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

(Basic Books, $28)

Nearly every American is a liberal—at least by classical definition, said Scott Galupo in TheAmericanConservative.com. That’s the argument that makes Yuval Levin’s illuminating new work “the must-read book of the year for conservatives,” though the point is only a building block. To Levin, the true divide between the Right and Left in America can be traced to a debate engaged in more than two centuries ago by two English observers of the French Revolution. During the American Revolution, statesman Edmund Burke and pamphleteer Thomas Paine both allied themselves with the rebels. But they broke decisively over 1789’s bloodier revolt. Like Paine, the proto-conservative Burke believed in government guided by reason and devoted to easing men’s burdens. That may surprise Republicans who today treat government as the enemy. So be it: Levin’s thoughtful treatise “fairly crackles with contemporary relevance.”

Burke, not surprisingly, “emerges as the more attractive and textured thinker” in Levin’s dual portrait, said Jack Rakove in The Washington Post. The author was a policy staffer in George W. Bush’s White House, and he’s always championed Burke’s cautious reformism. Burke, in blasting the French uprising, argued that the rebels had built their radical ideology on the mistaken belief that the rights of the individual predate society. To Burke, man was never born free of social ties, so there’s grave danger in any attempt to erase or negate the institutions that express or strengthen those ties. Paine instead embraced the revolutionaries’ fervent utopianism, and Levin acknowledges that he stands today as a hero of both the Left and Right. Why Levin instead considers Burke the father of modern conservatism thus remains “a mystery, even an absurdity,” that the book never resolves.

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Perhaps Levin should even consider switching party allegiances, said Harvey J. Kaye in TheDailyBeast.com. Though he’s “a rising star among right-wing public intellectuals,” Levin has decided to champion a thinker who bears almost no resemblance to today’s Republicans. Burke wasn’t cautious; “he was a reactionary”—a staunch defender of tradition and hierarchy who labeled common folk “the swinish multitude.” Levin wants his fellow Republicans to rediscover and embrace Burke’s more reasonable side. But if what he’s seeking is “a party of deference, compromise, and piecemeal reform,” he’ll surely feel at home among today’s Democrats.