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The Great Debate
- Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins
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Publisher's summary
An acclaimed portrait of Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the origins of modern conservatism and liberalism
In The Great Debate, Yuval Levin explores the roots of the left/right political divide in America by examining the views of the men who best represented each side at its origin: Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. Striving to forge a new political path in the tumultuous age of the American and French revolutions, these two ideological titans sparred over moral and philosophical questions about the nature of political life and the best approach to social change: radical and swift, or gradual and incremental. The division they articulated continues to shape our political life today.
An essential book for anyone seeking to understand the basis of our political order and Washington's acrimonious rifts today, The Great Debate offers a profound examination of what conservatism, progressivism, and the debate between them truly amount to.
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Critic reviews
"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 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
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The Founders' Key
- The Divine and Natural Connection Between the Declaration and the Constitution and What We Risk by Losing It
- By: Dr. Larry Arnn
- Narrated by: Van Tracy
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Dr. Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, reveals this integral unity of the Declaration and the Constitution. Together, they form the pillars upon which the liberties and rights of the American people stand. United, they have guided history's first self-governing nation, forming our government under certain universal and eternal principles. Unfortunately, the effort to redefine government to reflect "the changing and growing social order" has gone very far toward success.
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Linking Declaration and Constitution.
- By Ed Bethune on 04-26-24
By: Dr. Larry Arnn
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Between Past and Future
- Eight Exercises in Political Thought
- By: Hannah Arendt
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 11 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Hannah Arendt's insightful observations of the modern world, based on a profound knowledge of the past, constitute an impassioned contribution to political philosophy. In Between Past and Future, Arendt describes the perplexing crises modern society faces as a result of the loss of meaning of the traditional key words of politics: justice, reason, responsibility, virtue, and glory. Through a series of eight exercises, she shows how we can redistill the vital essence of these concepts and use them to regain a frame of reference for the future.
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Just stunning
- By Peter Stephens on 02-26-18
By: Hannah Arendt
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The End of History and the Last Man
- By: Francis Fukuyama
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 15 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Ever since its first publication in 1992, The End of History and the Last Man has provoked controversy and debate. Francis Fukuyama's prescient analysis of religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes, and war is as essential for a world fighting fundamentalist terrorists as it was for the end of the Cold War. Now updated with a new afterword, The End of History and the Last Man is a modern classic.
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An important discussion expertly narrated
- By Kevin Teeple on 06-27-19
By: Francis Fukuyama
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Churchill's Trial
- Winston Churchill and the Salvation of Free Government
- By: Dr. Larry Arnn
- Narrated by: Wayne Campbell
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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A penetrating look at the necessity of constitutional limits upon government and exceptional men to lead those governments, uniquely taken by overlaying the life and writings of Winston Churchill with the American experiment.
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A Masterpiece of Political Philosophy
- By Jean on 01-25-16
By: Dr. Larry Arnn
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A Short History of Ethics
- By: Alasdair MacIntyre
- Narrated by: Tim Dalgleish
- Length: 12 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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A Short History of Ethics is a significant contribution written by one of the most important living philosophers. It remains an important work, ideal for all students interested in ethics and morality.
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Great philosopher made ridiculous by accents
- By Olivia Walling on 10-04-17
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On Anarchism
- By: Noam Chomsky, Nathan Schneider - introduction
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 4 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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On Anarchism provides the reasoning behind Noam Chomsky's fearless lifelong questioning of the legitimacy of entrenched power. In these essays, Chomsky redeems one of the most maligned ideologies, anarchism, and places it at the foundation of his political thinking. Chomsky's anarchism is distinctly optimistic and egalitarian. Moreover, it is a living, evolving tradition that is situated in a historical lineage; Chomsky's anarchism emphasizes the power of collective, rather than individualist, action.
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Hit and Miss
- By Jacob King on 06-18-14
By: Noam Chomsky, and others
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The Lost History of Liberalism
- From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century
- By: Helena Rosenblatt
- Narrated by: Xe Sands
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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The Lost History of Liberalism challenges our most basic assumptions about a political creed that has become a rallying cry - and a term of derision - in today's increasingly divided public square. Taking listeners from ancient Rome to today, Helena Rosenblatt traces the evolution of the words "liberal" and "liberalism", revealing the heated debates that have taken place over their meaning. In this timely and provocative book, Rosenblatt debunks the popular myth of liberalism as a uniquely Anglo-American tradition centered on individual rights.
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Educative and informative
- By Amazon Customer on 06-05-19
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Revolutionary Characters
- What Made the Founders Different
- By: Gordon S. Wood
- Narrated by: Scott Brick
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Gordon Wood's wondrous accomplishment here is to bring these men and their times down to earth and within our reach, showing us just who they were and what drove them. In so doing, he shows us that although a lot has changed in two hundred years, to an amazing degree the virtues these founders defined for themselves are the virtues we aspire to still.
