part of the marketing for photographs and memorabilia and stereotypes. now would be considered passe but in many ways they are still in terms of the way we invite to see ourselves. .. >> as president obama's special assistant and personal aide. booktv continues on monday with all five of the nominees for the national book critics

circle award in nonfiction. all this and more on booktv, television for serious readers. for a complete schedule for today and for this coming weekend, booktv.org. next, from the first bill of rights day book festival, yuval eleven discusses his book "the great debate: edmund burke, thomas paine and the birth of the right and left." [inaudible conversations] [applause] >> ladies and gentlemen welcome to the second installment of our thrilling, first-ever national constitution center bill of rights book fair. for those of you who are joining us for the first time on c-span let me introduce this great event briefly one more time. i'm jeffrey rosen the president

and ceo of the national constitution center which, as our audience knows, is the only institution in america chartered by congress to disseminate information about the u.s. constitution on a nonpartisan basis. and this book festival is part of a daylong celebration today december 15th bill of rights day, which is the 225th anniversary of the proposal of the bill of rights. of the new exhibit opening at the constitution center which displays one of the 12 original copies of the bill of rights. and this was one of the copies that george washington sent to the states on october 2nd, 1789. we're displaying it with rare copies of the declaration of independence and the constitution. if you happen to be nearby philly or want to jump on a planed today, you can get -- on a plane today, you can get $5 admission to the museum and see the bill of rights. but i hope that around the country and around the world

people will join us both here at the museum and online to learn about how the rights that we're promised in the declaration of independence were implicit in the constitution and finally, codified in the bill of rights. i am now thrilled to introduce an old friend and a very distinguished scholar who's written a superb book called "the great debate." yuval levin is a herring to fellow, founder and editor of the superb journal "national affairs," a prolific scholar and journalist, a member of -- he's been executive director of the president's council on bioethics, and this book, described by "the washington post" as a thoughtful introduction to this famous opposition, i think that's understating the case. what this magnificent book does is in terms that are both deep

and scholarly but also beautifully written and entirely accessible, shows how this intellectual debate between two pillars of then lightenment -- thomas paine and edmund burke -- has come to define many of the debates around the world and in america today. and we began our great bill of rights festival discussing the first amendment and the natural rights theory that underlay it. and madison's feeling that laws restricting criticism of public officials violated the natural right which comes from god and not government to express one's opinions freely. and what yuval does in this book is give us a much deeper context for how that natural rights philosophy was broadly shared among the american framers, madison, jefferson, but really was given its most fiery and compelling popular expression in the work of thomas paine. and then he contrasts paine's vision with that of edmund burke

which, far from being rooted in the individual natural rights of all men, was focused more on the organic evolution of society and emphasized gradualism and tradition over justice and individual choice. yuval, first of all, welcome to the national constitution center. >> thank you very much for having me. >> describe the fact that paine and burke knew each other, first of all. they actually met. talk about their meeting. they were both opposed to the to britain's conduct during the war of american independence. how did they meet? >> yes. one of those extraordinary things about the debates of that period was they took place in a very small world, a small world of anglo-american elites who frequently knew each other. burke and paine had been on the same side of the american

question paine certainly much more radically so. he was one of the great champions of american independence right here in philadelphia having emigrated here from britain as a man in his early 30s. after the more than revolution -- after the american revolution paine found himself drawn to what was happening in france and very involved and very engaged in the debates that preceded their revolution and saw it as his purpose to make the case for revolution in france to the english-speaking world 689 that meant that he also spent a fair amount of time in loan deny, and the first -- london, and the first time he came back to london after first having gone to france, he sought out edmund burke who he thought of as a kind of kindred spirit since burke had been one of the few members of parliament who had very aggressively championed the more than cause, or at least opposed the british government's treatment of the americans. so they met.

they met first for dinner in august of 1787 and they spent a week together after that. a little bit later that summer. is and from all accounts they got along pretty well. by that point the two of them were expressing pretty different views and, of course not long afterwards they became really champions of the two opposing camps in the debate over the french revolution. even around the american question, burke and paine expressed different views. they both supported the americans, but for quite different reasons. paine made an argument that's really a case against monarchy not just the case for an american break with the british monarchy. burke thought parliament had the right to do what it was doing to the americans but that it was just a stupid thing to do and a mistake, and it would result in the break-up of the empire. so he opposed it on much more practical grounds. we have to assume their

differences became apparent to them when they spent time together, but they were certainly apparent to everyone else not long after that. >> so they actually met a month before the constitution was, in fact, proposed. >> yeah. >> and you have some interesting thoughts about how paine might have had some questions about the constitution. he favored a unicameral legislature. tell us some of the structures of constitution that he favored that are different -- >> it's an interesting thing, burke and paine are virtually silent about the american constitution. burke says a few vaguely nice things about the structure of the constitution in a parliamentary debate. paine, we just don't know. he never ebbs pressed an -- expressed an opinion about the ratification. paine was certainly not friendly to the complicated structure of the american constitution. he always argued for much simpler constitutional systems.

