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The Great Debate
Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left
Contributors
By Yuval Levin
Formats and Prices
- On Sale
- Dec 3, 2013
- Page Count
- 304 pages
- Publisher
- Basic Books
- ISBN-13
- 9780465040940
Price
$11.99Price
$15.99 CADFormat
Format:
- ebook $11.99 $15.99 CAD
- Audiobook Download (Unabridged) $27.99
- Trade Paperback $18.99 $23.99 CAD
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“In a Burkean manner, Mr. Levin enriches through wisdom rather than prescription.” —Washington Post
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. Burke and Paine were utterly fascinating and divisive figures, both active in politics, versed in philosophy, and two of the most effective and powerful political writers and polemicists in the history of the English-speaking world.
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 not only the basis of our political order but the controversies that fuel Washington's divisiveness, The Great Debate offers a profound examination of what conservatism, progressivism, and the debate between them truly amount to.
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“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
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“The Great Debate’s architecture is clever and intellectually persuasive.... A thoughtful introduction to this famous paradigmatic opposition.”Washington Post
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“A wonderful book.”Los Angeles Times
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“The definitive intellectual history of an argument so powerful that it echoes to the present day.”National Review Online
