The Great Debate

“In a Burkean manner, Mr. Levin enriches through wisdom rather than prescription. He gives us something more than a manual of past lessons—namely, the historical framework to achieve greater understanding.”—Wall Street Journal

“The Great Debate’s architecture is clever and intellectually persuasive.... A thoughtful introduction to this famous paradigmatic opposition.”—Washington Post

“A wonderful book.”—Los Angeles Times

“Yuval Levin, whose sharp thinking was honed at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought...is one of conservatism’s most sophisticated and measured explicators.”—George F. Will, Washington Post

“In this lively and probing book, Levin, one of the most influential conservative writers in the United States, looks at the ideas of Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, towering figures in the late eighteenth-century transatlantic Enlightenment...The Great Debate won’t settle any of the political disputes roiling U.S. politics today, but those who read it carefully will find it easier to understand their opponents—and perhaps even to find some common ground.”—Foreign Affairs

“Levin enters into another great debate that riles academia: between historians insisting upon the uniqueness and specificity of events, which defy abstractions and generalizations, and philosophers impatient with the ephemera and contingency of events, which do not rise to the level of truth and certainty. Here too he rises to the occasion, satisfying the scruples of historians and philosophers alike. From a debate raged about an event centuries ago, he deduces truths that illuminate some of our most vexing political and social problems today.”—Gertrude Himmelfarb, Weekly Standard

“The Great Debate is a masterful and loving piece of work, the kind of solo performance that commands mute attention and makes even a crinkled cough drop wrapper sound like an errant clang of the gong. It does more than announce Levin’s arrival; it is, in itself, a refutation  this time with an inerrant clang  of the factitious notion that intellectual conservatism is a bygone thing.”—Commentary

“The definitive intellectual history of an argument so powerful that it echoes to the present day.”—National Review Online