he wanted a unicameral legislature, no executive. you can see some of his thinking in the original pennsylvania constitution. he was one of the several authors of that document. and it was very, very different from the more than constitution. he believed in much more direct democracy. was in a sense a much more radical democrat than most of the american founders. and i think it's safe to say that he had a lot of problems with the american constitution, but he was careful never to say so. it was much more in keeping with burke's way of thinking about the dangers of power, the need to divide and channel power. but he, too didn't say much. it's one of the great frustrations of burke's scholarship, is that there's a letter from a great friend of his in ireland who sent him a copy of the federalists and said i'm going to be in london in a few weeks, and we should talk about this. and if only that trip had been canceled, we might have a letter back. but presumably, this conversation happened, and we just have no idea what his view

was. >> what do you think he would have made of it? >> well, i think he would have been impressed with the federalists. and we know he was generally, as i say, impressed with the constitution. but burke had a complicated relationship with the american revolution and with the american regime. he was, as was said basically a friend of the american independence, but he always wanted the argument to be understood in practical terms. he was very resistant to the philosophical case for american independence. he says nothing about the declaration of independence, even in his private letters, though we know for a fact he was present in parliament when it was read to the members. so he was certainly aware of it. he never writes about thomas jefferson, he's very interested in other people. he writes about washington, a little about hamilton, but he's wary of the more philosophical and more radical side of the american founding generation, and as you see in reading burke, that was not his way of thinking about politics. >> okay. well, let's talk about the philosophical basis for the american revolution as

articulated by paine. you mentioned the pennsylvania constitution which he had a role in drafting. when you go to our bill of rights gallery, you can click on anything in the bill of rights, and then compare it to the first constitution of pennsylvania 776, and see how similar and different the language is when it comes to the second amendment, for example, the u.s. constitution emphasizes a well-regulated militia. the pennsylvania constitution which paine helped to draft was the only one of the constitutions that explicitly recognized an individual right to defend. c-span viewers, you can do this online once the site is up and running later in this week, i should say and i should also say that, c-span viewers, you can tweet your questions to yuval levin to to @constitution center. so, yuval, i think your description of paine's understanding of social compact

theory is among the most clarifying i've seen period. you quote paine on page 93 of describing what individuals retain and what they surrender when they move from a state of nature into civil society. i can't do better than you do. if you want to read from paine you can. but just give us the elevator speech for what thomas paine understood the purpose of government was and how its role was to protect natural rights in exchange for greater security and safety and protection of the alienable rights that were exchanged. >> well, paine makes a very spark, locke january case for the source of our rights in society. what we think of as the argument emanating from john locke. i think it's fair to say that locke's own argument is a little more complicated than that, but payne argues we have to understand original rights as originating from the fact that every individual derives his rights directly and not through society. we have this famous thought

experiment, i think it's fair to say, of the state of nature where we understand society as a rising. we should think about society as coming out of a situation in which independent individuals completely separate from one another come together by choice to form a society and the compact they make with one another is the fundamental law of that society. it exists to protect the rights they have as individuals before t society. it doesn't give them new rights. they don't get their rights from society. they bring their rights into society. and what it offers them is protection; that is physical safety safety for their property and an ability to make use of their rights that they wouldn't otherwise be able to in the state of nature. but basically society just exists to protect the individuals' right of choice fundamentally. and, ultimately, that's the purpose of society. a very stark and very radical way of understanding the sources of what we think of as political rights, liberal rights.

burke begins very early in his career by asking a very basic question about that idea which is if, in fact, no human being has ever lived in such a state of nature if there's no way that anyone ever existed outside of a society, then how does it make sense to understand our rights in society as deriving from a kind of experiment that has no relation to the reality of human experience? that is, isn't it a problem that the state of nature is just a thought experiment and, in in fact, has never existed? what are rights in society rather than what are rights if we imagine ourselves outside of society where no person's ever been? so burke wants to make an argument for rights, and he is a believer in rightings. not only a believer, but it's very important to burke not to let people with these more radical views of a democratic society take ownership of these terms. so burke really insists on defining rights in his way, defining liberty in his way defining equality in his way, not allowing all these terms to be defined only in the most

radical possible way of understanding them. and he wants to say rights ultimately have to be understood as a function of a society that existed before us. every human being has always been born into a society. no human being has been born outside of society. and so we have to understand our rights as unher dances -- inheritances, and we have to understand our rights as defining relations to other people in a society. it's one way of seeing that burke and paine are both liberals, but they argue about it from very different angles from a very different point of origin. paine always wants to understand the liberal organization as a break from the past made possible by new insights that were gained in the enlightenment. burke always wants to understand a liberal society as an extension of the best of western civilization, not as something newly discovered, but as something gradually built up and evolved over many many generations, so as something

