(5) Preface

[Het gaat deels over Amerikaanse politiek. De achtergrond van de auteur is Republikeins. ]

"I’m a conservative, and I would not pretend to leave my worldview at the door while I explore the foundations of our political order. But a conservative must take an interest in his own society’s traditions, and our political tradition has always contained both the left and the right—each passionately advancing its understanding of the common good. I am therefore a conservative who is deeply interested in understanding both the left and the right as they truly are, and I strive here to tell their stories in a way that both liberals and conservatives today might recognize as meaningful and true, and from which both might learn something about themselves and their political adversaries." [mijn nadruk] (11)

(11) Introduction

"Between about 1770 and 1800, many of the crucial concepts, terms, divisions, and arguments that still define our political life seemed to burst into the world in fierce and fiery succession. This was the era of the American Revolution and the French Revolution, ..." [mijn nadruk] (11)

"There are no perfect representatives of the two major parties to the great debate of that age, but there may well be no better representatives than Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. Burke was an Irish-born English politician and writer, a man of intense opinions with an unrivaled gift for expressing them in political rhetoric. He was his era’s most devoted and able defender of the inherited traditions of the English constitution. A patient, gradual reformer of his country’s institutions, he was among the first and surely the most adamant and effective critics of the radicalism of the French Revolution in English politics.
Paine, an English-born immigrant to America, became one of the most eloquent and important voices championing the cause of independence for the colonies, and then, as revolution brewed in France, he became an influential advocate of the revolutionaries’ cause as an essayist and activist in Paris and London. A master of the English language, Paine fervently believed in the potential of Enlightenment liberalism to advance the cause of justice and peace by uprooting corrupt and oppressive regimes and replacing them with governments answerable to the people. He was a brilliant and passionate advocate for liberty and equality." [mijn nadruk] (14)

"As we will see, Burke spent the first two decades of his political career championing various sorts of reform: of the British government’s finances, its treatment of religious minorities, its trade policy, and more. He spent much of this time pushing against the standing inertia of English politics. But after the revolution in France, which he was concerned might be imported to Britain, Burke was above all a staunch defender of Britain’s political traditions. He strenuously opposed all efforts to weaken the power of the monarch and the aristocracy and warned against fundamental political reforms (like moves toward greater democratization) that might unmoor the nation from its long-standing traditions. He has sometimes been accused, therefore, of changing his most basic views and turning against his former co-partisans and friends. The charge could first be heard in his own lifetime (voiced by Paine, among others) and has been repeated by some of Burke’s biographers and interpreters ever since." [mijn nadruk] (18)

"Certainly, Paine was not the erudite intellectual that Burke was. His formal education was minimal, and his engagement with the philosophical tradition of the West bore the telltale rough edges of the autodidact." [mijn nadruk] (21)

"On the contrary, Paine’s great rhetorical power came from his ability to bring even modestly educated readers into contact with profound philosophical questions and to give those questions an immediacy and intensity that few political thinkers could match. Paine understood politics as moved by principles, and he thought that political systems had to answer to the right kinds of philosophical ideals—especially equality and liberty. However well established and grand they might be, however deep their roots might reach, all regimes had to be evaluated by how well they advanced these basic human goods. Thus, political principles and their instantiation in political actions are key to Paine’s teaching and present themselves far more prominently in the foreground of his writing than even in Burke’s."(22)

(23) One - Two lives in the arena

Biografisch. De historische context.

Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

"Jonathan Swift described the miserable lot of Ireland’s poor in his Modest Proposal. While Burke’s family was always reasonably comfortable, he witnessed real poverty around him."(27)

"In an era of often bitter divisions (in both England and Ireland) between the official Anglican Church, Catholicism, and the dissenting Protestant sects (such as the Quakers), Burke managed in his first fifteen years to travel through all three circles."(28)

"His Irish upbringing and education also left Burke with a deep love of language, the written word in particular. Upon graduation from Trinity, he left for London, ostensibly to study law at his father’s urging, though he abandoned his legal studies in short order to pursue his dream of joining the ranks of the great city’s intellectuals by becoming a writer on large public questions. London was a hotbed of philosophical and political debates, most often carried on through pamphlets—lengthy opinion essays (most of which would today qualify as short books), published and sold very cheaply, often answering one another and seeking to ground in deeper principles an immediate question of policy. These pamphlets would swiftly make the rounds of London’s burgeoning café culture and made for an exhilarating atmosphere of tense engagement with philosophy and politics."(29)

"A caustic and simplistic skepticism of all traditional institutions, supposedly grounded in a scientific rationality that took nothing for granted but in fact willfully ignored the true complexity of social life, seemed to Burke poorly suited for the study of society, and even dangerous when applied to it. Burke would warn of, and contend with, this force for the rest of his life."(31)

"Burke argues that human nature relies on emotional, not only rational, edification and instruction—an idea that would become crucial to his insistence that government must function in accordance with the forms and traditions of a society’s life and not only abstract principles of justice." [mijn nadruk] (33)

