Edmund Burke(1729-1797) / ThomasPaine(1737 - 1809) / the great debate

 

 

Edmund Burke was an Anglo-Irish statesman, economist, and philosopher who was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1729 and died in Beaconsfield, England in 17971. He was a member of Parliament (MP) between 1766 and 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party2. Burke championed conservatism in opposition to Jacobinism in Reflections on the Revolution in France1. He believed that society should be organized around institutions such as church and state that have evolved slowly over time and that sudden changes would lead to chaos1.

“Reflections on the Revolution in France” is a political pamphlet written by Edmund Burke and published in 17901. The pamphlet is a critique of the French Revolution and its ideas. Burke argues that the French Revolution was a disaster because it was based on abstract ideas of liberty and equality rather than tradition and experience1. He also argues that the French Revolution was violent and destructive, leading to chaos and bloodshed2.

Edmund Burke was a British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker prominent in public life from 1765 to about 17951. Some of his notable works include “Reflections on the French Revolution” (1790), “On Conciliation with the American Colonies” (1775), and “Impeachment of Warren Hastings” (1788)2

Edmund Burke is viewed as the founder of conservatism1. He believed that government should be representative of its people by serving their common good1. Burke argued in favor of a representative government that serves its people through the pursuit of the common good rather than their constituent opinions2. He also believed that natural rights and liberties were not absolute and that they had to be balanced against the needs of society as a whole2.