connected to the western tradition rather than fundamentally a rejection of the western tradition. and that debate between them ends up being a debate between a side that sees the liberal society as a break to be advanced, to be brought to full, fully into being or as an achievement to be conserved. in that sense, a progress i vision of liberalism and a conservative vision of liberalism from the very outset has been the argument about the nature of the liberal society. >> beautifully expressed contrast between two visions of the status of natural rights. i want to delve in just a bit because it's important for the audience to understand exactly which rights paine and the other framers considered natural civil, and which were alienable and unalienable because if we don't understand that, then we can't understand why madison thought the most important was the one that prohibited the states as well as the federal government from prohibiting

religious speech. i just thought this was such a great passage that you included. you said: moving from the state of nature to civil society, people trade freedom for protection, but they don't give up their basic pre-social or unalienable rights. and these are the natural rights, and you have to distinguish between rights you can individually exercise fully and perfectly and those you cannot. of the first kind, are rights of thinking speaking, forming and giving opinions and perhaps those which can be fully exercised by the individual without the aid of exterior assistance. of the second kind the alienable ones that you can surrender in exchange for greater safety security and personal protection -- that word, equal protection of the law, is a term of art which you get from the state of nature -- these include acquiring and possessing property in the exercise of the individual power is less than the natural right thus, i consider to be civil rights and distinguishable from natural rights. in our next discussion you'll

see not to be deprived of life liberty or due process was an alienable rather than an unalienable natural right, and that's why the framers allowed for more restrictions on it. again, with thanks for letting me spell that out to help elucidate it if you will, and tell me and tell our audience what the consequence of this natural right theory was for paine's and burke's views. burke emphasized the second half, what did paine believe that it's the people's duty to do when government infringes natural rights rather than granting them protection? >> yeah. what you really see in that quote is the central place that paine and others like him gave to human reason in political life. that is, they understood fundamentally that people come into society with a right to think freely and that that always remains a very important right to protect. and so that's one of the things

that government can't restrict and can't limit. ultimately, what this can amount to for burke and for paine as i suggested, they understood the liberal society in rather different ways. and the fact that burke emphasized continuity and sees that society as having gradually evolved especially in the british experience through the experience the historical experience of trying to find a balance between order and freedom and, therefore trying to find the practical implications of the moral and philosophical principles that stand above society. for paine those principles come first. those principles are discovered directly by a new science of politics in the enlightenment and have to be applied to society. and in a sense the purpose of government is to apply those principles and to allow them to become real. both of these views i think, are evident in the american declaration of independence. both the conservative view of the liberal society and the

progressive one, the more radical one are evident at the same time in the declaration. the opening of the declaration is a very radical statement of principles. it asserts rights, and it asserts the right to act on those when government restricts them. so what pa a ine would say is if the government is not allowing you to exercise your rights not protecting your rights, you have a right to overthrow it and begin again, start over from the principles, build a government on those principles. that's certainly are evident in the declaration of independence. it's an important part of the argument for revolution. but after stating those fairly radical principles, the declaration makes a turn a turn toward a list of grievances that the americans have for justifying why it was time for revolution. and those imreefnses if you look at them are all about continuity. they're accusing the king of not allowing them to keep the system of government they had before. they're not arguing in that second part of the declaration that they need to start over from scratch based on the right

kinds of principles. they're arguing instead that they used to have a legitimate government and fairly recently the british government has started to rob them of their rights. and all of those grievances that are listed are basically about allowing the colonists to continue to preserve the political tradition they've had. a much more conservative case for revolution. a case for recovering for recovering a legitimate government. and reading the deck la rawtion of independence you have to ask yourself do these people think that monarchy is necessarily illegitimate everywhere, or do they think the particular monarchy they've been living under is treating them in an illegitimate way? i think it can be read both way. thomas paine certainly believes that monarchy is illegitimate, period. and the arguments that he makes even at the time of the american revolution in "common sense," his great revolutionary pamphlet is an argument against

monarchy. burke argues monarchy is one of the legitimate forms of government, but it certainly has to treat its own people in a legitimate way. that debate, which is one form of the original left-right debate, is evident in the american founding and has always opinion part of our national conversation -- has always been part of our national conversation about politics from the very beginning. >> this is one of your most provocative claims, the debate between burke and paine sufficient fuses american history and defines the parameters of our current debates. you don't talk much about the 19th century and what happened between the deck declaration and today. would it be fair to say that the burkians of the 19th century were calhoun and defenders of slavery whereas the paine acolytes were people like lincoln and frederick douglass

who invoked afterral rights theory -- natural rights theory? >> burke was an opponent of slavery. he took it to be a question that was outside of politics and was one of the adamant abolitionists in english politics. slavery itself had been abolished in british life by then, but the slave trade was very much a part of the british empire, and burke wanted it ended. he was one of the first signatories of the wilbur force petition. he certainly had no question about where or not to stand on the slavery question. and i also think that lincoln in his arguments shows the presence of both of these ways of thinking about american life. that is, lincoln in a way discovered memory in american politics. he make the case especially as president, he makes the case for understanding the american political tradition which, remember, wasn't that old at the time. four score and seven years.

