"In The Great Debate Yuval Levin explores the origins of the familiar left/right divide in American politics by examining the views of the men who best represent each side of that debate: Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. In a groundbreaking exploration of the origins of our political order, Levin shows that our political divide did not originate (as many historians argue) in the French Revolution, but rather in the Anglo-American debate about that revolution. Burke and Paine were both utterly fascinating figures--active in politics, versed in philosophy, and two of the best, most effective and powerful political writers and polemicists in the history of the English speaking world. Levin sets the work of these two men against the dramatic history of their era and shows how they mixed theory and practice to advance their very different notions of liberty, equality, nature, history, reason, revolution, and reform. Paine believed in radical change and saw the American and French Revolutions as catalysts for creating a new society; Burke believed in a significantly more gradual approach with each generation acting merely as part of a long chain of history. These differing approaches to revolution and reform created a division that continues to shape our current political discourse--including issues ranging from gun control and abortion to welfare and economic reform"--

Daniel Patrick Moynihan may be best known as a statesman. He served in the administrations of presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford; was ambassador to India and the United Nations; and represented New York in the U.S. Senate for 4 terms. But he was also an intellectual of the first order, whose books and papers on topics ranging from welfare policy and ethnicity in American society to international law stirred debate and steered policy. Moynihan was, journalist Michael Barone remarked, the nation's best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson. He was, Greg Weiner argues, Americas answer to the 18th-century Anglo-Irish scholar-statesman Edmund Burke. In its incisive analysis of Moynihans political thought, American Burke lays out the terms for such a recovery. The book traces Moynihans development through the broad sweep of his writings and career. The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society, Moynihan once wrote. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself. In his ability to embrace both of these truths, this American Burke makes it bracingly clear that a wise political thinker can also be an effective political actor, and that commitments to both liberal and conservative values can coexist peaceably and productively. Weiners work is not only a thorough and thoroughly engaging intellectual exploration of one of the most important politicians of the twentieth century; it is also a timely prescription for the healing of our broken system.

The Burke that emerges from Professor Kramnick's sensitive reinterpretation--the troubled ambivalent bourgeois--is vastly more interesting and truly significant than the mythic defender of the old order that generations have worshipped and misunderstood.