"became private secretary to the Marquis of Rockingham, the great Whig leader who would serve briefly as prime minister and would be Burke’s foremost political patron and friend. Rockingham immediately grasped Burke’s immense talent and value—his erudition, his prudence, and his considerable rhetorical skills. He brought Burke into the inner circle of Whig politics and, in 1765, arranged for him to be elected to a seat in the House of Commons—Burke’s great arena for the next three decades.(...) taking passionate public views on the great questions of the day: Ireland’s religious and political troubles, the American Revolution and its aftermath, Britain’s management and mismanagement of India, contentious reforms of the British parliamentary and electoral system, the monumental challenge of the French Revolution, and the European war that followed." [mijn nadruk] (35)

"Burke’s distinctive political philosophy, as he argued for prudent statesmanship and an attention to the sentiments (and not just the material needs) of the people and to the venerated status of social and political institutions. Political reform, he suggested, must take account of these and proceed gradually and respectfully regarding them."(37)

"Burke was keenly aware that society was always changing, and its laws needed to change too. But in every case, he advanced gradual and incremental rather than radical or fundamental reforms and he always called for respect for existing institutions and forms. Constructive change requires stability, so reformers always have to be careful."(38)

"No eager democrat, Burke rejected the notion that a member of the Commons must simply express the views of those who sent him,..."(38)

"Burke in these early years in Parliament was, above all, a reformer—of financial policy and trade policy, of laws restricting the freedom of Catholics and Protestant dissenters, and of the criminal law. He also opposed the slave trade as inhuman and unjust and resisted the undue intervention of the Crown in politics."(39)

"“Politics ought to be adjusted not to human reasonings but to human nature, of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part,” Burke said."(40)

[Is dat weer de bekende negatieve kijk op mensen naar Hobbes? Of gaat dat bij hem samen met een positief vertrouwen in mensen? ]

"Excessive and needlessly aggravating uses of power can undermine these affections, and this idea moved Burke to worry about the king’s excessive involvement in politics in the early 1760s, the needless irritation of the Americans later in that decade and into the 1770s, and British abuses of the natives of India in the 1780s. Out of the latter concern, (...) All of this made Burke a prominent reformer, though for reasons other than those of most of his fellows in that camp. He was never a radical modernizer, as some of his fellow Whigs were, but he worked with these more radical elements when he thought their efforts could counterbalance an abuse of power."(42)

"Politics was first and foremost about particular people living together, rather than about general rules put into effect. This emphasis caused Burke to oppose the sort of liberalism expounded by many of the radical reformers of his day. They argued in the parlance of natural rights drawn from reflections on an individualist state of nature and sought to apply the principles of that approach directly to political life."(43)

"This way of thinking about politics made Burke a reformer of failing institutions who was wary of radical change and a preserver of venerated traditions who was wary of the abuse of power." [mijn nadruk] (43)

Thomas Paine (1737-1809)

"He had a lifelong ingrained sense that the laws of justice are clear and simple, that they embody a preference for the weak over the strong, and that there can be no excuse for disregarding them."(44)

"Paine’s experience seems to have left him thinking that religious disputes were ultimately pointless, and that it was morality—which he thought could be distinguished from religion—that truly mattered." [mijn nadruk] (44)

[Goed gezien.]

"Paine thus seemed to have begun his life’s journey as a working-class Englishman. But in 1762, after the tragic death of his wife and child in childbirth, his world was turned upside down. Overcome with desperate grief, he abandoned his profession and his now empty home to become an excise officer—an itinerant collector of taxes on commodities like coffee, tea, and alcohol. The excise trade was notoriously corrupt. (...) The experience left Paine with an awareness of the potential for government corruption and for the abuse of workers—a sense that would stay with him."(45-46)

"He wrote on a wide range of social and political subjects—from local scandals to international affairs—but always with a plainspoken moralism intent on protecting the needy and weak. One article in particular, a powerful denunciation of the slave trade, gained him the attention of Benjamin Rush—the great physician and statesman and the unofficial organizer of Philadelphia’s small but deeply impressive intellectual community. Rush brought Paine into the inner circle of the city’s political and literary elites, where Paine’s writings gained ever greater prominence." [mijn nadruk] (49)

"Common Sense. The fifty-page pamphlet was an all-out assault on the British Crown and indeed on the notion of hereditary monarchy and the practices and premises of British politics. It laid out, too, the beginnings of a political philosophy."(52)

De Franse Revolutie van 1789 maakte de verschillen tussen Burke en Paine duidelijk.

"From the outset, Burke’s own response was far more guarded. He recognized the injustice of the old regime, but worried about the violent zeal of the revolutionaries."(68)

"The October 1789 assault on Versailles, in which a mob attacked the young queen and nearly killed her, convinced Burke that the revolution was not only out of control but also intent on undermining the deep sentiments and social attachments essential to holding a people together."(69)

[Merkwaardig. Wat zijn dat dan voor 'diepe sentimenten en sociale verbanden' die essentieel zijn voor het 'bij elkaar houden van een volk'? Wat is dat laatste dan wel? En wat die eerste zaken? Geloof in een koning? In een aristocratie? In de status quo? Het is totaal vaag.]

