The great law of change: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the meaning of the past in a democratic age

This dissertation explores the role of tradition and the past in modern democratic politics by examining the views of Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. Burke and Paine, contemporaries engaged in the great political struggles of their day, held starkly opposing views regarding what may well have been the overarching political controversy of the time: the question of democratic revolution. Both were prominent public voices in the debates surrounding the two momentous revolutions of the late eighteenth century: the American and the French. And while they were ostensibly on the same "side" of the American question and differed sharply on the French (even engaging each other directly), they in fact gave voice to profoundly opposing worldviews with regard to both events, and in their writings before and beyond the two revolutions. Their disagreement was grounded in deeply divergent political outlooks that both men articulated extensively in the course of their careers. This study takes apart each man's view of history, nature, society, reason, political institutions, freedom, equality, rights, and other key questions, and seeks the principles informing each one's understanding of political life. It argues that Burke and Paine each offers a coherent and, for the most part, internally consistent case about the character of society and politics, that each man's case is powerfully illuminated by contrasting it with the other's, that their disagreement can teach us about some of the most important questions underlying modern liberal-democratic politics, and that the common thread running through the various facets of this disagreement is an argument about the status of the given past in political life.