Notwithstanding his involvement in the controversies of the moment, if one judges by his new book, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left, Levin prefers the classics to more contemporary fare.

The Great Debate stands apart from many conservative books of the last decade because it is aimed almost quaintly above the current debates of the day. Barack Obama’s name appears once—in an offhand mention at the end that even the world’s most famous community organizer has claimed to be a Burkean at heart.

As Levin’s subtitle suggests, the book argues that these two contemporaries were the founders of the modern Anglo-American right (Burke) and left (Paine). Now, while the politician and polemicist Burke has long been considered the father of modern conservatism, Paine is far less likely to be considered a founding father by today’s left. But he does stand out as perhaps the greatest contemporary American defender of the French Revolution, a cataclysmic event that is widely, and rightly, seen as the birthplace of, variously, the left, the “revolutionary tradition,” and/or totalitarianism itself. Meanwhile, Burke was the greatest critic of the French Revolution in the English-speaking world, a fact that shocked many Americans who revered Burke for his moral support of the American Revolution. . . .

While it is obvious that Levin’s deeper affection is for Burke, he is never heavy-handed about it. Indeed, by the end of the book, it is clear that Levin is not really interested in selling the argument in his subtitle. Instead, he simply lets the men speak for themselves and trusts the reader to provide the context as needed. As Levin concedes, this is partly due to the fact that while the divergent worldviews of Burke and Paine illuminate important differences between right and left, they also clearly illuminate disagreements that run through the heart of Anglo-American life. These are two strands that together form—or at least deeply inform—the DNA of our political culture, and together they create family resemblances that transcend the conventional ideological divide.