Fighting versus Evading:

Polemical Strategies in the Burke-Paine Controversy

Carine Lounissi

[Reprinted with permission from the Bulletin of Thomas Paine Friends, Vol.7, No.2, July 2006]

Carine Lounissi has recently defended a doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne Nowelle University in Paris, on Thomas Paine's political thought within the context of 18th-century political literature and she has written articles and papers on Paine. Her field of research is more generally the relations among French, American and British political thought at the end of the 18th century. [Note: Footnotes from the original have been ommitted. Interested readers are directed to the Thomas Paine Friends website for a complete reprint.

It has been suggested that Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke never had a genuine debate together. Such is R. R. Fennessy's position. In his book, published in the beginning of the 1960s, he argues that between the two men, who had not always been on bad terms with each other, as Paine himself underlined in the first part of Rights of Man, the famous controversy amounted to "two appeals to English public opinion from two entirely different and totally irreconcilable points of view."[1] According to him, it was a dialogue of the deaf and they never refuted the ideas of the other. He contends that "no exchange of arguments, reply, or counter-argument"[2] can be found in the texts of what is however still called a debate by most. Does this vision really correspond to what the writings of the two opponents contain? An analysis of the polemical devices used by both protagonists may enable us to answer this question and to come to a better understanding, or so we hope, of the nature of the so well-known Burke-Paine debate, limiting ourselves here to the theoretical aspect of it, the scope of this article making it impossible for us to deal with the historiographical issue of the French Revolution as well.

One of the arguments put forward by R. R. Fennessy and his followers is that "one of the participants refused to acknowledge the other,"[3] that is to say Burke. In the two parts of Rights of Man, Paine indeed often quoted Burke, whereas in An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, Burke refused to mention Paine. Moreover, Burke derogatorily referred to Paine's writing by approximate titles, such as "Vindication of the Rights of Mar"[4], voluntarily confounding Paine's and Mary Wollstonecraft's answers to him, or such as "Defence of Rights of Man."[5] The complete title of Burke's Appeal at once reveals that this work was not aimed to be an answer to Rights of Man, but that it was primarily meant to be a sequel to his Reflections on the Revolution in France, and more precisely, to give him the opportunity to discuss the interpretation of the content of this book by the Members of Parliament of his party.[6]

In the text itself, Burke rejected all kind of demonstration by asserting that his developments were to be taken "not in the way of argument, but narratively,"[7] which may be an echo of Paine's remark at the beginning of the "Miscellaneous Chapter" of the first part of Rights of Man, in which he describes his own work as containing both "narrative" and "argument."[8] Burke emphatically refused to take part in the argumentative contest ("I will not in the smallest degree attempt to refute them," he said about Paine's theses)[9] and entrusted "others" with this task. The collage of quotations and paraphrases from Rights of Man, the content of which Paine claimed as his own in the second part of this work, was only intended by Burke as information left to the sagacity of the "Whig reader."[10] The MP for Bristol indeed judged that a debate of ideas was not the adequate answer to a writing such as Rights of Man, and thought that only a legal proceeding could be appropriate, reducing Paine's writing to a libel not against truth but against the existing laws of Great Britain, and thus shifting the ground of the debate.

Paine interpreted this stand as an avowal of failure on the part of his adversary and he, in his turn, did not fail to highlight this sidestepping in what he himself described as a "controversy" in the preface of the second volume of Rights of Man. Paine especially reproached him with not having made a comparative study of the French and British constitutions. The revolutionary of Thetford favoured an immediate and direct confrontation: "it is better that the whole argument should come out, than to seek to stifle it,"[11] he stated. Contrary to Burke, Paine went on mentioning the latter and more often Reflections on the Revolution in France than An Appeal. He also, even more explicitly than Burke, indicated that one work was the continuation of the other by keeping the same title for both parts. In the preface of that of 1792, he declared that his goal was to prolong the reflection started in the volume of the preceding year and that this project went back to the time when he was writing the first part. Therefore, he did not present the sequel of Rights of Man as an answer to An Appeal, thus imitating the Burkean tactic, but only up to certain extent, as we shall see presently.

