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

Author:Yuval Levin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Philosophy, Biography, Politics, History
ISBN: 9780465040940
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2013-12-03T05:00:00+00:00

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REASON AND PRESCRIPTION

IF NATURAL EQUALITY IS THE CRUCIAL PREMISE OF Enlightenment-liberal politics, and government by consent its essential form, then human reason is its great moving force. Reason cuts through the pious platitudes of the old order, demonstrates the truth and consequences of our rights, and helps us to shape a new order built to serve justice. The age of revolutions understood itself as advancing the cause of reason in political life.

In America, the revolutionary leaders assumed that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel” their actions for inspection under the searing light of reason. In France, the most ardent revolutionaries considered themselves a kind of “cult of reason,” as the revolutionary leader Jacques Hebert put it. And for a great many Europeans who described their time as an age of enlightenment, it was human reason unleashed (especially by the new natural sciences and their methods) that shed new light on old quandaries.

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