Edmund Burke, (born January 12? [January 1, Old Style], 1729, Dublin, Ireland—died July 9, 1797, Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England), British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker prominent in public life from 1765 to about 1795 and important in the history of political theory. He championed conservatism in opposition to Jacobinism in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Early life Burke, the son of a solicitor, entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1744 and moved to London in 1750 to begin his studies at the Middle Temple. There follows an obscure period in which Burke lost interest in his legal studies, was estranged from his father, and spent some time wandering about England and France. In 1756 he published anonymously A Vindication of Natural Society…, a satirical imitation of the style of Viscount Bolingbroke that was aimed at both the destructive criticism of revealed religion and the contemporary vogue for a “return to Nature.” A contribution to aesthetic theory, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which appeared in 1757, gave him some reputation in England and was noticed abroad, among others by Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, and G.E. Lessing. In agreement with the publisher Robert Dodsley, Burke initiated The Annual Register as a yearly survey of world affairs; the first volume appeared in 1758 under his (unacknowledged) editorship, and he retained this connection for about 30 years. In 1757 Burke married Jane Nugent. From this period also date his numerous literary and artistic friendships, including those with Dr. Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and David Garrick. Political life After an unsuccessful first venture into politics, Burke was appointed secretary in 1765 to the Marquess of Rockingham, leader of one of the Whig groups, the largely liberal faction in Parliament, and he entered the House of Commons that year. Burke remained Rockingham’s secretary until the latter’s death in 1782. Burke worked to unify the group of Whigs that had formed around Rockingham; this faction was to be the vehicle of Burke’s parliamentary career. Britannica Quiz Philosophy 101 Burke soon took an active part in the domestic constitutional controversy of George III’s reign. The main problem during the 18th century was whether king or Parliament controlled the executive. The king was seeking to reassert a more active role for the crown—which had lost some influence in the reigns of the first two Georges—without infringing on the limitations of the royal prerogative set by the revolution settlement of 1689. Burke’s chief comment on this issue is his pamphlet “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents” (1770). He argued that George’s actions were against not the letter but the spirit of the constitution. The choice of ministers purely on personal grounds was favouritism; public approbation by the people through Parliament should determine their selection. This pamphlet includes Burke’s famous, and new, justification of party, defined as a body of men united on public principle, which could act as a constitutional link between king and Parliament, providing consistency and strength in administration, or principled criticism in opposition. In 1774 Burke was elected a member of Parliament for Bristol, then the second city of the kingdom and an open constituency requiring a genuine election contest. He held this seat for six years but failed to retain the confidence of his constituents. For the rest of his parliamentary career he was member for Malton, a pocket borough of Lord Rockingham’s. It was at Bristol that Burke made the well-known statement on the role of the member of Parliament. The elected member should be a representative, not a mere delegate pledged to obey undeviatingly the wishes of his constituents. The electors are capable of judging his integrity, and he should attend to their local interests; but, more importantly, he must address himself to the general good of the entire nation, acting according to his own judgment and conscience, unfettered by mandates or prior instructions from those he represents. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now Burke gave only qualified support to movements for parliamentary reform; though he accepted the possibility of widening political participation, he rejected any doctrine of mere rule of numbers. Burke’s main concern, rather, was the curtailment of the crown’s powers. He made a practical attempt to reduce this influence as one of the leaders of the movement that pressed for parliamentary control of royal patronage and expenditure. When the Rockingham Whigs took office in 1782, bills were passed reducing pensions and emoluments of offices. Burke was specifically connected with an act regulating the civil list, the amount voted by Parliament for the personal and household expenses of the sovereign. A second great issue that confronted Burke in 1765 was the quarrel with the American colonies. Britain’s imposition of the Stamp Act there in 1765, along with other measures, provoked unrest and opposition, which soon swelled into disobedience, conflict, and secession. British policy was vacillating; determination to maintain imperial control ended in coercion, repression, and unsuccessful war. Opposed to the tactics of coercion, the Rockingham group in their short administration of 1765–66 repealed the Stamp Act but asserted the imperial right to impose taxation by the Declaratory Act. Burke’s best-known statements on this issue are two parliamentary speeches, “On American Taxation” (1774) and “On Moving His Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies” (1775), and “A Letter to…the Sheriffs of Bristol, on the Affairs of America” (1777). British policy, he argued, had been both imprudent and inconsistent, but above all legalistic and intransigent, in the assertion of imperial rights. Authority must be exercised with respect for the temper of those subject to it, if there was not to be collision of power and opinion. This truth was being ignored in the imperial quarrel; it was absurd to treat universal disobedience as criminal: the revolt of a whole people argued serious misgovernment. Burke made a wide historical survey of the growth of the colonies and of their present economic problems. In the place of narrow legalism he called for a more pragmatic policy on Britain’s part that would admit the claims of circumstance, utility, and moral principle in addition to those of precedent. Burke suggested that a conciliatory attitude be shown by Britain’s Parliament, along with a readiness to meet American complaints and to undertake measures that would restore the colonies’ confidence in imperial authority. In view of the magnitude of the problem, the adequacy of Burke’s specific remedies is questionable, but the principles on which he was basing his argument were the same as those underlying his “Present Discontents”: government should ideally be a cooperative, mutually restraining relation of rulers and subjects; there must be attachment to tradition and the ways of the past, wherever possible, but, equally, recognition of the fact of change and the need to respond to it, reaffirming the values embodied in tradition under new circumstances. Ireland was a special problem in imperial regulation. It was in strict political dependency on England and internally subject to the ascendancy of an Anglo-Irish Protestant minority that owned the bulk of the agricultural land. Roman Catholics were excluded by a penal code from political participation and public office. To these oppressions were added widespread rural poverty and a backward economic life aggravated by commercial restrictions resulting from English commercial jealousy. Burke was always concerned to ease the burdens of his native country. He consistently advocated relaxation of the economic and penal regulations, and steps toward legislative independence, at the cost of alienating his Bristol constituents and of incurring suspicions of Roman Catholicism and charges of partiality. The remaining imperial issue, to which he devoted many years, and which he ranked as the most worthy of his labours, was that of India. The commercial activities of a chartered trading concern, the British East India Company, had created an extensive empire there. Burke in the 1760s and ’70s opposed interference by the English government in the company’s affairs as a violation of chartered rights. However, he learned a great deal about the state of the company’s government as the most active member of a select committee that was appointed in 1781 to investigate the administration of justice in India but which soon widened its field to that of a general inquiry. Burke concluded that the corrupt state of Indian government could be remedied only if the vast patronage it was bound to dispose of was in the hands neither of a company nor of the crown. He drafted the East India Bill of 1783 (of which the Whig statesman Charles James Fox was the nominal author), which proposed that India be governed by a board of independent commissioners in London. After the defeat of the bill, Burke’s indignation came to centre on Warren Hastings, governor-general of Bengal from 1772 to 1785. It was at Burke’s instigation that Hastings was impeached in 1787, and he challenged Hastings’ claim that it was impossible to apply Western standards of authority and legality to government in the East. He appealed to the concept of the Law of Nature, the moral principles rooted in the universal order of things, to which all conditions and races of men were subject. The impeachment, which is now generally regarded as an injustice to Hastings (who was ultimately acquitted), is the most conspicuous illustration of the failings to which Burke was liable throughout his public life, including his brief periods in office as paymaster general of the forces in 1782 and 1783. His political positions were sometimes marred by gross distortions and errors of judgment. His Indian speeches fell at times into violent emotion and abuse, lacking restraint and proportion, and his parliamentary activities were at times irresponsible or factious. The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 was initially greeted in England with much enthusiasm. Burke, after a brief suspension of judgment, was both hostile to it and alarmed by this favourable English reaction. He was provoked into writing his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) by a sermon of the Protestant dissenter Richard Price welcoming the Revolution. Burke’s deeply felt antagonism to the new movement propelled him to the plane of general political thought; it provoked a host of English replies, of which the best known is Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791–92). In the first instance Burke discussed the actual course of the Revolution, examining the personalities, motives, and policies of its leaders. More profoundly, he attempted to analyze the fundamental ideas animating the movement and, fastening on the Revolutionary concepts of “the rights of man” and popular sovereignty, emphasized the dangers of democracy in the abstract and the mere rule of numbers when unrestrained and unguided by the responsible leadership of a hereditary aristocracy. Further, he challenged the whole rationalist and idealist temper of the movement. It was not merely that the old social order was being pulled down. He argued, further, that the moral fervour of the Revolution, and its vast speculative schemes of political reconstruction, were causing a devaluation of tradition and inherited values and a thoughtless destruction of the painfully acquired material and spiritual resources of society. Against all this, he appealed to the example and the virtues of the English constitution: its concern for continuity and unorganized growth; its respect for traditional wisdom and usage rather than speculative innovation, for prescriptive, rather than abstract, rights; its acceptance of a hierarchy of rank and property; its religious consecration of secular authority and recognition of the radical imperfection of all human contrivances. As an analysis and prediction of the course of the Revolution, Burke’s French writings, though frequently intemperate and uncontrolled, were in some ways strikingly acute; but his lack of sympathy with its positive ideals concealed from him its more fruitful and permanent potentialities. It is for the criticism and affirmation of fundamental political attitudes that the Reflections and An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791) retain their freshness, relevance, and force. Burke opposed the French Revolution to the end of his life, demanding war against the new state and gaining a European reputation and influence. But his hostility to the Revolution went beyond that of most of his party and in particular was challenged by Fox. Burke’s long friendship with Fox came to a dramatic end in a parliamentary debate (May 1791). Ultimately the majority of the party passed with Burke into support of William Pitt’s government. In 1794, at the conclusion of Hastings’ impeachment, Burke retired from Parliament. His last years were clouded by the death of his only son, on whom his political ambitions had come to centre. He continued to write, defending himself from his critics, deploring the condition of Ireland, and opposing any recognition of the French government (notably in “Three Letters Addressed to a Member of the Present Parliament on the Proposals for Peace, with the Regicide Directory of France” [1796–97]).

