Thomas Paine by Kuklick Bruce;

Author:Kuklick, Bruce;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

The great paradox in labelling Paine a republican—in any sense of the term connected to a view of the signal importance of politics in the ordering of human destinies, was that Paine’s understanding of politics was a very narrow one (as was Locke’s). It is society which Paine represents as the basis for a consensual order, linked by commerce and mutual interest, with a very minimal degree of political intervention. The scope of politics is extremely narrow: representatives pass laws which the people periodically confirm or rescind, but society can be allowed, pretty much, to get on with its business without interference. Moreover, even at his most republican, in his Crisis letters, Paine suggests that the classical world is not superior in its understanding of politics and government.32

Similarly, any republicanism in Burke is very much over-determined. There is no doubt that he fears the corruption of the people, sees the political order as the source and guarantor of the social order, not something which merely grows from it, and has a profound sense of the fragility of that order, beset as it is by the weakness of men’s capacity for self-restraint, the strength of their passions, and their tendency to grasp at power for their own ends. Indeed, it is the fragility of the political order—and that it is absolutely essential to social peace—which leads him to insist that it be insulated from change:

if that which is only submission to necessity should be made the object of choice, the law is broken, nature is disobeyed, the rebellious are outlawed, cast forth, and exiled from this world of reason, and order, and peace, and virtue, and fruitful penitence, into the antagonistic world of madness, discord, vice, confusion and unavailing sorrow.’33

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