"Where Burke saw chaos and terror, however, Thomas Paine saw the natural extension of both America’s own revolution and the empire of rights and legitimate government. Dispirited by the Regency Crisis, which he believed revealed that the Whigs, and British society more generally, simply had no stomach for radical democratization, Paine had turned his ambitions and hopes to France, where he returned a few months before the outbreak of the French Revolution."(70)

"... the political philosophy of the Enlightenment, seeking to instantiate the ideals of an individualist egalitarianism—was precisely the sort Burke feared most for its corrosive effect on people’s reverence for their society’s political institutions and traditions." [mijn nadruk] (72)

[Welke politieke instituten en tradities?]

"Price had argued that the Glorious Revolution itself had established the principle that the monarchy was subject to popular choice (exactly the view Burke opposed in the Regency Crisis) and indeed that the Glorious Revolution was fought over “unalienable rights.” It was this effort to commandeer the English constitution for the revolutionary cause that Burke could see creeping into the thought of his fellow Whigs; he would oppose this effort most adamantly in his writings about France." [mijn nadruk] (74)

"The revolution had been proceeding apace, with the government increasingly moving to confiscate private property and collapse the structures and institutions of the old regime." [mijn nadruk] (75)

[Daar was Burke dus tegen. Privébezit en eigendommen van de kerk, daar mocht je niet aankomen. Met zo'n opvatting verdedig je dus de rijke landadel overal, de bovenlaag. ]

Zie Reflections on the Revolution in France van 1 november 1790.

"Burke articulates the significance of the hereditary principle in the English system not only in sustaining the monarchy but in securing the people’s liberties and allegiance to the laws."(79)

[Dat alleen al. En niets over de Fransen die uitgehongerd waren onder hun oude regime. En niets over de armen in Engeland, alleen de suggestie dat de mensen oor het grootste deel tevreden waren.]

"The resulting book, which Paine titled, with his usual flair, Rights of Man, is part answer to Burke, part stand-alone defense of the principles of the French Revolution. It offers a logical, sustained, focused, passionate, and powerful argument, delivered with often astonishing rhetorical force. Certainly among the most complete and most widely read elucidations of the basic worldview underlying the revolution, it is Paine’s most expressly theoretical work. Here, Paine’s political teaching—the set of views that will pervade the rest of this book—is most fully put forward. Standing as it did as an answer to Burke’s Reflections, the book marks the moment when these two giants of the age of revolutions were set clearly against one another and when the great debate they launched had truly come into its own. Published in March 1791, Rights of Man launches vehement attacks against Burke and his views"(83)

"He spends very little time on the suffering of the French lower classes under the old regime or the abuses and excesses of the French aristocracy. Leading with a systematic attempt to refute or dismiss Burke’s key points, it quickly turns to an enthusiastic case for human liberty. Paine writes with resolute confidence in the efficacy of reason in political life. He argues that the revolution is the working out of inescapable principles of politics and that its success and extension are therefore essentially inevitable. The objections of its opponents, including Burke’s, merely mark the alarm of those who see that their old and unjust systems of privilege and oppression are in danger ..." [mijn nadruk] (84)

"Paine’s is a politics of applied principle, and he believes the only way to rescue polities constructed on the wrong principles is to tear them down and rebuild from scratch. He clearly believes, as he had written in Common Sense years earlier, that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.”"(84)

[Een echte utopist.]

"Paine lays out his political vision in greater detail in Rights of Man than in any of his earlier writings: a vision of individualism, natural rights, and equal justice for all made possible by a government that lives up to true republican ideals. He is persuaded that all this has become possible in his time."(85)

"More than any of Burke’s other works, the Appeal presents a robust view of the kind of social and political life he seeks to defend."(89)

"After the publication of Burke’s Appeal, which Paine perceived (correctly) as largely a response to him, he set about writing a further reply, in the form of a second part of Rights of Man, published in February 1792. This sequel was in many ways more ambitious than the original and in every way more radical. Burke and Paine had forced one another to get to the core of their differences: a dispute about what makes a government legitimate, what the individual’s place is in the larger society, and how each generation should think about those who came before and those who will come after." [mijn nadruk] (89)

"Paine begins to take the next steps on liberalism’s path: He advocates for a public pension system for the poor, free public education, public benefits for parents, more parliamentary representation for the lower classes, and a progressive income tax. He even offers a plan for world peace through the extension of reason and knowledge" [mijn nadruk] (90)

"The question of that philosophy—the question of the character of modern liberal government—was pressed with special force in the early days of the revolution, but it neither began with the upheaval in Paris nor ended with it. In the wake of the French Revolution, this question had clearly become a crucial dividing line of modern political life."(92)

"But because his book, which he titled The Age of Reason, criticized the traditional forms of organized religion with the same zealous passion for justice he had brought to his political writing, it set itself so adamantly in opposition to Christianity that it was bound to spark controversy and would cast a shadow over Paine’s reputation, especially in America. “Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented,” he wrote, “there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity.” Having composed such lines, how could he have expected anything but the hostile reception his book swiftly received on both sides of the Atlantic?" [mijn nadruk] (95)

[Maar dat betekent nog niet dat hij geen gelijk had. Integendeel.]