for understanding that tradition as an inheritance, as a kind of ancient tradition. he describes it as our ancient faith. it wasn't that ancient but he understood why it was important, why it could be helpful to understand the principles of the american republic as an inheritance and not just as an innovation. so i think lincoln in himself contains both of these strands so i wouldn't say that he simply represents the more radical element of american life, though lincoln certainly was a fan of thomas paine and understood himself as advancing a principled understanding of politics. it's important to see the burkian tradition also advances a principled understanding of politics. often times the difference between the two ways of seeing the place of principle in politics has to do with the question of how we can know the principles and how they apply to specific political circumstances. burke's complaint about paine's way of thinking and the way of thinking of the radicals in france was they thought you

could take principles directly from a kind of political philosophy and just apply them like a formula onto political life. burke argues principles don't work that way in politics. we can never know them quite that explicitly and the best way for us to know them is through political life. that is, a society as it adopts in a sense -- develops in a sense takes on their shape. so when you arrive at a question of principle in politics, one good way to answer that question is to think what way of proceeding would be most like our best selves rather than saying what way of proceeding is demanded by a formulaic definition of that principle? he thinks the principles are never that reliable. politics isn't math, and it's not physics. it's always a way of society finding the best way to be more like its best self. and for him, that's basically the statesman's task, the political challenge. >> you give a powerful answer to the idea that lincoln was

exclusively an act lite of natural rights and say he embraced both burke and paine. what's your response in that spirit to the famous claim of louis harts of harvard who wrote in his famous book "the liberal tradition," he began by quoting john locke: in the beginning all of a sudden world was america, and harts argued that essentially, america has always been lockean precisely because of the absence of feudalism, and for that reason harts said the more burkian tradition is not was not embraced by the framers all of whom were lockeans. what's the response to that? >> well, there's always been a strand that wants to say that america started from scratch. that's, in essence, what john locke was saying. it's not -- i don't think it's supportable by american history. that is, american history doesn't actually begin in the american revolution. and you can see that, again, in

the american declaration of independence which hearkens back to a tradition which says we have been living in a certain way for several hundred years, and that way is now being denied to us, and we want to recover it. there is that demand for recovery a kind of conservative assertion in the declaration of independence. tocqueville offers a nice answer to this in democracy in america. he makes the case that america's always been democratic, but for him that's not an argument for thinking that, therefore the american case for democracy is purely a principled argument. on the contrary he says america's political tradition has always been democratic. so the american people have the luxury of just continuing to live in their tradition in a democratic age so that american life is better suited to a liberal era, but that's not to say that americans have always been pure theorists pure philosophers of democratic rights. america's had a longstanding democratic tradition which is both democratic and a tradition. and, therefore has room in it both for a certain kind of

radicalism and a certain kind of conservativism. i think that's our great strength. the french revolution was a struggle between these two sides, ask one of them was going to -- and one of them was going to win and the other was going to lose. the american revolution contained both of these sides and so created a republic that has always contained them both and that has always through the pull and push of these two created a space where we can actually be a free people. that at the same time value both will liberty and order value both tradition and innovation. i think it's our great fortune that we've had that history. >> um, you talk powerfully about how paine is the hero of today's progressives who support rule by expertise. paine also embraced the prototypical version of the welfare state and supported relief for the poor whereas burke, who focused more on the support of traditional institutions like families and

churches and markets, is the heir to modern conservativism. are there aspects of burke that are obsolete and don't speak to america? i mean, he wrote flattering letters to dukes where he talked about the glittering wisdom of the unmetered aristocracy and -- inherited aristocracy and they're particularly archaic in that light. does burke still speak to us or are some of them still irrelevant? >> yeah, no question about it burke is an englishman and is working in an english tradition and a late 18th century english context. certainly, not all that speaks to us. i also would say to argue that burke and paine are the origins of left and right i'm not suggesting conservatives are who they are because they have read burke or that liberals are who they are because they've read paine. but, rather, life in a liberal society brings to the surface almost inevitably these two ways of understanding that society. one that sees it as a break, as

a trying to perfect a kind of theoretical construct, the other that sees it as an achievement that's trying to refine a longstanding accomplishment of western civilization. these are two ways that arise over and over in the debates that especially the anglo-american tradition sees, but debates that arise in liberal societies in general nowadays. burke and paine are useful because they are present at the outset of that tradition and so offer us an especially clear debate about those principles. they're very clear. they argue about principles in very, very fundamental ways. they understand where they disagree a lot better than most people now do. and so they're very useful in helping us see the foundations of these ways of thinking. but i wouldn't say they're simply that they're fathers in a literal sense. i wouldn't say that everything about burke is useful to conservatives. certainly not everything about burke is shared by american conservatives. the american context has always been a different context.

