Early Radicalisim - Edmund Burke vs Thomas Paine

Question 1

How was Burke not conservative

Answer 1

• He sympathised with american colonies and their need of independence.
• He also supported reform in Britain, such as catholic Emancipation.
• He saw revolution as a necessary exception to rule to ensure stability.

Question 2

What was Burke’s key ideas on the revolution in France?

Answer 2

• Revolution is always accompanied by violence.
• Government gets its authority from custom and tradition.
• The government in Britain is stable and ‘wise’

Question 3

what where the key ideas of Thomas Paine

Answer 3

• Believed ‘tradition’ is not always a good thing and that the dead should not control the living.
• Government should be run equally and not by people who are interested in themselves only (Aristocrats).
• Believed in universal male suffrage.
• Thought that the French Revolution emerged from reason and rational thought and not from emotional violence.

Question 4

Why was paine seen as a radical

Answer 4

• He had spent 13 years in america,

- in 1787 he travelled to France where he saw the drama of the revolution which influenced his beliefs.

Question 5

How did Paine bring politics to the working/lower class?

Answer 5

• He had sold the book cheaply which allowed him to sell 200,000 copies of The Rights of Men in a year.
• Although the working class could not read the passages were read out in pubs, clubs and in their homes.