Edmund Burke published Reflections on the Revolution in France in November 1790. Rights of Man Part I came out in March 1791 and Part II in February 1792. The two parts together sold around 200,000 copies in the first eighteen months, against perhaps 20,000 for Burke. Paine won the pamphlet war by an order of magnitude. He won the war for English-language popular opinion. He did not win the argument.
A site dedicated to Paine has an obligation to say what Burke got right.
Burke’s Reflections is a very long book. It is more than three hundred pages of extremely well-written political prose, and most of it is devoted to a single argument: that abstract reasoning about politics, severed from the experience of how actual societies work, leads to the kind of confidence that destroys actual societies. He uses the French Revolution, in 1790, as his case. The book was written before the Terror, before the September Massacres, before the king’s execution, before the Thermidorian reaction. Burke is not analyzing what the Revolution did. He is predicting it.
Most of his predictions came true. The Revolution would destroy the institutions that mediated between the citizen and the state, leaving nothing between them but force. It would substitute for those institutions a centralized bureaucracy that would be more intrusive than the monarchy it replaced. It would attack religion not as competition for state authority but as a competing source of moral language, and the result would be a state that demanded the kind of devotion the church had once asked for. It would make property in land insecure, drive capital abroad, and produce a class of paper-money speculators who would consolidate their gains during the upheaval. Within five years of the Reflections, every one of these predictions had held.
The reason Paine won the pamphlet argument is that Burke is, in a different way, also wrong. He is wrong about England. The English constitution Burke is defending against the French innovation was, by 1790, a system that disenfranchised the great majority of English subjects, allocated parliamentary seats by hereditary patronage, taxed the poor for the benefit of the rich, and used the criminal law to defend property at the cost of any other public value. Paine sees this. Most of Rights of Man Part II is the case that the English constitution Burke is defending is itself an outrage, and the French Revolution is the only living thing in European politics. Paine’s case for written constitutions, popular sovereignty, and elected magistrates is a case Burke cannot answer, because Burke is not arguing for those things; he is arguing for the institution-rich, slow-changing, deeply traditional society that had given Burke his career and that he had every reason to defend.
Both men are right about the other man’s country.
What was at stake between them was not whether to overthrow tyranny. It was whether to do so by blueprint. Paine believed yes. Burke believed no. Paine’s argument is that any institution that cannot stand a rational examination of its principles deserves to fall. Burke’s argument is that institutions are not held together by their principles; they are held together by the habits and the affections and the small daily fidelities of the people who live inside them, and a frontal assault on the principles of an institution will not, in the short term, replace it with the better institution the assailants intended. It will replace it with chaos, and chaos will eventually call forth the kind of regime that ends chaos.
The twentieth century is, in part, the century in which both men are tested. The American Revolution is, on its face, Paine’s case: a written constitution drafted by reasoners, ratified by elections, defended by elected magistrates. It worked. The French Revolution is, on its face, Burke’s case: a written constitution drafted by reasoners, applied to a society whose mediating institutions were not strong enough to absorb it, and within ten years a Bonaparte. The Russian Revolution is Burke’s case in extremis. The decolonization movements of the twentieth century are mixed; the Indian outcome is Paine’s, the African outcomes are mostly Burke’s, the Latin American outcomes are by case.
Paine could not see this because the Russian Revolution had not happened. He saw the American Revolution and the French Revolution Phase One (the Constitution of 1791) and inferred that revolutions, when they were faithful to their principles, succeeded. Burke could see, even in 1790, that the French Phase One was not stable, and that the principles being invoked were not strong enough to hold a society together when the institutions of habitual fidelity collapsed.
The reason a Paine site should publish the strongest case for Burke is that Paine himself, in the last decade of his life, came to something close to a Burkean settlement on a few key questions. The 1797 Agrarian Justice is a recognition that Rights of Man had not engaged with property; the Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance is a recognition that paper money detached from real assets is a slow-acting catastrophe; the Letter to the Citizens of the United States is a recognition that the rule of law in young republics is fragile and worth more than any single political victory. None of these positions are Burke’s, but they are positions Burke would not have rejected.
What Burke got right is what every honest republican has had to absorb in the two centuries since. Institutions matter; principles need habits; revolutions are easier to start than to land; the people who write the new constitution are not always the people who will live under it. Paine’s project was to make the case for the radical revision of institutions. Burke’s project was to make the case that radical revision usually destroys what it intended to improve. The argument is not over.
Rights of Man Part I is at /works/rights-of-man/; Part II at /works/rights-of-man-part-2/. Read them with Burke open beside them. The argument is more interesting than either side, alone, lets it be.