Edmund Burke v. Thomas Paine This paper will dis

Burke and Paine came from two opposite ends of the political spectrum. Burke was basically conservative, valuing tradition and the status quo. Paine was a firebrand of the left, advocating revolution and popular democracy. Ironically, Burke had sympathized with the colonists in North America during the period of troubles there, but he did not believe in the overall social revolution which took place in France in the last years of the 1780s. Paine, on the other hand, supported both revolutions. His writings are often credited with inspiring many of the American colonists to rebel against the mother country; they, in turn, were said to have been a source of inspiration for the French lower classes.

Burke simply did not believe in overthrowing the social order. The American Revolution did not result in a new social order, for most of the colonial rebel leaders were wealthy, propertied men. They simply wanted to rule the colonies as they saw fit, rather than subject themselves to the absente

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was a bastardization of the Declaration of Right, passed immediately after the Glorious Revolution. Rather than being a declaration of natural rights of the people, this statute was enacted for the settling of the succession of the Crown. It delineated the method for choosing a monarch when there was no natural issue from the previous monarch. This declaration was followed by a second statute a few years later, again formulating a policy for selecting a monarch from among those who were in the protestant line of succession from James I. Both of these acts, in which are heard the unerring, unambiguous oracles of Revolution policy, instead of countenancing the delusive, gypsey predictions of a "right to choose our governors," prove to a demonstration how totally adverse the wisdom of the nation was from turning a case of necessity into a rule of law (Burke 29). For Burke, equality was a dangerous myth; some would always be on the top and others on the bottom. Any attempts to change this order would result in chaos, as evidenced by events in France. If power were given to the unpropertied masses, they would turn against the propertied few in order to get their spoils. In the end, each individual would get an infinitesimal s
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Approximate Word count = 1726
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)