According to Pierre Manent, a French specialist of political philosophy, "the direct refutation of Burke's argumentation takes up the lesser part of [Paine's] book," and he explains this by the fact that "Paine does not manage to take [Burke's ideas] seriously."[12] Going further than this, and undoubtedly too far, Fennessy even suggests that Paine "did not bother to read Reflections carefully before beginning"[13] to write his answer to Burke. He adds that "what he 'refutes' is a mere travesty of Burke's position."[14] No wonder, then, that Fennessy concluded that Paine's ultimate purpose was not to counter Burke but to propagandize his ideas in England. Is it really so?

In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke attacked both the concept of rights of man and the revolutionary theory of sovereignty. Consequently, in the first part of his reply, Paine dwelled on the hereditary principle and on the conception of law as custom, especially by refuting the resort to precedent and authority as a basis for legitimacy. For him, such a refutation of the premises of Burke's reasoning made no less than "almost one hundred pages of Mr. Burke's book"[15] null and void.

It is well known that in this debate, broadly speaking, two conceptions of time were set against each other: one founded on reproduction, the other on transformation, since Burke envisioned time circularly, whereas Paine endeavoured to break the circle and to stretch it out into a line. The latter defended the principle of a diachronic equality between all generations and opposed it to the Burkean idea of a contract which could still be extant when those who had signed it were gone to another world. In addition, he turned back against Burke his accusation concerning the republican regime's alleged lack of adaptation to the real by insisting on the evolutive dimension of time. According to the revolutionary of Thetford, on the level of argumentation, Burke had not succeeded in adducing any sufficient proof in support of his theory of a legitimate eternal contract. Going further, Paine even contended that Burke's arguments made it easier for any contradictor to demolish them insofar as the author of the Reflections had unknowingly provided such an opponent with the starting point of the contrary thesis:

Had anyone purposed the overthrow of Mr. Burke's positions, he would have proceeded as Mr. Burke has done. He would have magnified the authorities on purpose to have called the right of them into question, and the instant the question of right was started, the authorities must have been given up.[16]

Taking up again later the theoretical argumentation after an interruption consisting in an analysis of the nature of the French Revolution and in an account of the circumstances that led to the Storming of the Bastille, Paine once more underlined that his adversary had not given any solid foundation on which to build up his system: "he asserts whatever he pleases, on the presumption of its being believed without offering either evidence or reasons for so doing."[17] In this regard, Paine believed that such a major methodological shortcoming applied to the concept of the rights of man. He rightly saw that Burke did not deny the existence of any right, but that the crux of their disagreement was the basis on which rights stood. As a result, Paine raised the question of the origin of rights, which led him to conclude that Burke had not gone back far enough in time. This choice of strategy was particularly crafty since Paine did not try to rely on abstract principles, which was precisely what the defenders of the theory of the rights of man were criticized for, but resorted to a genealogy of the authorities, the first of them being the Bible, although he hesitated on its "divine" or "historical" nature.[18] In this way, Paine sought to attack Burke on his own ground by opposing a neo-Lockean theory to what he considered to be a neo-Filmerian one (as this affirmation reveals: "Mr. Burke has set up a sort of political Adam, in whom all posterity are bound forever"[19]).

As regards the Burkean conception of a compact, as it were, absorbing the natural rights into the civil ones once and for all, it is with no direct reference to Burke that Paine proposed his own version of the social contract, although it is not difficult to link the two and find the points on which the one answered the other. Paine mentioned the right of judging the others possessed by everyone, which Burke considered as one of the rights to be surrendered by the citizens-to-be. The former completed this idea by adding that it was also necessary to take into account the exercise of this right. Still having Burke in his mind, but without naming him, Paine used an expression ("common stock"[20]) close to a phrase employed by the author of the Reflections ("joint stock"[21]). However, Burke was not the source of Paine's formula, since Paine had already coined it in 1778 to describe the social compact in his "Address to the People of Pennsylvania."[22] Similarly, the financial register he seems to borrow from Burke[23] was already present in his thirteenth American Crisis.[24] Thus, while, on the one hand, Paine answered Burke with the same imagery, on the other, it was his before 1790-91. Nevertheless, Paine did not point out the ambiguities of the Burkean contract,[25] although he remarked that "it is in his paradoxes that we must look for his arguments,"[26] and although Paine's text was not4tself free from ambivalence on this theme.[27] Yet, he dwelled on the question of the form of the compact, vertical (between the governed and the governors) or horizontal (the governed with one another), reasserting the illegitimacy of the former.