Burke’s thought and influence Burke’s writings on France, though the most profound of his works, cannot be read as a complete statement of his views on politics. Burke, in fact, never gave a systematic exposition of his fundamental beliefs but appealed to them always in relation to specific issues. But it is possible to regard his writings as an integrated whole in terms of the constant principles underlying his practical positions. These principles are, in essence, an exploration of the concept of “nature,” or “natural law.” Burke conceives the emotional and spiritual life of man as a harmony within the larger order of the universe. Natural impulse, that is, contains within itself self-restraint and self-criticism; the moral and spiritual life is continuous with it, generated from it and essentially sympathetic to it. It follows that society and state make possible the full realization of human potentiality, embody a common good, and represent a tacit or explicit agreement on norms and ends. The political community acts ideally as a unity. This interpretation of nature and the natural order implies deep respect for the historical process and the usages and social achievements built up over time. Therefore, social change is not merely possible but also inevitable and desirable. But the scope and the role of thought operating as a reforming instrument on society as a whole is limited. It should act under the promptings of specific tensions or specific possibilities, in close union with the detailed process of change, rather than in large speculative schemes involving extensive interference with the stable, habitual life of society. Also, it ought not to place excessive emphasis on some ends at the expense of others; in particular, it should not give rein to a moral idealism (as in the French Revolution) that sets itself in radical opposition to the existing order. Such attempts cut across the natural processes of social development, initiating uncontrollable forces or provoking a dialectical reaction of excluded factors. Burke’s hope, in effect, is not a realization of particular ends, such as the “liberty” and “equality” of the French Revolution, but an intensification and reconciliation of the multifarious elements of the good life that community exists to forward. In his own day, Burke’s writings on France were an important inspiration to German and French counterrevolutionary thought. His influence in England has been more diffuse, more balanced, and more durable. He stands as the original exponent of long-lived constitutional conventions, the idea of party, and the role of the member of Parliament as free representative, not delegate. More generally, his remains the most persuasive statement of certain inarticulate political and social principles long and widely held in England: the validity of status and hierarchy and the limited role of politics in the life of society. Charles William Parkin The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

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Thomas Paine was an English-born American Founding Father, political activist, philosopher, political theorist, and revolutionary1. He authored Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis (1776–1783), two of the most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution1. Other works that contributed to his reputation as one of the greatest political propagandists in history were Rights of Man2 and The Age of Reason1.