in fact burke himself in speaking about the americans around the time of the revolution, one of the his great speeches in parliament opposing the policy of the government, offers a kind of character description of the americans. and it's a wonderful thing to read. it used to be read a lot in american schools. it's really not anymore. what he says first is that the americans are obsessed with personal liberty, they're utterly obsessed with it, and he says they smell threats to their liberty in the air. they constantly see them coming. and in this way they are different from their british cousins. and his argument against the british government was that this has to be understood about them. if you're going to govern the americans, you have to understand their character. of and their character is an obsession with personal liberty and, he says, they translate that obsession into tax policy. [laughter] which is true. they let taxes stand for liberty. so it's especially a huge mistake to tax the americans in a way they find obnoxious.

find another way to raise the money, he says to the prime minister. this is a terrible way to treat these particular people. so there's no question that there are difference differences of character between americans and englishmen. and so not everything about burke is relevant. but the basic disposition, i think, speaks to a lot of what we still think about now. >> that was a great detail in his response to the british about why this isn't just a local tax matter. he's saying you're threatening the very character -- >> yeah. he says you say "tax," they hear "freedom." >> yeah, and he was right. >> and there's a lot of that still. [laughter] >> i want to delve down on this very provocative claim you make that burke is the heir to conservatives to ask who are the conservatives among burkians? paine was discovered by american conservatives in the '80s reagan quotes him at the 1980 convention and president obama discovered burke in saying that he wanted to resist dramatic transformation of the welfare state and that he was a

minimalist and a gradualist which is a remarkable inversion. and then also as you note conservatives appeal to natural rights theory and certainly the tea party is full of paine-like rhetoric, and we're about to, after this break have a great discussion with timothy sandofer who is a painian libertarian -- >> yeah, and who has written a superb book about the constitution. >> we're going to discuss it and have a phenomenal debate, so everyone halls to come back after lunch -- has to come back after lunch. >> yeah. i do offer reagan and obama as examples of an inversion. i think that they're making, they're making arguments about burke and paine that aren't quite true to burke and paine. ray gone loved to quote p -- reagan loved to quote paine and in some sense the least conservative thing he ever said where he argued we have it in our power to begin the world over again. reagan made this case in calling the american people to do great

things again; that is, he wanted to say we're not over. we still have in us the capacity to do the kinds of great things that americans have done in the past. he was not arguing for an end to religion and an overthrow of all social order as paine was. i would say this, i think that the basic burkian disposition is still very powerful in conservatives, and i think of it in three ways. and really the debate between burke and paine can be thought about along these three kinds of axes. first of all, burke begins in gratitude and not in outrage. that is, he looks at a world that is an imperfect world that has both good and bad in it, and he sees the good first and is impressed by the good first and wants to use the best of what we have to address the worst of what we have. he does this because he has very low expectations of human beings. he's impressed that anything works at all in society. [laughter] and so rather than start by saying things ought to be a lot better than this, he starts by

saying things could be a lot worse than this. [laughter] and he's, first of all grateful. paine begins by being outraged, again, because he thinks we've discovered the right way to do this. we have the right principles, we just have all these oppressive governments standing in our way of applying them, and so things should be a lot better than this. and he is fundamentally outraged at the status quo at all times. this difference is a difference you still see. it doesn't mean conservatives aren't outraged. burke was outraged most of the time. but his outrage was about losing things we had, losing great things that were the inheritance, the possession of the society that he was part of rather than an outrage at not having things we ought to have. i think that difference still tells you a lot about the left and the right. secondly, burke had a very limited notion of what human knowledge and power could do in society. i think this difference a kind of lirches that's very very important to understanding burke. burke thinks that the notion you can have a scientific politics

is the most preposterous thing that the radicals have proposed. he doesn't think that that kind of knowledge that the sort of knowledge that's available to a physicist in solving a physics problem can be available to a statesman in solving a social problem. the knowledge we have about society is always dispersed knowledge and always partial knowledge. and so it's not possible to think of pollices -- politics in technical terms. paine wants to say that it can be that science including the science of politics has a lot to offer us in addressing social problems. and he wants part of what he expects out of government is government will serve as a means of applying technical knowledge to social problems. burke wants government to serve as a means of channeling social knowledge, to use the mechanisms we have for channeling the knowledge possessed by individuals in society but at no point possessed at the center at no point possessed by technical knowledge by anybody. these kinds of institutions are institutions that exist between

the individual and the state. the family the community religious organizations, civic organizations and the market are ways of channeling social knowledge, of moving knowledge from the bottom up. and paine is expressly hostile to all of these institutions because he thinks they're not legitimate politically. they're not democratically elected. nobody gave the catholic church a right to run hospitals, so how is it making decisions about who can run this or that? it's still an argument we have all the time. he believes that you can concentrate knowledge in the middle and apply it and that as long as it's done legitimately -- that is, by an elected government -- it's both an effective way to solve social problems and a legitimate way to to solve social problems. burke says all that's very nice except it is not possible. we don't have that kind of knowledge. so government has to serve as a way to enable the intermediate institutions the mediating institutions to do what they do. that argument is still very much alive between left and right and you see it in our economic

