things that must change gradually over time. (This isn't always true, of course; in areas of civil liberties like rights to privacy, the position is often reversed, with conservatives having been the most enthusiastic supporters of increasing the surveilance state in response to "changing times" of a post-9/11 world.) But this is why Levin's failure to apply Burke and Paine's interlocutions over the French revolution is disappointing: if anything, modern debates between "left" and "right" just don't appear to break down into Levin's "Left = Paine, Right = Burke" model. If it does, he doesn't even attempt to explain how. As for a better because more varied and nuanced book discussing a similar idea - that the right tends to favor a model of "constrained man" and the left, "unconstrained man," I'd suggest Thomas Sowell's "Conflict of VIsions." Levin's book might be best seen as a supplement to that book.