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Common Sense is a 47-page pamphlet written by Thomas Paine in 1775–1776 advocating independence from Great Britain to people in the Thirteen Colonies1. Writing in clear and persuasive prose, Paine collected various moral and political arguments to encourage common people in the Colonies to fight for egalitarian government1. It was published anonymously on January 10, 1776, at the beginning of the American Revolution1.

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The American Crisis is a collection of articles written by Thomas Paine during the American Revolutionary War1. In 1776 Paine wrote Common Sense, an extremely popular and successful pamphlet arguing for Independence from England1. The essays collected in The American Crisis constitute Paine’s ongoing support for an independent and self-governing America through the many severe crises of the Revolutionary War1.

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Thomas Paine (born Thomas Pain;[1] February 9, 1737 [O.S. January 29, 1736][Note 1] – June 8, 1809) was an English-born American Founding Father, political activist, philosopher, political theorist, and revolutionary.[2][3] He authored Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis (1776–1783), two of the most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, and helped inspire the Patriots in 1776 to declare independence from Great Britain,[4] theretofore an unpopular cause. His ideas reflected Enlightenment-era ideals of transnational human rights.[5]

Born in Thetford, Norfolk, Paine emigrated to the British American colonies in 1774 with the help of Benjamin Franklin, arriving just in time to participate in the American Revolution. Virtually every rebel read (or listened to a reading of) his 47-page pamphlet Common Sense, proportionally the all-time best-selling American title,[6][7] which catalysed the rebellious demand for independence from Great Britain. The American Crisis was a pro-revolutionary pamphlet series. Paine lived in France for most of the 1790s, becoming deeply involved in the French Revolution. While in England, he wrote Rights of Man (1791), in part a defense of the French Revolution against its critics. His attacks on Anglo-Irish conservative writer Edmund Burke led to a trial and conviction in absentia in England in 1792 for the crime of seditious libel.

The British government of William Pitt the Younger, worried by the possibility that the French Revolution might spread to Britain, had begun suppressing works that espoused radical philosophies. Paine's work, which advocated the right of the people to overthrow their government, was duly targeted, with a writ for his arrest issued in early 1792. Paine fled to France in September where, despite not being able to speak French, he was quickly elected to the French National Convention. The Girondins regarded him as an ally; consequently, the Montagnards, especially Maximilien Robespierre, regarded him as an enemy. In December 1793, he was arrested and was taken to Luxembourg Prison in Paris. While in prison, he continued to work on The Age of Reason (1793–1794). James Monroe, a future President of the United States, used his diplomatic connections to get Paine released in November 1794.

Paine became notorious because of his pamphlets and attacks on his former allies, who he felt had betrayed him. In The Age of Reason and other writings he advocated Deism, promoted reason and freethought, and argued against institutionalized religions in general and the Christian doctrine in particular.[8][9][10][11] In 1796, he published a bitter open letter to George Washington, whom he denounced as an incompetent general and a hypocrite. He published the pamphlet Agrarian Justice (1797), discussing the origins of property and introduced the concept of a guaranteed minimum income through a one-time inheritance tax on landowners. In 1802, he returned to the U.S. When he died on June 8, 1809, only six people attended his funeral, as he had been ostracized for his ridicule of Christianity[12] and attacks on the nation's leaders.

Early life and education[edit]

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Thomas Paine was born on January 29, 1736 (NS February 9, 1737),[Note 1] the son of Joseph Pain, a tenant farmer and stay-maker,[13] and Frances (née Cocke) Pain, in Thetford, Norfolk, England. Joseph was a Quaker and Frances an Anglican.[14] Despite claims that Thomas changed the spelling of his family name upon his emigration to America in 1774,[1] he was using "Paine" in 1769, while still in Lewes, Sussex.[15]

Old School at Thetford Grammar School, where Paine was educated

He attended Thetford Grammar School (1744–1749), at a time when there was no compulsory education.[16] At the age of 13, he was apprenticed to his father.[17][18] Following his apprenticeship, aged 19, Paine enlisted and briefly served as a privateer,[19] before returning to Britain in 1759. There, he became a master staymaker, establishing a shop in Sandwich, Kent.[20]