debate. if you think about the health care debate we're having in the last few years, it is exactly this argument. it is a debate about whether we solve a complicated problem by applying technical knowledge from the center or by empowering the institutions that applied diffuse social knowledge. in this case, a mark institution. -- a market institution. a lot of the debate about the welfare state today is about whether we should have concentrated institutions that apply technical knowledge or diffusing institutions that allow social knowledge to work. that's a the education debate. it's the health care debate. it's a lot of our economic debate. so i think it's still very much a left-right difference. >> i -- who's the most burkian politician and who's the most burkian supreme court justice? >> well, the second one's easy. i think justice alito is easily the most burkian supreme court justice, and that's the most interesting expression of that is in how he differs from the other conservatives on the court.

alito is very concerned for tradition, is very concerned for local differences and is less concerned for a direct application of abstract principles. i think he's certainly the most burkian justice. and i think he would say so. he certainly is interested in burke and knows a fair amount about him. with politicians that's more difficult. i think that there are ways, especially if you think about the kinds of economic debates we have, there are ways of seeing some of the people who are leading some of the reform debates on the right people like paul ryan, people like senator mike lee from utah, understanding them as very burkian figures even though in their 'em temperaments, i think they're more aggressive than burke would have been. but the kind of substantive arguments are very burkian arguments. most of the tone and tenor of the right sounds more like paine than burke, but if you get past the tone, the substance is very burkian.

>> absolutely right about justice alito who came here and gave the most wonderful speech for our preview of the bill of rights gallery. masterfully talking about the relationship between new york and pennsylvania and using george washington as a figure that united them both. and he is, of course an incrementalist and has resisted claims to overturn precedents that some of his more paine-like colleagues on both sides have embraced. that leads me to ask what would thomas paine have thought about judicial review? namely, the power of courts to strike down unconstitutional laws. you say that paine thought that every age and generation must be free to act for itself in all cases. the present generation's entitled to rule he would have required all laws to expire after a generation. how could he have justified unelected judges striking down a law passed by we the people in the here and now in the name of the dead hand of the past namely the views of the framers who were dead and gone?

>> yeah. well, again this is an issue where we don't have paine's opinion from him. i think it's fair to say he would have had a fair amount of trouble with jewish durable review as it took -- judicial review as it took shape. paine argued, as you say that every generation needed to be free of its predecessors in essentially the same way that every individual needs to be free of his neighbors. this comes to be, i think, one of the most profound differences between burke and paine, one of the ways in which you see their differences most fundamentally and how they think about the relationship between the generations. burke thinks you cannot understand individuals apart from those generational relationships. no one is born into an empty world. everyone is born into a world that exists before us and so we're born into a web of relationships, of obligations and of privileges that we didn't create that we didn't choose and yet that are binding on us. for paine, this was a problem even though it was undeniably a fact. and he wanted a free system of

government to liberate people from that as much as possible, to liberate them from generational obligations as much as it liberates them from oppression by people around them. i think the place of the courts as it's taken shape would have been a problem for him in that respect. but, again the radicalism of the fundamental claim has to be understood. now, thomas jefferson said something like this too. there's a famous exchange of letters in september of 187 between -- 1787 between jefferson and madison where jefferson makes something very much like thomas paine's claim. every law should be expired after a generation. madison writes him back this wonderful letter where he very gently sort of says well, if you think about what things will look like on the day that all the laws expire, i'm not really sure we want to do that. [laughter] but, you know, the radical imof jefferson's kind of liberalism goes that far, and there are times when he was willing to take it to its logical conclusion. there are times when he wasn't.

paine always took it to its logical conclusion, and it results in arguments like those, for good and bad. >> this is great. i have a follow up. i want to put in one more plug for our great c-span audience to tweet your questions to @constitutioncenter, constitution ctr using the hashtag ncc bill of rightings. so jefferson and payne questioned judicial review by the end of his days, as you suggest, jefferson was even questioning marshall's insistence that judges did have the power to strike down unconstitutional laws as we'll learn about in our final talk of the evening. and in that sense um, what was paine and jefferson eastern? did they think people should -- their alternative? did they think people should rise up? did they believe there should be actual revolution when judges

were tyrannical? >> well, one of the things that becomes evident is also illuminating of contemporary progressivism. jefferson and paine both thought if you let democracy be democratic enough, these kinds of mistakes won't happen. that is, if the people really rule and if the democratic system is answerable enough if it doesn't have all these levers and all these barriers to allowing the people's will to be expressed, if it doesn't have all these divisions of power, it will express the public will. and that will mean that it is a legitimate system of government. it will also mean paine certainly argued -- jefferson, i think, was a little more careful about -- it will also mean that the people choose to be governed in a way that's compatible with this understanding of the potential of government to apply technical knowledge to society. one of the interesting things about 20th century and 19th century american progressivism is this combination of radical democracy with technocratic government. at the same time, the early

