The Burke-Paine Debate and its influence on the new republic

Following the commencement of the French Revolution in 1789, a debate erupted in the Atlantic world known as the Burke-Paine Debate. This debate was part of a larger Atlantic movement known as "the pamphlet war" of the 1790s, a series of polemical writings concerning the pros and cons of the Revolution. Alarmed at the broad scope of the French Revolutionaries, Englishman Edmund Burke opened the pamphlet war in 1790 with a scathing rebuke entitled Reflections on the Revolution in France. This in turn elicited the response of Thomas Paine, who derisively rebuked Burke in kind in 1791 with Rights of Man, supporting the Revolution's ostensible aim toward republicanism. This thesis examines how the ideas which animated the Burke-Paine Debate influenced the debate over the expansion of democracy in the early American republic. While the Debate influenced political discussion throughout the nineteenth century, it also serves as a paradigm for the creation of a dichotomy between liberal and conservative politics. The thesis provides a comparative analysis of how the ideas of Burke and Paine were received, reported, and repackaged during the nineteenth century, providing as well an intellectual history of the roles of ideas in American history