As the notions of right and compact were the foundations of the conceptions of revolution and constitution, it is not surprising that Burke preferred reform. As for Paine, he was far from condemning it since he had defined the new form of revolution initiated by the American Revolution as "a total reformation."[28] He repeated this position only in the second part of Rights of Man. As to the notion of constitution, he proposed his own definition in the first volume and clarified its relations to the "government." Such a development came in reply to what Burke said in his Reflections, in which he alluded to "the engagement and pact of society, which generally goes by the name of constitution"[29] and to the "constitution of government."[30] Moreover, Paine accused Burke of confounding the "constitution" with the "convention," but he did so as a reference to Burke's "Speech on the Army Estimates." It nonetheless remains possible that this argument may also have been directed at a sentence of Burke's book against the Revolution of 1789 in which he asserts that "if society be the offspring of convention, that convention must be its law."[31]

In the "Miscellaneous Chapter" of the initial volume of Rights of Man, Paine explicitly attacked Burke's definition of government as "a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants,"[32] this time founding his refutation on a quotation. Paine considered that such a definition was in contradiction with the principle of hereditary transmission, a political mode of selecting one's governors which he never ceased to denounce as unfit to bring competent men to power. In the passage of Burke's text which he cited, he omitted the end of the sentence, in which the word "want" yet appears, and based his argument on the following sentence (beginning with "men have the right...") in order to play on the meaning of the word "want" and to assert that it would be a true "want of wisdom"33 on the part of the governed if they agreed to be ruled by a set of men establishing themselves as the only valid source of truth.

Furthermore, it should be stressed that Paine construed the word "government," as it is used by Burke, as a reference to the monarchical regime. Norbert Col, a French specialist of Burke's thought, tends to believe that such an interpretation pertains to a wrong reading by Paine of the ideas of Rockingham's one-time secretary.[34] However, it is also reasonable to assume that such a distortion may have been voluntary, thus enabling Paine once more to deal with the question of the origin of rights and of governments. This seems to belong to the same argumentative strategy as his remark according to which "Mr. Burke talks about what he calls an hereditary crown,"[35] which provides the author of Rights of Man with a basis for further criticism of such a regime and gives him a pretext to develop the comparison made earlier in the same volume between the "crown" and a "metaphor."

Similarly, in the same chapter, Paine deciphered what he took to be the coded language of another extract from the Reflections,[36] the concealed signification of which being, for Paine, the affirmation by Burke that government was not to be subjected to principles of justice. Here, Paine's argument may have been part of his analysis of monarchical discourse as an instrument to manipulate the people, but it may also be an instance of his talent for polemic and twisted clever argumentation. Be this as it may, these uses of Burke's text bring to light Paine's tendency to instrumentalize the words of his opponent to serve his own purpose, an art in which Burke also excelled -- and without which there would be no polemic worthy of the name.

If we then turn to the second phase of the debate, one should first examine whether, in spite of the contempt for his opponent expressed by Burke in An Appeal, this work really contains no answer at all to any of Paine's ideas. N. Col suggests that the refutation is "indirect"[37] insofar as Burke chose to submit his own point of view to the reader as a way to reply to Paine. What form does this strategy precisely take in Burke's writing? Burke indeed went on opposing the notion of reform to that of revolution, even saying that the latter word had no meaning at all. He resumed his attack on the Lockean theory of revolution, that is, the idea according to which once the people had created a government, they still remained fully possessed of their natural sovereignty. It was with a design to complete his position on this subject that Burke went into greater details about his legalistic conception of a people whose will and power were entirely transferred to the governors. Burke thought that the people were indeed the locus of power, but that they could not exercise it at the same time, thus leading him to conclude that any wish for revolution was the product of an "arbitrary will. However, Burke refused to ascribe to this well-argued and carefully built demonstration, of which we have only sketched the outlines, the status of a contribution to the controversy, by remarking that "I lay them down not to enforce them upon others by disputation,"[39] which was an implicit way of condemning Paine's method of arguing.

The treatment Burke reserved to Paine's text rather obviously tends to show that Burke did not believe it to be worthy of interest for him to bother to refute it. He only summed up Paine's ideas according to different themes (constitution, aristocracy, representation, monarchy). By this way of putting together these elements, visually separated from the rest of his own text, Burke hoped to make the content of these syntheses appear as simplifying caricatures of and by themselves and therefore as not needing to be contradicted or mocked by someone else. Moreover, his stand in the contest also led him to assimilate all his opponents to Paine and to assert that the ideas of all the "radicals" and those of Paine were interchangeable, which is highly questionable.