"With his health and his finances failing him in time, Paine spent his last days in relative poverty at a boarding house in New York City. He died on June 8, 1809, and was buried in New Rochelle, New York."(96)

(99) Two - Nature and history

"That is why debates about political philosophy often begin from debates about nature and human nature. But the meanings of these terms—nature and human nature—are not simple or self-evident. They are themselves subject to intense debate, and that prior debate about what we mean by the natural is often an indicator of the assumptions that guide our political thinking." [mijn nadruk] (100)

[Kortom: aan het debat liggen mensvisies en maatschappijvisies ten grondslag. ]

"Burke and Paine each sought to base his arguments—from his very earliest writings on—on an idea of what nature and human nature were and what they should mean for political life. Their dispute begins, in effect, with a debate about nature and its relation to history, so our examination of their views should begin there too."(100)

[Blijkbaar willen ze allebei uit wat is afleiden wat moet zijn. Een fundamentele denkfout.]

Over Paine:

"And by “nature,” he means the condition that preceded all social and political arrangements and therefore the facts regarding what every human being is, regardless of social or political circumstances. Our nature remains just as it was at the beginning of the human race, since our various social arrangements don’t change what we are by nature—what every human being always has been and will be. And so our basic nature must remain the foundation of our political thinking—of our understanding of what human beings are and how they ought to live together.
Paine begins nearly all of his major writings by restating this basic case, the key features of which come from Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and other political thinkers of the Enlightenment. It is the essential starting point of his political philosophy: that reflection on politics must begin from permanent natural facts about human beings, which means it must begin from man himself, apart from society (and therefore, in essence, before society)." [mijn nadruk] (102)

[Dat is fundamenteel onjuist. Mens en samenleving kun je niet van elkaar scheiden, mensen veranderen zelfs biologisch door de samenleving waarin ze leven. ]

"At his origin, man is an individual. And because he has no social relations to start with, he is burdened by no social distinctions and therefore is equal to all other men. Social hierarchies have no natural foundation:" [mijn nadruk] (104)

[Onzinnig standpunt, mensen zijn juist vanaf het begin afhankelijk van sociale relaties. Mensen zijn jarenlang afhankelijk van voeders en opvoeders. Paine voegt de sociale dimensie pas later toe, als het ware. ]

"Human beings are therefore social creatures with needs and wants that reach beyond themselves. But even for the purpose of assessing their sociality, humans are best understood as equal and separate individuals."(106)

"For Paine, there is a crucial middle step between the state of nature and the political community: the natural society that exists at first without a government. When humans first gathered into society, the motives and needs that drew them together naturally governed their cooperation, and they achieved a relatively sophisticated degree of social life without a need for government as such. But over time, as they succeeded in overcoming necessity, they relaxed in their duties, and some form of government became necessary to restrain their vices." [mijn nadruk] (107)

[Ik weet niet of dit historisch zo is, maar het lijkt me onjuist. De aantallen mensen zijn een factor. De afhankelijkheden.]

"To the charge (made by Edmund Burke, among others) that an all-out revolution would bring the dissolution of society itself and so make any government that followed illegitimate, Paine has an answer. First, he says, society is older and more important than government. Second, a revolution consists of a reversion to the natural society for the purpose of establishing a new government from the same origins as the old one, but better and more justly formed and organized."(107)

"As Paine defines it, then, society is a function of nature, while government is a product of art. But the purposes of government are defined by man’s natural rights and natural limits, so although men create government, they must create it with the facts of nature in mind, and in such a way as to protect each man’s natural prerogatives and rights and to secure the natural freedom and best interest of all. The science of government, therefore, begins from a knowledge of nature through reason, and government can be judged by how effectively it respects man’s individual freedom and equality."(113)

"That means that only power willingly granted is legitimate, and only a government by consent is just."(113)

"This representative democracy is the form of government best in line with nature, according to Paine."(114)

"Kings and nobles commonly seek to portray themselves as possessed of elevated origins deep in the mists of history, but Paine will have none of it:"(115)

"And worse yet, monarchs pass their illegitimate power on to their children, denying their people’s natural rights beyond their own lives. Because of Paine’s insistence on the importance of origins, he considers the hereditary principle near the root of all evil. By compelling men to accept the decisions of prior generations, it denies them their natural right to self-determination and is therefore a profoundly unnatural principle of government."(116)

[Lijkt me juist gezien. ]

Over Burke

"Edmund Burke began his own public career by rejecting precisely the view of nature and its relation to politics that we have just seen Paine lay out. His first major work, The Vindication of Natural Society, published in 1756, argues in essence that looking past all conventional institutions and accepting only nature (narrowly understood as an abstract set of rules) as a source of authority or insight about human affairs would be deeply corrosive of political and social life."(117)

"A government does not derive its legitimacy by beginning from the proper principles, drawn from nature. Instead, government develops through time along lines that serve the needs and well-being of the people and therefore point toward some natural idea of the good." [mijn nadruk] (118)

[Maar kun je dat volhouden als je ziet dat de rijken de armen onderdrukken en zo? Wat is het welzijn van het volk namelijk? Dan wordt dat laatste een rechtvaarding ervan met de natuur. Ook niet goed. ]

"This rejection of the importance of beginnings separates Burke from the vast majority of political thinkers in the Western tradition—from Plato and Aristotle through Hobbes and Locke and their modern successors."(119)

"Burke argues that to learn about man’s nature, we need to understand man as he is and, to our knowledge at least, has always been: a social creature, living together with others in an organized society with a government. To imagine him as solitary and asocial is to ignore man himself in pursuit of an abstraction with little to teach us."(120)

[Daar ben ik het wel mee eens.]

