Burke was born in 1729 CE, and Paine was born in 1737 CE. Burke was Irish, Paine was English. They both supported the American Revolution; that is to say opposed the English parliament and its monarch on the matter. If you remember our early episodes in this series, one of the root causes for the American revolution was Britain demanding more money from its American colonies to make up for the losses incurred in its involvement in the Seven Years war. Burke and Paine was against this new taxation on the colonies. Well, then they were friends!

The French also supported the American revolution, you see. They had lost dearly in the Seven Years war, and sought revenge against their arch rivals, the British. The bitter resentment was carried on until they helped the American colonies defeat the British in the revolution. But the moral victory defeated them materially. The war drove the French Kingdom to bankruptcy. One of the root causes for the French revolution was the Monarch and his ancien regime trying to recover the losses by taxing its populace further.

Thomas Paine fully supported the French Revolution. In fact, he was an advisor to the French National Assembly when they were drafting the new Constitution.

Edmund Burke did not know how to react initially to the revolution. In August 1789, Burke wrote:

"England gazing with astonishment at a French struggle for liberty and not knowing whether to blame or applaud! The thing indeed, thought I thought I saw something like it in progress for several years, has still something in it paradoxical and mysterious. The spirit it is impossible not to admire; but the old Parisian ferocity has broken out in a shocking manner"

But, in October 1789, when a crowd of Parisian women marched on Versailles to compel King Louis XVI to return to Paris, Burke lost it. That event took him to his boiling point. Burke began to abhor the revolution. So he voiced and printed words against the revolution and its principles, to which Paine replied vehemently. And they became bitter rivals.

Edmund Burke is considered as the founder or father of conservatism, especially in Britain. In 1790, he registered his reaction to the revolution in France by publishing a pamphlet titled, “Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event: In a Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Paris.” The rather long title was then trimmed to the now popular "Reflections on the Revolution in France".

The 'Certain societies' mentioned in the original title was referring to a revolutionary society in England which supported Protestantism as the state religion. This was a peaceful society, not as revolutionary as its name suggests. The name rather alludes to its admiration of the "Glorious Revolution" in England in 1688, which deposed the Catholic monarch and replaced him with a Protestant monarch, thus establishing the victory of parliament over the crown. The society was also happy about the revolution in France, and supported the National Assembly. Not just England, but every other neighbouring country was afraid of the contagious revolution in France spreading to their land. One has to presume that Burke was worried too. He directly attacked the revolutionary society in England, the French National Assembly, and the enlightenment ideas of liberty, natural rights and Constitution. Plus, the wound left by the Gordon riots in London in 1780, an attack on the Catholics, must have still been fresh in Burke's mind.

I present a few passages from Burke's reflection on the "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" movement in France, and the forming of a constitution by the National Assembly, nullifying the monarch and his divine authority, He wrote:

"It is known; that armies have hitherto yielded a very precarious and uncertain obedience to any senate, or popular authority; and they will least of all yield it to an assembly which is only to have a continuance of two years. The officers must totally lose the characteristic disposition of military men, if they see with perfect submission and due admiration, the dominion of pleaders; especially when they find that they have a new court to pay to an endless succession of those pleaders; whose military policy, and the genius of whose command, (if they should have any,) must be as uncertain as their duration is transient. In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account.

A few years later, enter Napoleon Bonaparte!

There is only one comparably Cassandra-like prediction, writes Christopher Hitchens, "that I can call to mind, and that is Rosa Luxemburg’s warning to Lenin that revolution can move swiftly from the dictatorship of a class to the dictatorship of a party, to be followed by the dictatorship of a committee of that party and eventually by the rule of a single man who will soon enough dispense with that committee."

Next passage. Of the then French queen, Burke wrote:

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,—glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendour, and joy. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom."

Of the National Assembly and the constitution, Burke wrote:

"If this monster of a constitution can continue, France will be wholly governed by the agitators in corporations, by societies in the towns formed of directors of assignats and trustees for the sale of church lands, attornies, agents, money-jobbers, speculators, and adventurers, composing an ignoble oligarchy, founded on the destruction of the crown, the church, the nobility, and the people. Here end all the deceitful dreams and visions of the equality and rights of men."

Of the social contract. Burke wrote:

"It becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place."

Now let's listen to Paine's reply.