progress is tended to argue -- progressives tended to argue will ought to be many more mechanisms for direct democracy people should be able to make their views known through referenda, the senate should be directly elected, and they believed that if this happened people would choose to be governed by experts. the constitutional system, i think it's fair to say, is opposed to both of these two ends. it doesn't trust the people, and it doesn't trust the experts. the constitution doesn't trust anybody. [laughter] it says let's assume everybody's wrong. what does a legitimate government look like then? i think that's one of the best things about the constitution because it's safe to assume that everybody's wrong. running a country's a very complicated thing and it's likely that everybody in a great public debate is at least partially wrong. and so we have a system that doesn't can allow us to make really big mistakes -- that doesn't allow us to make really big mistakes. but this is certainly drawn from the view that the potential for error is much greater than the

potential for wisdom in politics, and so we need to protect ourselves from the former much more than we enable ourselves to benefit from the the latter. >> you've expressed beautifully the combination of the mistrust of nature when it comes to exercising power a desire to create a government energetic enough to achieve common ends but limited enough to protect liberty. this is, of course, the vision of james madison. and this leads me to ask something that i'm curious about, did madison read burke? in some ways he seems like the perfect amalgamation of paine and burke both embracing the natural rights philosophy but the unchecked -- >> yeah. madison was very familiar with burke's writing. jefferson also loved his speeches. i don't know of any evidence that madison read burke on france where burke is more conservative, where burke is much more, is much more forceful in articulating his concerns

about, frankly jefferson's kind of approach to liberalism and democracy. madison himself, of course, also changes, i think it's fair to say, or at least emphasizes different things at different times in his career. the period when he is hamilton's partner is very different from the period he's jefferson's partner, and the fact that it's the same person is at the very least mysterious. he doesn't completely con rah district himself, but i think madison at different times is in different places on this very fundamental question. >> you mentioned france. tell us about what paine's support of the revolution was based on what burke's strong concern was based on, and in this matter was burke actually correct? >> yeah. well, so the friend revolution -- french revolution is much more radical than the american revolution. there were people both in france and america who wanted to link the two, to see them as expressions of the same principle. certainly, paine himself wanted

to do that and understood it that way. but the french revolution was not an argument between two different kinds of liberalism, it was a, it was an attempt to put into place in a real place n a real country a very very radical version of the liberal idea. burke saw in this the death of liberalism. he thought that the radicalism would make it impossible for a liberal society to function and to develop and that the french revolutionaries by breaking with the past, by throwing away all of their inheritance and really trying to start over from scratch on principle alone would end up with disaster. and there's a famous passage in his great book "the reflections on the revolution in france," where burke predicts what will happen. and what he predicts is, essentially, because it's impossible for these principles to actually function in practice, the french will turn on themselves and will create an opportunity for a military dictator to take over. and this very radical liberal

revolution will end with the end of liberal revolution. it was easy to see, i think, the rise of napoleon at the end of the revolutionary period as proving burke right. burke budget simply right about france because in many ways the french revolution did succeed. it planted seeds that have not gone away and that even contemporary modern france very much looks to. but i do think that he was largely right about how that kind of radicalism would play out in the life of a natural society. paine was much more optimistic. he thought the principles were right, we're putting them into place, we're liberating the french public, and what will result is a working liberal society. this certainly seems not to have turned out that way, and paine saw that himself. he was in france for the entirety of the revolution. by the end of it, he was in prison. he was in prison because he was friendly with the less radical of the radical elements of the french regime, and he found

himself imprisoned with a lot of his friends. he spent more time in prison than he had to because he'd made some enemies in america, so the more than ambassador morris, refused to take him out of prison basically. they said paine's an american, if you'd like to take him into your custody, you can. and he said, no thank you. [laughter] it wasn't until james monroe became the american ambassador -- a friend, of course, of thomas jefferson's and paine's himself -- that a he was released. he spent over a year in prison, but he didn't sour on it. even years after the revolution 1806paine still but saying, ultimately, the principles were right. if only they'd lived up to the principles. things you heard a lot from people in the soviet union, for example, thrown out by one faction of the bolsheviks against another. they still would say the principles are right the revolution is the right way forward, they just didn't do it

right. so paine never really gave up on that dream. but burke's way of seeing this was taken to have been right. and, learn i in britain he was -- certainly, in britain he was quickly understood to have been been right to be so worried about france. >> paine, bad luck in his friends, spent time in prison and was concerned about what would happen to his remains as was burke, tell the remarkable story about how both burke and paine tried to control about where they were buried, and paine had worse luck than burke in this regard. >> it's almost more symbolic than i know what to do with. [laughter] so at the ends of their lives both burke and paine made very strange requests about their remains. burke was concerned -- burke died in 1797. the french revolution was still very much a living thing, and he was worried still that the ideas of the revolutionary would spread to britain and was

concerned that the champions of those ideas would see him as their enemy and would basically take his body out of its grave. he didn't want to be buried in the family plot. he didn't want his lot to be that of his son who had died before him or of his wife who was still alive but set to be buried in the same plot. so he wanted to be buried in an unmarked grave, and he said this to his family on what ended up being the last day of his life. he was sort of in a heavy five. his family and friends after he -- fever, his family and friends after he died put him in the family plot anyway, and he's still buried there. but the level of his concern was extraordinary. i mean, he was sure that if the radicals won in britain he would end up being sort of untombed and put on a pike. that's the kind of thing that happened, of course. the british had done it to one of their kings. it wasn't that crazy.