Burke's refusal to launch into a direct refutation is particularly well exemplified by his reaction to Paine's attack on his idea that government is "a contrivance of human wisdom," since the former contented himself with quoting Paine quoting him.[40] Later in the work, Burke repeated his definition, but made no allusion to Paine whatsoever and referred to his own Reflections. He did not try to defend the monarchical regime either. However, statements such as "no man can be a friend to a tempered monarchy who bears a decided hatred to monarchy itself"[41] or "they, who have raked in all history for die faults of kings, and who have aggravated every fault they have found"[42] cannot but be interpreted as addressed to the Anglo-American revolutionary, such forms of vague generalisations being one of the usual devices of pamphlet-writing. Regarding the other component of the hereditary part of the British regime, the aristocracy, Burke promoted what he called "a true natural aristocracy,"[43] but without referring to Paine who had defended the idea of a "noble of nature"[44] in the first part of Rights of Man. Finally, it was as a reply to Charles James Fox that Burke declared that he had "never abused all republics."[45]

How did Paine react to this "indirect" refutation? Three kinds of answers can be found in the second volume of Rights of Man: direct and indirect ones, as well as expressions of contempt for Burke scattered in the text. In the first chapter, Paine proposed his own version of the social "chain," a word used in Burke's attack on the French Revolution, and Paine's argument, according to which the dissolution of society and the overthrow of a government were distinct processes, seems to be his retort to Burke's thesis of a simultaneous creation of the people and of the rulers described in An Appeal. The expression, "voluntarily will,"[46] strange enough in itself, may be an echo of the phrase "arbitrary will" used by Burke in the work just mentioned.[47] Paine also set forth his conception of what the relations among power, will and right should be, but he waited until A Letter Addressed to the Addressers to tackle the theme of majority and unanimity in the political sphere.

More directly still, in the preface of his second edition of Rights of Man, he criticized the title of Burke's Appeal, along two lines, the use of authorities and the choice of them in the persons of the "old Whigs," whom Paine stigmatized as "childish thinkers and half-way politicians."[48] In the third chapter, he judged that the difference made by his adversary between two categories of Whigs consisted only in "childish names and distinctions,"[49] which is striking when one recalls that Burke castigated the "childish futility" of the French revolutionaries.[50] In addition, Paine thought that the shift from the field of reason and language (logos) to that of law (legis) through a legal action was irrelevant, seizing the opportunity to reflect on the exercise of private and public reason along lines quite close to those of Kant.

In the third chapter, nevertheless, Paine made it clear that his aim was to answer Sieyes and not Burke. Yet, in spite of such a position, Burke had not totally slipped out of his mind, for, after two pages, he again launched into a diatribe against Burke's defence of monarchy, once more resorting to some of his favourite arguments against it. A few paragraphs later, he focused again on Burke in order to charge him with confusing "democracy and representation." This came as a reply to an assertion in the Reflections depicting democracy as "rather the corruption and degeneracy than the sound constitution of a republic."[51] At the end of the same chapter, he once again mentioned Burke and cited a speech he had delivered in April 1791 in which he had argued in favour of the necessity of balancing republican and monarchical institutions in the same regime, an idea that can also be linked to what he says in his Reflections: "you can better engraft any description of republic on a monarchy."[52] The image was indeed taken up by Paine to explain the relation between democracy and representation.

In the fifth chapter, Paine reproduced a sentence of the Reflections in which Burke voiced his total approval of the representative system existing in his own country, but his opponent only briefly remarked that Burke's position as regards the laws passed by Parliament was contrary to his declaration. Paine then began a further criticism of aristocracy, taking as a starting point a quotation from An Appeal, a commentary announcing the summary made by Burke of Paine's point of view on this subject. It is the concept of "landed interest" as understood by Burke that Paine wished to put into question. According to the latter, this expression was only a screen-word to designate the wealthiest who wanted to protect their property against the poorest, whereas, for Paine, the true "landed interest" was made up by the farmers and the merchants, the part of the population producing wealth as opposed to the unproductive aristocrats. As a polemical ornament, Paine then established a connection between this sentence written by Burke in An Appeal and another one in the Reflections, the result of which being a skilful metaphorical build-up uniting a "pillar" and its "Corinthian capital."[53] A little further on, Paine quoted another passage from An Appeal, which happens to be the lines following the synthesis of Paine's position on the notion of aristocracy, and Paine took advantage of this to hammer his arguments home against male primogeniture. However, he did not pay any attention to Burke's defence of a "natural aristocracy."