"Building on existing forms using existing materials requires not an abstract study of nature but a very particular understanding of the history and character of one’s society. Because the state is conventional, and because the abstract rights of man do not provide explicit rules for political life directly, statesmanship is almost always a matter of prudence, an “experimental science,” as Burke puts it."(124)

"Burke writes in the Reflections on the Revolution in France, “consists for the most part of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites,” but it also consists of efforts to address these vices, and in both its best and worst manifestations, history offers lessons no statesman can afford to ignore." [mijn nadruk] (125)

[Dat klinkt toch wel erg als 'zo zijn mensen nu eenmaal', ook een mensvisie.]

"Burke believed they had far too much faith in the ability of reason alone to govern those other elements—and especially the passions and sentiments. From a young age, Burke had concerned himself with the place of the passions in human affairs..." [mijn nadruk] (126)

[Waar geloof je in? is de vraag. Zijn mensen in staat tot rationaliteit of niet?]

"This is one reason why, for Burke, the stable order of society should not be needlessly disrupted, and the importance of the rituals, ceremonies, and outright pomp that often accompany social and political life should not be dismissed."(127)

"We cannot be simply argued out of our vices, but we can be deterred from indulging them by the trust and love that develops among neighbors, by deeply established habits of order and peace, and by pride in our community or country."(128)

"In this respect, Burke argued that the actions of the revolutionaries—by denying the sentimental aspect of human nature—were profoundly unnatural and anti-natural. He refused to cede the language of nature in politics to Paine and the French and English radicals, because he grounded his case for resisting radical political disruption in a notion of nature quite different from that of the radicals."(130)

"Burke saw in the absence of such a natural reaction to the spectacles of the revolution a sure sign of trouble—a lack of restraint that could only end in disaster. This radically unnatural lack of restraint, in his view, had to be taught. A product of a political theory at odds with nature, it justified violence and threatened to desensitize the public to violence."(132)

"(Burke geciteerd) We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look up with awe to kings; with affection to parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respect to nobility. Why? Because when such ideas are brought before our minds, it is natural to be so affected; because all other feelings are false and spurious, and tend to corrupt our minds, to vitiate our primary morals, to render us unfit for rational liberty."(133)

[Zo zie je maar weer. Uiteindelijk krijgen we gewoon een andere mensvisie die de bestaande orde rechtvaardigt. ]

"By treating existing political institutions and practices as an entailed inheritance, citizens learn to think of them as a kind of charge—a gift from the past that, preserved and suitably improved upon, is owed to the future—and therefore learn not to dismiss them lightly."(142)

"Burke thus offers a model of gradual change—of evolution rather than revolution. In a sense, he sees tradition as a process with something of the character that modern biology ascribes to natural evolution. The products of that process are valuable not because they are old, but because they are advanced—having developed through years of trial and error and adapted to their circumstances."(143)

"Burke and Paine’s disagreement about the proper model of nature for politics therefore leads inexorably to a dispute about justice and order."(145)

(145) Three - Justice and order

"Despite his rather abstract and theoretical mode of expression, Paine’s passion always comes from outrage against injustice and human suffering. He detects a moral vacuum in Burke’s denial of the natural roots of political principle and a marked lack of compassion for the low and the weak in Burke’s romantic celebration of the noble and the mighty. It may be easier to paint great tragic pictures when a queen is threatened by a mob, Paine says, but it is more important to offer help when an entire people is crushed by a corrupt regime." [mijn nadruk] (146)

"All of Burke’s appeals to beauty and order, to the imposing majesty of the deeply rooted practices we inherit, strike Paine as excuses for inequality, indifference, and injustice. He does not think men are innately so vicious as to require beautiful illusions to restrain them. The illusions, Paine argues, are necessary only to keep the people from seeing that they have been denied their rights."(146)

"Paine’s answer is loud and clear: For him, justice is embodied in the rational principles of liberal politics. Anything short of a government chosen and consented to by the people—a government that respects their rights and represents their interests—is an unjust regime and can only survive through brazen crimes. Paine’s politics is firmly anchored in a moral standard. But the moral grounding of Burke’s politics is a far more complicated problem."(148)

[Precies en dat is waarom ik van Paine houd en niet van Burke. Iemand die niet helder kan zeggen wat hij denkt is niet betrouwbaar. Zijn tegenstrijdige beweringen zijn een voorbeeld. En zijn verdediging van de religie ook. Het volgende citaat zegt alles:]

"Religion, and especially an established church, helps to give people the kind of sentimental attachments and peaceful habits necessary to sustain a political order grounded in generational continuity and prescription. Covering the state in sacred garb also helps to shield its origins and protect it from rash and extreme reform or revolution. And finally, religion also helps the poor deal with their condition. To deprive them of this source of consolation is to make oneself “the cruel oppressor, the merciless enemy of the poor and wretched.”"(155)

[Hierna lijkt het of de auteur Burke zit te verdedigen. Maar alles wordt er onhelderder door.]