paine, as he -- paine died in 1809 in the united states. he had by then written a book called "the age of reason" which was basically an attack on christianity. it was unwise. [laughter] let's say. he wrote it while he was in france. he came back to america and found that for all of the very important role that he had played in the american revolution this book was the only thing anybody knew about him, and it caused him no end of trouble. but as he was on his deathbed, he asked -- well, in his will actually, in his written will he asked to be buried in a quaker cemetery. his father had been a quaker. he had given it up. he was -- we would now call him an atheist. and he was very up front about it again, having written a book about it. but he asked to be buried in a quaker cemetery. his logic was very similar. he thought that the kind of people who might have it against him, who might want to, who

might want to cause trouble after he died wouldn't do it in a christian cemetery. so his father had been a quaker, why wouldn't the quakers let him? the quakers after he died -- it was in his will -- they said no. [laughter] so paine ends up being buried on his farm in new rochelle in upstate new york. and his fear was not crazy, because his body was exhumed from its grave. as it turns out, by a great admirer of his who wanted to take the body to britain and erect a great memorial to his great hero e in the town where paine had been born in the south of england. the british government also didn't like thomas paine because he didn't like them very much. he had written a lot of nasty things about king and the monarchy and so the perp who took his -- the person who took his body hadn't thought to ask for permission. he asked for permission after and paine's remains were lost.

nobody knows where they are. [laughter] there have been all kinds of efforts, and you can imagine there are scholars who have made entire careers of these sorts of efforts. in the 20th century there were several to try to figure out what happened, where he would be. nobody knows. and so burke is buried with his family, and paine has never been buried, or at least no one knows where he is. both of them were worried about their legacies i think it's safe to say and both of them have had very long, and great legacies. both of them have remained controversial in something like they might have imagined because the debates they were so involve ared in contributing to remain live debates. they're still very much the disagreements we have, and so maybe they were right to worry. >> as woody allen said, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. [laughter] and connected to our earlier discussion paine actually charged in britain with libel. he could not have been in

america because of madison's objections and the supreme court's eventual recognition. three great questions with just a bit of time to go. here they are. we have talked about burke's influence on madison. the question hear is how did burke and paine influence jefferson? >> well, jefferson was great admirer, like madison, of burke's writings on the american revolution. he was not an admirer of burke's writings on the french revolution. jefferson was a fan of the french revolution almost to its end. not quite as adamant as paine, but close. he took burke's writings about france to be sort of crazy. there's a letter -- and i don't remember who it was to, it might have been to john adams -- in which jefferson says he's much less worried about the revolution in france than he is about the revolution in burke. [laughter] he takes burke to be

contradicting himself having sported the american revolution but so adamantly opposing the french revolution. and so the debate and even the debate between burke and paine was followed very closely in america. the debate about the friend -- french revolution, i think it's fair to say had a role in launching the american party system. it was a very very controversial question here, and burke's formulation of against the argument of regulation was an important example. jefferson adamantly disagreed with burke's reading of france. he was a friend of paine's a close friend during the revolutionary years. he thought that paine's great pamphlet, "common sense "was extremely important and ought to be distributed as widely as it could be and helped it get distributed. he helped paine to get a job as the secretary to the committee on foreign relations of the continental congress. and so he was a kind of patron

of thomas paine's in some ways. when paine came back to america after france jefferson was president. he was wary of being associated with paine's views on religion so didn't hang out with him very much. but he helped him get established, he helped him get a job, and the two knew each other very well. they were friends. >> superb. well, the most important rule of a national constitution center bill of rights book fair is that it end on time, so i'm afraid we're going to have to skip the remaining two questions. ladies and gentlemen, during our lunch break -- we're going to reconvene at 1:1:-- view one of the 12 original copies of the bill of rights. c-span audience, get on a train, get on a plane. there is still time to see the original bill of rights, and if you can't make it today it's going to be displayed for the next three years. ladies and gentlemen for a superb and enlightening discussion, please join me in thanking yuval levin.

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now, we have a full day of author talks scheduled with topics ranging from are george washington to prohibition-era manhattan. but first, carl hoffman describes the disappearance of michael rockefeller in 1961 in his new book. this is booktv on c-span2. of. .. >> good morning and happy valentine's day. i a