Moreover, in the whole text of the second volume of Rights of Man, Paine hesitated between a despising attitude and a refuting mood For example, in the fourth chapter, he hinted at Burke's vision of the American Revolution, but he hastened to add that it was only "by way of relaxation"[54] that he had "turn[ed] a thought or two to Mr. Burke."[55] The revolutionary of Thetford could not, however, refrain from adding a sheer polemical assertion by pointing out that if Burke did not recognize the rights of man, he had to be a supporter of the rights of the beasts. Again, he ended this page devoted to Burke by a new expression of disdain: "having thus paid Mr. Burke the compliment of remembering him, I return to the subject."[56] Yet, the author of the Reflections was still in his thoughts since Paine next raised the issue of precedents. In the last paragraphs of the chapter, he again came back to his adversary and remarked that "the principle upon which Mr. Burke formed his political creed ... is now become too detestable to be made a subject of debate, and, therefore, I pass it over with no other notice than exposing it,"[57] thus adopting Burke's strategy.

Such passages may have been the source of the opinion of one of Paine's biographers according to whom "to continue the debate with Burke was no major part of Paine's purpose."[58] In the conclusion of the second part of his answer to Burke, Paine indeed observed: "it has been my intention for the five years in Europe to offer an address to the people of England on the subject of government, if the opportunity presented itself before I returned to America. Mr. Burke has thrown it in my way and I thank him."[59] Eight years later, in a letter addressed to Jefferson, he retrospectively confirmed that "Mr. Burke's attack on the French Revolution, served ... [him] as a background to bring forward other subjects upon, with more advantage than if the background was not there."[60] Therefore, it seems that Paine literally needed a pre-text, that is, a basis on which he could stand to present his thoughts, and that he was more at ease in a debate than in a theoretical exposition written out of a specific context. In the same letter, he even went as far as to say : "this is the motive that induced me to answer him, otherwise I should have gone on without taking any notice of him."[61] On the contrary, in 1795, in a letter to William Elliot, Burke expressed the belief that without the publication of his book, Paine could very well have written his Rights of Man.[62]

It is indeed worth noting that in this text Paine did not add fundamentally new elements on the notions of republic, monarchy, revolution and constitution, although his exploration of the relations between society and government tended to add some tensions in his system of thought All in all, from the viewpoint of the evolution of Paine's thought, this writing enabled him to tie up the loose ends of his ideas on the central theoretical points of his works.

Ultimately, then, can we say that it was an "aborted debate," a phrase used by Padraig O'Brien,[63] which took place between Paine and Burke? Or, was it an effective polemic? The arms they wielded during the contest were certainly not those of a serene debate. Paine looked for a direct confrontation, contrary to Burke, who was probably not "intimidated ... from answering as he ought" by the "virulent declamations" and the "enthusiastic fury of the times," as John Adams thought.[64] Paine was frustrated by Burke's attitude, as the second part of Rights of Man shows. Even if he considered that he was the winner of the joust, as he wrote to Attorney-General Sir Archibald MacDonald in May 1792, declaring that "Mr. Burke, finding himself defeated, and not being able to make any answer to the 'Rights of Man,' has been one of me promoters of the prosecution,"[65] one should not take this claim at face value.

Both adversaries indeed must have been aware of the radical difference separating their systems of thought. Is Burke's choice to be regarded as more realistic than Paine's, insofar one may surmise that the reason for his refusal to write a detailed refutation of the latter's ideas was his conviction that he would never be able to win him over to his side of the controversy? It is true that Paine made a greater effort than Burke in this field, although his counter- argumentation was neither systematic, nor always cogent, as in all polemics. He selected parts of Burke's writings and discourses and interpreted them so as to lean on them to build up his own demonstration. Each participant did instrumentalize the other's texts to express his own point of view. However, whereas the devices used by both contenders were those of a polemic, the scope of their logomachy goes beyond that of an outdated controversy insofar as the issues raised by it were (and are) at the origins of our democratic modernity, which vindicates that it should still be held to be a seminal debate.