"Burke’s model of nature does not point to social equality. In a society sustained by inheritance, social eminence and great wealth will tend to stay in certain families and beyond the reach of others. Not that change and reform cannot happen, or that those who are able to rise in society are somehow unworthy of it, but equality itself should not be a primary goal of politics. Social peace, prosperity, and stability are more important for everyone, and are often not well served by the pursuit of equality—especially because true social equality is ultimately an unachievable goal." [mijn nadruk] (171)

"Rather, distinction should go to those who are best suited for power, and Burke believes one important component of that suitability has to do with property and leisure, which tend to be inherited. It should be possible, but not too easy, for others to break in to the ruling class if they prove themselves (as indeed Burke himself had done). But as a general matter, he writes, “some decent, regulated preeminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolitic.”"(174)

[Ook dat zegt alles. Hij wil ongelijkheid laten bestaan, hij wil de klassensamenleving van zijn tijd verdedigen. Punt.]

"Paine believed that every man stands in an equal relation to his origin with every other, and therefore that none is somehow entitled to reign supreme. “Where there are not distinctions there can be no superiority,” Paine writes in Common Sense. And since “all men [are] originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever.” Because it violates the rights of every new generation, inherited social status is a recipe for an unjust society that could never be well governed."(182)

"Political rule, according to Paine, is thus like artistic or scientific achievement—it takes a natural talent, in this case, “mental powers,” which enable the possessor to best understand the laws and rights of nature and apply them. No class of men is uniquely gifted with such abilities, and those who have them will not necessarily pass them down to their children. Only an egalitarian society could allow them to emerge and serve the interests of the polity. The equal right to rule is thus essential to the success and prosperity of society. Paine is not a leveler of property, as Burke sometimes accuses him of being, but he is a leveler of authority."(185)

(186) Four - Choice and obligation

Paine:

"This cogent description grounds rights in a highly individualistic understanding of the citizen. It sees social and political bonds as the products of individual choices driven by calculations of utility and need. Every citizen has the right to freedom of action, and when an individual right cannot be exercised individually, citizens draw on the power of the state to put their rights into practice. This power is not a gift of society; it is an entitlement—access to it is the reason we enter into society. We form societies to protect and vindicate preexisting natural rights, and what we call our civil rights are means of drawing upon the common capital of society so that natural rights can be given effect. "(191)

"And how is this society to be led? Paine’s answer—that popular sovereignty and the election of leaders are essential features of any legitimate regime—flows directly from his belief in individual choice. Hereditary government violates the rights of the governed, even if at its origin, generations ago, such a government was installed by the choice of the public. People can choose to be governed by a king with broad powers, but they cannot choose to empower that king’s children and grandchildren permanently over their own."(196)

Burke:

"Paine spends a great deal of time in Rights of Man arguing this point, and he does so in direct response to Edmund Burke’s writings on the French Revolution. Burke argued not only that the French had removed their government in an illegitimate way but also that the very notion that people always have a right to remove their government and select their own rulers was in error. The idea that choice sits at the center of all political thought struck him as a mistake."(196)

"A long philosophical tradition, from Plato to Montesquieu and right to Burke’s own day, had noted the dangerous excesses of absolute democracy, and in pointing to these dangers, Burke makes an unusually explicit appeal to philosophy: “Not being wholly unread in the authors who had seen the most of [democratic] constitutions, and who best understood them, I cannot help concurring with their opinion, that an absolute democracy, no more than absolute monarchy, is to be reckoned among the legitimate forms of government. . . . If I recollect rightly, Aristotle observes that a democracy has many striking points of resemblance with a tyranny.” This notion of tyranny, a tyranny of the unchecked majority over the minority, much alive in Burke’s mind at the time of the French Revolution, would underlie his critique of unchecked democracy." [mijn nadruk] (202)

"If there is no source of authority but this moment’s popular will, then no arrangements or institutions of society can be expected to remain in place one moment longer than the majority wishes them there. This, Burke argues, is not only impractical (as it would lead to a debilitating uncertainty and make it impossible for any citizen to plan his future), but also an error in principle."(204)

"The most essential human obligations and relations—especially those involving the family but also many of those involving community, the nation, and one’s religious faith—are not chosen and could never really be chosen, and political and social life begins from these, not from an act of will."(206)

"Just as Paine’s understanding of rights and choice sits at the heart of his political thought, so this vision of obligations not chosen but nevertheless binding forms the very core of Edmund Burke’s moral and political philosophy. An enormous portion of Burke’s (and the conservative) worldview becomes clearer in light of the importance he places on the basic facts and character of human procreation, and an enormous portion of Paine’s (and the progressive) worldview becomes clearer in light of the desire he evinces to be liberated from the implications of those facts and that character. Almost all of what we loosely call the “the social issues” have to do with the dispute about whether such liberation is possible and desirable and, because it raises the question of the relation between generations (as we will see in Chapter 7), that dispute also shapes a surprising portion of our other prominent debates. Burke takes the human person to be embedded in a web of obligations that give shape to our lives." [mijn nadruk] (209)

"The family is the primary obstacle to an ethic of choice and so a primary target of genuinely radical liberal revolutionaries."(210)

[Dat kan ik me voorstellen.]

