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The Relevance of the Burke-Paine Controversy to American Political Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Francis Canavan S.J.
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Extract

Thomas Paine's social-contract theory, which asserts the protection of individual rights as the sole end of civil society and the consent of the majority of individuals as the sole source of government's authority, may seem to be better suited to the democratic Constitution of the United States than Edmund Burke's theory of prescription of government. Burke's theory is based on the rational moral goals of civil society, not on the supremacy of the people's or any other will. It asserts that the natural ends of society are prior to rights as Paine and other radical democrats conceived of them and that natural obligation is prior to and controls consent. Burke can therefore afford us a more realistic interpretation of popular consent and of the Constitution as the political form that makes us a people. He also offers a useful corrective to the currently popular view of the Supreme Court's function as being primarily to protect an ever-expanding array of constitutional rights. Burke was no democrat but he may help democrats to overcome the limitations of the liberal contractarian model of society.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , Spring 1987 , pp. 163 - 176
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1987

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References

Notes

1 Edmund Burke: Prescription and Providence (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1987).Google Scholar

2 The Rights of Man, in The Complete Works of Thomas Paine (New York: Freethought Press Association, 1954), 2:194.Google Scholar

3 Ibid., p. 155.

4 Ibid., p. 153

5 Ibid., p. 48

6 Ibid., p. 42

7 Ibid., p. 131

8 Ibid., pp. 13–14.

9 Dissertation on the First Principles of Government, Complete Works, 2:365.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., pp. 373–74

11 Rights of Man, p. 98.Google Scholar

12 Reflections on the Revolution in France, Works (the Rivington edition), 5:230.Google Scholar

13 An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, Works, 6:200.Google Scholar

14 Ibid., p. 230.

15 Reflections, 5:178–80.Google Scholar

16 The Morality of Consent (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), p. 4.Google Scholar

17 Tract relative to the Laws against Popery in Ireland, Works, 9:348.Google Scholar

18 The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the year 1803 (London: T. C. Hansard, 1806–1820), 29:365.Google Scholar

19 An Appeal, 6:212.Google Scholar

20 See, for example, Chrimes, S. B., English Constitutional Ideas in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), pp. 133–36.Google Scholar

21 Second Treatise of Government, sect. 122.

22 An Appeal, 6:207.Google Scholar

23 Speech on the Reform of the Representation, Works, 10:96–97.Google Scholar

24 Rights of Man, p. 16.Google Scholar

25 Constitutional Opinions (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 232.Google Scholar

26 Ibid., p. 235.

27 Ibid.

28 I have developed this thesis at length in Freedom of Expression: Purpose as Limit (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1984).Google Scholar

29 The Irony of Liberal Reason (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 303.Google Scholar

30 Excerpt in Liberalism and Its Critics, ed. Sandel, Michael J. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), p. 57.Google Scholar

31 Excerpt Ibid., p. 64.

32 Statecraft as Soulcraft (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), p. 158Google Scholar. For an eloquent defense of “the moral equality of appetites,” see the dissenting opinions in Bowers v. Hardwick (the Georgia sodomy law case), 1065 S. Ct. 2841, 2848 ff. (1986).