The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left Audiobook

Quotes

• 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

• [The Great Debate's] architecture is clever and intellectually persuasive.... A thoughtful introduction to this famous paradigmatic opposition.

  — Washington Post

• 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

• 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

• 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

• [A] wonderful book.

  — Los Angeles Times

• The definitive intellectual history of an argument so powerful that it echoes to the present day.

  — National Review Online