"His contract is not a set of quid pro quos, with rights exchanged for obligations by free people making choices about what is best for them, but a description of relations that are inescapable and binding. Society is not an agreement, but an arrangement (a “great arrangement of mankind,” as he puts it), and the contract lays it out for us to see, not to choose. Burke’s notion of the social contract is thus distinct from Paine’s and from the common Enlightenment-liberal social-contract teaching."(216)

[Voor Burke is de plicht belangrijker dan de keuze. ]

"To deny the centrality of consent is surely to deny as well the importance of rights, as Enlightenment-liberal theory understands them. And Thomas Paine argues fervently that Burke’s unusual twist on the social contract leaves him incapable of any case for rights."(219)

"Human beings cannot live in society if they follow their wants and passions unrestrained, and so one of the rights of citizens is to have their passions brought under some control. Thus society guarantees some liberties and some restraints, and precisely how these are balanced is in normal times a matter of prudence, not absolute principle. The calculus of prudence aims not to maximize choice, but to meet the true wants of the people, as these emerge from the complex and layered society that Burke describes. His rights are therefore relations, not individual entitlements—they describe a person’s place in the large scheme of obligations and privileges and offer the protection and benefits of that scheme and that place." [mijn nadruk] (222)

[Burke hult zich gemakkelijk in een abstract taalgebruik. Ik vind die abstracties erg vaag. Hij is een essentialist, en hij meent te weten wat de 'ware' behoeftes zijn van het volk. Bijvoorbeeld.]

"Without question, Burke’s reimagining of the social contract deprives him of one great advantage of the Enlightenment-liberal contract theorists: a clear principle by which to limit the scope of government action to oppose coercion."(226)

[Dat is het logische gevolg van die abstracties. Ook vrijheid wordt een abstractie en valt vrijwel samen met plicht.]

"This ordered liberty, Burke argues, is the essence of what a good government owes its people. It is what the social contract protects, what the rights of men properly understood involve, and what freedom really means. It is secured by prudent statesmen, alert to the non-voluntary social relations that shape society, and to the unique history, habits, and mores their people have developed to meet their obligations and pursue gradual and incremental political and social progress."(231)

"The right and left both began with high hopes for capitalism, but for very different reasons and with very different notions of what it would mean for society and its members—and especially what material obligations citizens had toward one another.
Paine several times makes it clear that he is a believer in commerce because he believes open trade and free economics will advance his radical causes by uprooting traditional social and political arrangements." [mijn nadruk] (236)

[Een erg tijdgebonden opvatting.]

"Burke’s support for largely unimpeded trade and industry began from roughly the opposite corner. He argued that government manipulation of the economy could be profoundly disruptive to the social order because it involved gross manipulation of very complicated economic and social forces that are almost inevitably beyond the understanding of legislators. Even in its own material terms, he argues, the economy functions best when left to itself, referring in one essay to “the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God.” A free economy, as Burke saw it, would help sustain the stability of society and therefore its wealth—some of which could (and should) then be used by the wealthy to help the poor." [mijn nadruk] (237)

"Legislators are always tempted to employ the weight of government to undo economic inequalities, but such attempts always produce more harm than good, in Burke’s view. He recognizes that the modern economy does relegate some people to desperate poverty or to demeaning occupations, and he frets about “the innumerable servile, degrading, unseemly, unmanly, and often most unwholesome and pestiferous occupations, to which by the social economy so many wretches are inevitably doomed.” But the costs of remedying their situation, not only to society as a whole but even to the particular wretches involved, would be far worse than their current suffering, Burke argues, because these people are the most vulnerable to economic dislocations, which are made more likely by clumsy government manipulations of prices or wages."(238-239)

"The needs of the poor are of the utmost importance, he argues, but they should be addressed by charities, which should be amply supported by the wealthy and the noble. Government cannot take that care upon itself, as doing so would never work and, in the process, would disrupt the social order. Care of the poor is not in this sense a public obligation, but a private one." [mijn nadruk] (239)

[Dé smoes om alles te laten zoals het is. Daar hebben die arme mensen wat aan. Ze hebben geen rechten, maar moeten hopen op liefdadigheid. Burke denkt helemaal in lijn met Adam Smith. ]

"Paine was undoubtedly right about some of the social consequences of free-market economics, and Burke was surely mistaken to argue that free trade and capitalism would keep the elements of society in their place and aid stability. Few forces in the modern West have been as disruptive (for good and for bad) of established order. But the two men’s deeper difference, it turns out, was not about the consequences of capitalism but about the community’s obligation to the poor. While the often communitarian Burke argues that care for the needy ought to remain a private function in large part for the sake of the needy, the often libertarian Paine makes a forceful case for something like a modern welfare system. In so doing, Paine helps show how the modern left developed from Enlightenment liberalism toward embryonic forms of welfare-state liberalism as its utopian political hopes seemed dashed by the grim realities of the industrial revolution."(241)

"But by 1791, having witnessed in Paris and London the early effects of the approaching industrial economy and having thought through the implications of his views about the origins of the social order, Paine was writing with eloquent passion of “the moral obligation of providing for old age, helpless infancy, and poverty.” Meeting this obligation, he argues in the second part of Rights of Man, is a key purpose of government." [mijn nadruk] (241)

"He calls for provisions for poor parents when a child is born, for government support in paying for elementary education, for pensions to the elderly who cannot work, and even for public help with funeral expenses for those who cannot afford them. “This support,” he then argues, “is not of the nature of a charity but of a right.” Public assistance to the poor turns out to be a true social obligation." [mijn nadruk] (242)