On September 27, 1759, Paine married Mary Lambert. His business collapsed soon after. Mary became pregnant; and, after they moved to Margate, she went into early labour, in which she and their child died.[21]

In July 1761, Paine returned to Thetford to work as a supernumerary officer. In December 1762, he became an Excise Officer in Grantham, Lincolnshire; in August 1764, he was transferred to Alford, also in Lincolnshire, at a salary of £50 per annum. On August 27, 1765, he was dismissed as an Excise Officer for "claiming to have inspected goods he did not inspect". On July 31, 1766, he requested his reinstatement from the Board of Excise, which they granted the next day, upon vacancy. While awaiting that, he worked as a staymaker.[22]

Thomas Paine's house in Lewes

In 1767, he was appointed to a position in Grampound, Cornwall. Later he asked to leave this post to await a vacancy, and he became a schoolteacher in London.[23]

On February 19, 1768, he was appointed to Lewes in Sussex, a town with a tradition of opposition to the monarchy and pro-republican sentiments since the revolutionary decades of the 17th century.[24] Here he lived above the 15th-century Bull House, the tobacco shop of Samuel Ollive and Esther Ollive.[25]

Paine first became involved in civic matters when he was based in Lewes. He appears in the Town Book as a member of the Court Leet, the governing body for the town. He was also a member of the parish vestry, an influential local Anglican church group whose responsibilities for parish business would include collecting taxes and tithes to distribute among the poor. On March 26, 1771, at age 34, Paine married Elizabeth Ollive, the daughter of his recently deceased landlord, whose business as a grocer and tobacconist he then entered into.[26]

Plaque at the White Hart Hotel, Lewes, East Sussex, south east England

From 1772 to 1773, Paine joined excise officers asking Parliament for better pay and working conditions, publishing, in summer of 1772, The Case of the Officers of Excise, a 12-page article, and his first political work, spending the London winter distributing the 4,000 copies printed to the Parliament and others. In spring 1774, he was again dismissed from the excise service for being absent from his post without permission. The tobacco shop failed. On April 14, to avoid debtors' prison, he sold his household possessions to pay debts. He formally separated from his wife Elizabeth on June 4, 1774, and moved to London. In September, mathematician, Fellow of the Royal Society, and Commissioner of the Excise George Lewis Scott introduced him to Benjamin Franklin,[27] who was there as a voice for colonial opposition to British colonial rule, especially as it related to the Stamp Act, and the Townshend Acts. He was publisher and editor of the largest American newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette and suggested emigration to Philadelphia. He handed out a letter of recommendation to Paine, who emigrated in October to the American colonies, arriving in Philadelphia on November 30, 1774.[28]

In Pennsylvania Magazine[edit]

Paine barely survived the transatlantic voyage. The ship's water supplies were bad and typhoid fever killed five passengers. On arriving at Philadelphia, he was too sick to disembark. Benjamin Franklin's physician, there to welcome Paine to America, had him carried off ship; Paine took six weeks to recover. He became a citizen of Pennsylvania "by taking the oath of allegiance at a very early period".[29] In March 1775, he became editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, a position he conducted with considerable ability.[30]

Before Paine's arrival in America, sixteen magazines had been founded in the colonies and ultimately failed, each featuring substantial content and reprints from England. In late 1774, Philadelphia printer Robert Aitken announced his plan to create what he called an "American Magazine" with content derived from the colonies.[30] Paine contributed two pieces to the magazine's inaugural issue dated January 1775, and Aitken hired Paine as the Magazine's editor one month later. Under Paine's leadership, the magazine's readership rapidly expanded, achieving a greater circulation in the colonies than any American magazine up until that point.[30] While Aiken had conceived of the magazine as nonpolitical, Paine brought a strong political perspective to its content, writing in its first issue that "every heart and hand seem to be engaged in the interesting struggle for American Liberty."[30]

Paine wrote in the Pennsylvania Magazine that such a publication should become a "nursery of genius" for a nation that had "now outgrown the state of infancy," exercising and educating American minds, and shaping American morality.[30] On March 8, 1775, the Pennsylvania Magazine published an unsigned abolitionist essay titled African Slavery in America.[31] The essay is often attributed to Paine on the basis of a letter by Benjamin Rush, recalling Paine's claim of authorship to the essay.[31] The essay attacked slavery as an "execrable commerce" and "outrage against Humanity and Justice."[31]

Consciously appealing to a broader and more working-class audience, Paine also used the magazine to discuss worker rights to production. This shift in the conceptualization of politics has been described as a part of "the 'modernization' of political consciousness," and the mobilization of ever greater sections of society into political life.[30][32]