Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts,

of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org, or you can subscribe,

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Today's May 2nd, 2014, and my guest is Yuval Levin. He is the Hurtog Fellow at the Ethics

and Public Policy Center, the founding editor of National Affairs, and author of the great debate,

Edmund Burke, Thomas Payne, and the Birth of Right and Left. Yuval, welcome to Econ Talk.

Thanks very much for having me. Our topic for today is your book, The Great Debate. You begin

with the observation that the political divide between the left and the right today is something

we take for granted without thinking about what comes from. And you focus on two men, Edmund Burke

and Thomas Payne, as a way to appreciate the origins of that divide. Let's start with a brief sketch

of their lives. Tell us a little bit about both Edmund Burke and Thomas Payne.

Well, Edmund Burke was an Irish-born English politician and writer of the late 18th century. He was

born in 1730. He was active from the 1760s until he died at the very end of the 18th century,

1797. He was a member of the House of Commons for 30 years, a wig, a patient, gradual reformer of

British institutions, and a staunch opponent of what we would think of now as a kind of liberal

radicalism, especially as embodied in the French Revolution. He's been thought of as one of the

fathers of modern conservatism because of his emphasis on generational continuity, on gradualism,

on respect for tradition and for existing institutions, and really because of his skepticism

about human power and human knowledge, and again his criticism of the radicalism of the French

Revolution. Thomas Payne and someone we might know better in America, he was an English-born

...