The Great Debate, Yuval Levin
The Great Debate, Yuval Levin
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The Great Debate
Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

Author: Yuval Levin

Narrator: Mike Chamberlain

Unabridged: 10 hr 31 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 12/22/2020

Synopsis

An acclaimed portrait of Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the origins of modern conservatism and liberalism

In The Great Debate, Yuval Levin explores the roots of the left/right political divide in America by examining the views of the men who best represented each side at its origin: Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. Striving to forge a new political path in the tumultuous age of the American and French revolutions, these two ideological titans sparred over moral and philosophical questions about the nature of political life and the best approach to social change: radical and swift, or gradual and incremental. The division they articulated continues to shape our political life today.

Essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the basis of our political order and Washington's acrimonious rifts today, The Great Debate offers a profound examination of what conservatism, progressivism, and the debate between them truly amount to.

About Yuval Levin

Yuval Levin is director of social, cultural, and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the editor of National Affairs. A former member of the White House domestic policy staff under George W. Bush, he has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, among many other publications. His previous books include The Fractured Republic and The Great Debate. He lives in Maryland.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Riku on April 08, 2015

The Perfect Omelet A good investigation of the origins of the great liberal political debate. Levin takes us to the original arguments and shows us how at a distance the great but nebulous political divides of our day take a much more concrete shape. Of course the author is slightly right-leaning and......more

Goodreads review by Bakunin on July 11, 2019

Great book which really helped clarify the difference between conservatism and certain strains of the enlightenment. Burkes contention is basically that we do not create society but we are born into it. We should therefore not think that we are smart enough to remake society according to abstract pr......more

Goodreads review by Drtaxsacto on December 21, 2013

I first read Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke almost 50 years ago. I will confess that I am more a Burkean than a Paineista. Levin does a careful analysis of the work of these two 18th century writers in a compare and contrast mode that I found quite interesting. Burke grew up as an Irishman - when we v......more

Goodreads review by Otto on July 26, 2019

Paine and Burke were powerful thinkers and rhetoricians who inserted their views surgically into the central debates of modern politics, from the American crisis to the French revolution. This book is a lean, precise, and analytical account of the central passions and reasons of their philosophies.......more

Goodreads review by Joseph on December 12, 2020

This book's thesis is highly patchy and under-developed, but if you want to learn about Paine and Burke, it is very good. Levin is a conservative who clearly favors Burke, but he's fair to both and points out strengths and weaknesses on both sides. He also doesn't set them up as totally opposed, giv......more

Quotes

"Yuval Levin, whose sharp thinking was honed at the University of Chicago s Committee on Social Thought...is one of conservatism s most sophisticated and measured explicators."—George F. Will, Washington Post

"[The Great Debate's] architecture is clever and intellectually persuasive.... A thoughtful introduction to this famous paradigmatic opposition."—Washington Post

"In a Burkean manner, Mr. Levin enriches through wisdom rather than prescription. He gives us something more than a manual of past lessons--namely, the historical framework to achieve greater understanding."—Wall Street Journal

"In this lively and probing book, Levin, one of the most influential conservative writers in the United States, looks at the ideas of Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, towering figures in the late-eighteenth-century transatlantic Enlightenment...The Great Debate won't settle any of the political disputes roiling U.S. politics today, but those who read it carefully will find it easier to understand their opponents--and perhaps even to find some common ground."—Foreign Affairs

"Levin enters into another great debate that riles academia: between historians insisting upon the uniqueness and specificity of events, which defy abstractions and generalizations, and philosophers impatient with the ephemera and contingency of events, which do not rise to the level of truth and certainty. Here too he rises to the occasion, satisfying the scruples of historians and philosophers alike. From a debate raged about an event centuries ago, he deduces truths that illuminate some of our most vexing political and social problems today."—Gertrude Himmelfarb, Weekly Standard

"The Great Debate is a masterful and loving piece of work, the kind of solo performance that commands mute attention and makes even a crinkled cough-drop wrapper sound like an errant clang of the gong. It does more than announce Levin's arrival; it is, in itself, a refutation--this time with an inerrant clang--of the factitious notion that intellectual conservatism is a bygone thing."—Commentary

"[A] wonderful book."—Los Angeles Times

"The definitive intellectual history of an argument so powerful that it echoes to the present day."—National Review Online

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