[Paine heeft een geweldige visie gebaseerd op solidariteit. Burke komt daarentegen niet verder dan 'het is wat het is, het is nu eenmaal zo':]

"To Burke’s mind, meanwhile, poverty is one of the realities that always exists and is part of the larger human condition, not a departure from it. Wealthy individuals have a moral and religious duty to help ameliorate poverty, but it could never be eradicated by the government."(245)

(249) Five - 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."[mijn nadruk] (249)

"Burke thought the governing of human communities was much too complex a task to be simplified into a series of pseudoscientific questions and resolved by logical exercises. It required, in his view, a degree of knowledge and wisdom about human affairs that could only be gathered from the experience of society itself."(250)

"Edmund Burke’s belief in the complexity of human nature and the insufficiency of choice leads him to be far more skeptical than most of his peers about reason’s potential for guiding political action. Burke routinely mocks the idea that the radicals’ rationalism had unleashed a great enlightenment upon a hitherto dark world."(251)

"By ignoring the greater parts—especially the sentiments and attachments that move people in politics—one misses the most important factors behind political actions and social attachments. Many of the greatest challenges a statesman must confront arise from the less rational elements of the human character."(252)

"Burke’s case regarding the limits of human reason in politics can easily be taken as an anti-intellectual case against the use of reason in politics, or the use of reason at all, and it very often has been. But it is better understood as an argument about the particular character of the political sphere. Burke clearly does not deny the value of the contemplative life in its own terms, and indeed at times he argues that the contemplative virtues are superior to the active ones." [mijn nadruk] (290)

"Throughout his writing Paine rejects appeals to authority and demands instead appeals to reason as a standard of judgment. He even prides himself in his own work on avoiding making points by quotation of familiar and learned authorities—a practice Burke engages in frequently. “I scarcely ever quote; the reason is, I always think,” Paine writes."(297)

[Ik mag die Paine wel :-) ]

"Paine’s most express and outright claims for the power of unaided reason appear in his writings on religion and especially his two-volume case for Enlightenment Deism, titled (not coincidentally) The Age of Reason.
The Age of Reason is in some respects an astonishingly intemperate book and may therefore unduly distract its readers from Paine’s case for reason. He launches blistering attacks on all forms of organized Christianity and works his way through the Bible pointing out inconsistencies and implausibilities. “The most detestable wickedness, the most horrible cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion,” Paine writes." [mijn nadruk] (299)

[O ja, Paine is my man :-) ]

"But beyond his attacks on the particular dogmas and consequences of organized religion, Paine’s final book contains his most extensive and assertive case for the centrality of individual human reason. His rejection of organized religion is an elevation of individual reason: “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.”84 He rejects any religious authority’s claims that cannot be independently verified by every rational person."(300)

(340) Six - Revolution and reform

"Burke and Paine were keenly aware that political ideas pointed to political action. Both men were writers and thinkers, but both were also deeply involved in political affairs at a time when the links between ideas and action were unusually clear. Their political ideas therefore point toward two views of political action and change—with Burke drawing on his vision of prescription to make the case for slow, incremental reform and Paine building on his case for a rational politics to argue that only a wholly new beginning from first principles can redeem an illegitimate government."(340)

(388) Seven - Generations and the living

[Is voor een groot deel herhaling van de inmiddels bekende standpunten. Het is typisch voor dit boek waarin dezelfde zaken steeds weer herhaald worden vanuit een ander thema. Het was mogelijk om de kern van de zaak op een pagina of tien neer te zetten. Maar, nee, dan wordt het geen boek, hè. :-( ]

(419) Conclusion

"Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the twenty-first, both have been frequently appealed to by various political movements. Assorted radical leaders the world over—from the American abolitionist firebrand John Brown to Uruguayan liberator José Gervasio Artigas and countless others in between—laid claim to the legacy of Thomas Paine, as did the mainstream labor and progressive movements in the Anglo-American world. Conservative cultural and political movements—from Romantic poets to reforming Tories to the conservative movement that emerged in America in the middle of the last century—have laid claim to Edmund Burke’s name and ideas."(422)

"we can see how the worldviews Burke and Paine laid out still describe two broad and fundamental dispositions toward political life and political change in our liberal age."(424)

"Today’s left, therefore, shares a great portion of Paine’s basic disposition, but seeks to liberate the individual in a rather less quixotic and more technocratic way than Paine did, if also in a way that lacks his grounding in principle and natural right. Thus today’s liberals are left philosophically adrift and far too open to the cold logic of utilitarianism—they could learn from Paine’s insistence on limits to the use of power and the role of government. Today’s right, meanwhile, shares a great deal of Burke’s basic disposition, but seeks to protect our cultural inheritance in a less aristocratic and (naturally, for Americans) more populist way than he did, if also in a way that lacks his emphasis on community and on the sentiments. Today’s conservatives are thus too rhetorically strident and far too open to the siren song of hyperindividualism, and they generally lack a nonradical theory of the liberal society. They could benefit by adopting Burke’s focus on the social character of man, from Burke’s thoroughgoing gradualism, and from his innovative liberal alternative to Enlightenment radicalism."(432)