Reflections on the French Revolution.
THE CHARACTERISTIC passion of Burke’s life was his love of order. In spite of the varying relations held by him toward the different parties in England during his political career, one may easily find the key to his consistency in this central principle. When the King’s party sought to increase the royal prerogative, he resisted; when the old Whigs sought to make the government of the country a means to the enrichment of their class, he resisted; and when the sympathizers with the Revolution sought, as Burke thought, to abolish government, he resisted. Liberty he claimed that he loved, but “a liberty connected with order”; and in each of the political movements just mentioned he discerned an attack on either liberty or order. He had a profound veneration for the accumulated wisdom of centuries of experience, and held that the bounds of liberty should be enlarged with great caution and very gradually. That a political system had lasted a long time was to him an argument that it must to a large extent be fit for its purpose, and that therefore it should not be rashly changed. With such views, Burke was bound to oppose the French Revolution. The sweeping away of the traditions of ages, the erection of new forms of government built on abstract theories, were abhorrent to him; and he threw himself with vehemence into opposition. Much that was hopeful in the Revolution he failed to see; and he could not in his passion discriminate carefully among men and motives. But his treatment of the situation in these “Reflections,” written before the Terror had begun to alienate sympathy, shows great insight and prophetic wisdom. This book led the reaction in England and made its author a European figure. In this country to-day, with our traditional sympathy with the great upheaval, it is in the highest degree valuable to see these momentous events through the eyes of a great contemporary conservative.

Rights of Man

On Paine's return to England in 1787, this democratic republicanism reached its most influential expression in his two-part Rights of Man (1791-2), prompted by the need to refute Edmund Burke's critical Reflections on the Revolution in France. For citizen Paine the French Revolution represented a much-needed new beginning, an age of reason in which universal and natural rights (at least for men) were no longer denied by privilege and the past, by spurious argument premised on dubious history, bogus constitutionalism, invented tradition or inherited superstition. A talented writer, Paine deployed his 'intellectual vernacular prose' to render natural rights and rational republicanism accessible, uncompromising and all-embracing, including the 'swinish multitude' disparaged by Burke.

'Paine found both the language and the programme to attract working people to politics, underlining its relevance to their experience of economic hardship.'

But it was not just the style that accounted for the remarkable success of the Rights of Man which, even by the most conservative estimate, sold between 100,000 and 200,000 copies in the first three years after publication. As Part Two evinced, Paine was much more than a talented popularizer of advanced ideas, a megaphone for the enlightenment project against kingcraft, lordcraft and priestcraft. An original thinker far ahead of his time, he sought to redress poverty (seemingly endemic in advanced European societies) through an interventionist programme of welfare redistribution, including old-age pensions, marriage allowances and maternity benefits.

Paine found both the language and the programme to attract working people to politics, underlining its relevance to their experience of economic hardship. Stopping short of socialism, Paine transformed jurisprudential notions of social obligation - the 'soft' right to charity - into a theory of 'positive liberty' - the 'hard' right to welfare, guaranteed by government and financed by redistributive taxation.