Thomas Paine's reply to Burke's pamphlet is equally emphatic. The general tone could be sampled in the paragraph below:

"As to the tragic paintings by which Mr. Burke has outraged his own imagination, and seeks to work upon that of his readers, they are very well calculated for theatrical representation, where facts are manufactured for the sake of show, and accommodated to produce, through the weakness of sympathy, a weeping effect. But Mr. Burke should recollect that he is writing history, and not plays, and that his readers will expect truth, and not the spouting rant of high-toned exclamation."

and in the following paragraph as well:

"There is scarcely an epithet of abuse to be found in the English language, with which Mr. Burke has not loaded the French Nation and the National Assembly. Everything which rancour, prejudice, ignorance or knowledge could suggest, is poured forth in the copious fury of near four hundred pages. In the strain and on the plan Mr. Burke was writing, he might have written on to as many thousands. When the tongue or the pen is let loose in a frenzy of passion, it is the man, and not the subject, that becomes exhausted."

I include these to show how vicious ideological battles in writing was back then. Apart from these, most other parts of Paine's reply are rather technical, and it counters almost every major accusation made by Burke. He has defended the revolutionary society of England, and the idea of natural and civil rights which was then zeitgeist. Paine wrote:

"Mr. Burke, on the contrary, denies that such a right exists in the nation, either in whole or in part, or that it exists anywhere; and, what is still more strange and marvellous, he says: "that the people of England utterly disclaim such a right, and that they will resist the practical assertion of it with their lives and fortunes." That men should take up arms and spend their lives and fortunes, not to maintain their rights, but to maintain they have not rights, is an entirely new species of discovery, and suited to the paradoxical genius of Mr. Burke."

About Burke's admiration of the queen, and the disappointment in the lost chivalry, Paine replied:

"When we see a man dramatically lamenting in a publication intended to be believed that "The age of chivalry is gone! that The glory of Europe is extinguished for ever! that The unbought grace of life (if anyone knows what it is), the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone!" and all this because the Quixot age of chivalry nonsense is gone, what opinion can we form of his judgement, or what regard can we pay to his facts? In the rhapsody of his imagination he has discovered a world of wind mills, and his sorrows are that there are no Quixots to attack them."

About Burke's notion of a social contract needing to be between the living, dead and the unborn, Paine wrote:

"Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow. The Parliament or the people of 1688, or of any other period, had no more right to dispose of the people of the present day, or to bind or to control them in any shape whatever, than the parliament or the people of the present day have to dispose of, bind or control those who are to live a hundred or a thousand years hence. Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated. When man ceases to be, his power and his wants cease with him; and having no longer any participation in the concerns of this world, he has no longer any authority in directing who shall be its governors, or how its government shall be organised, or how administered."

About society, contract and the Constitution, Paine replied:

"In casting our eyes over the world, it is extremely easy to distinguish the governments which have arisen out of society, or out of the social compact, from those which have not; but to place this in a clearer light than what a single glance may afford, it will be proper to take a review of the several sources from which governments have arisen and on which they have been founded. They may be all comprehended under three heads. First, Superstition. Secondly, Power. Thirdly, The common interest of society and the common rights of man. The first was a government of priestcraft, the second of conquerors, and the third of reason."

Well, if nothing has had been concluded in over 200 years, it would be hard to conclude anything now. That is the tragedy of social sciences. At any rate, few observations must be made.

1. First, this exchange of words must have unveiled the general political situation of the late 18th century you. Both of them had supporters and followers. It certainly has affected our modern world in many ways
2. Edmund Burke is considered as the founder of conservatism now. Whether he knew it is arguable. I suppose his writings, especially the Reflections on Revolutions has acted as an inspiration in autopsy for the conservatives. It doesn't really help us, in this podcast episode to define Conservatism really. Nevertheless, it is imperative to be aware of his views with all its frailties
3. Burke passage about the French queen might not be palatable for a reader of 21st century, but if you look around to find similarities, find it you might quicker than you would think it might be. Hero worship is still pervasive
4. The most curious comment made by Burke, according to me, the hardest to comprehend is regarding the social contract needing to include the living, dead and the unborn. Perhaps, we are reading it in an entirely different circumstances
5. Burke's triumph is in the Cassandra like prediction of the a powerful military general. That was eerily exact!

6. Thomas Paine is not considered the father of liberalism, but it is impossible to study or analyse the idea of liberty without Paine. It is as simple as that.

   With that, let's move on to the 19th century, where Classical Liberalism and Conservatism took its real shape.

1. Arguably, Christopher Hitchens
2. Reflections on Revolution in France, Edmund Burke
3. Rights of Man, Thomas Paine
4. Common Sense, Thomas Paine.
5. Political Ideologies : An Introduction, Andrew Heywood
6. The French Revolution, William Doyle