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Wood clearly dislikes Adams
- By Michael on 01-15-07
By: Gordon S. Wood
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Reflections on the Revolution in France
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This famous treatise began as a letter to a young French friend who asked Edmund Burke’s opinion on whether France’s new ruling class would succeed in creating a better order. Doubtless the friend expected a favorable reply, but Burke was suspicious of certain tendencies of the Revolution from the start and perceived that the revolutionaries were actually subverting the true "social order". Blending history with principle and graceful imagery with profound practical maxims, this book is one of the most influential political treatises in the history of the world.
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The Conservative Mind
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Kirk defines "the conservative mind" by examining such brilliant men as Edmund Burke, James Fenimore Cooper, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Quincy Adams, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Benjamin Disraeli, Cardinal Newman, George Santayana, and finally, T.S. Eliot. Vigorously written, the book represents conservatism as an ideology born of sound intellectual traditions.
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An interim review
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How a band of antislavery leaders recovered the radical philosophical inspirations of the first American Revolution to defeat the slaveholders' oligarchy in the Civil War.
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Mismatch of text and narrator
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In this short book, Roger Scruton presents an original and radical defense of human uniqueness. Confronting the views of evolutionary psychologists, utilitarian moralists, and philosophical materialists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, Scruton argues that human beings cannot be understood simply as biological objects.
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By: Edmund Burke
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Edmund Burke
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Russell Kirk has ingeniously combined into a living whole the private Burke and the public Burke. He gives us a fresh assessment of Burke, a statesman enjoying even greater influence today than in his own time. He lucidly unfolds Burke's philosophy, showing how it revealed itself in concrete historical situations in the 18th century and how Burke, through his philosophy, "speaks to our age".
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Narration too Fast for Me
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Edmund Burke
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Edmund Burke is both the greatest and the most underrated political thinker of the past three hundred years. A brilliant 18th-century Irish philosopher and statesman, Burke was a fierce champion of human rights and the Anglo-American constitutional tradition, and a lifelong campaigner against arbitrary power. Revered by great Americans including Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, Burke has been almost forgotten in recent years.
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More about what Burke thought than about his life
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On Politics
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Both a history and an examination of human thought and behavior spanning three thousand years, On Politics thrillingly traces the origins of political philosophy from the ancient Greeks to Machiavelli in Book I and from Hobbes to the present age in Book II. Whether examining Lord Acton's dictum that "absolute power corrupts absolutely" or explicating John Stuart Mill's contention that it is "better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied," Alan Ryan evokes the lives and minds of our greatest thinkers in a way that makes hearing about them a transcendent experience.
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Simply no book quite like this
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The Conservative Sensibility
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The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist's "astonishing" and "enthralling" New York Times best seller and Notable Book about how the Founders' belief in natural rights created a great American political tradition (Booklist) - "easily one of the best books on American Conservatism ever written" (Jonah Goldberg).
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Conservativism explained and in practice
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Suicide of the West
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Only once in the last 250,000 years have humans stumbled upon a way to lift ourselves out of the endless cycle of poverty, hunger, and war that defines most of history. If democracy, individualism, and the free market were humankind’s destiny, they should have appeared and taken hold a bit earlier in the evolutionary record. The emergence of freedom and prosperity was nothing short of a miracle.
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Put some gratitude in your attitude
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The Narrow Corridor
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Liberty is hardly the "natural" order of things. In most places and at most times, the strong have dominated the weak and human freedom has been quashed by force or by customs and norms. Either states have been too weak to protect individuals from these threats or states have been too strong for people to protect themselves from despotism. Liberty emerges only when a delicate and precarious balance is struck between state and society.
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Hugely disappointing book!
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By: Daron Acemoglu, and others
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America's Cultural Revolution
- How the Radical Left Conquered Everything
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In the 1960s, Mao launched China’s Cultural Revolution. Cities grew overcrowded. Technocrats demanded progress from above. Anyone opposed was sent to be “re-educated.” China’s revolution was bloody, fast, and a failure, but what if America started a revolution at the same time, based on the same bad ideas, and it’s just been slower, calmer, and more effective?
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Outstanding Analysis
- By Roman on 07-22-23
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The Right Side of History
- How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great
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America has a God-shaped hole in its heart, argues New York Times best-selling author Ben Shapiro, and we shouldn't fill it with politics and hate.
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As an atheist
- By Benjamin on 03-27-19
By: Ben Shapiro
What listeners say about The Great Debate
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- stealth2e
- 01-26-23
Very informative for the historically uninformed.
Sometimes it reads like a PhD dissertation, but i made it through. cf Roger Scruton.
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- Diana
- 05-17-24
Intellectual Battle of Ideas
Levin has an exceptional knowledge of Paine and Burke and presents their arguments fairly and objectively. Today, we hear faint echoes of these arguments in the battles between conservatives and libertarians. If you want to hear these arguments at the highest intellectual level, you can hear it here.
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- Louise
- 06-04-23
Essential Reading
This book was immensely readable given the topic.To understand how we got to the political reality of the 21st century, we need to look back on the thinking that set the stage. Glad I read it.
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- Coffin Family
- 10-30-22
absolutely worth your time
Yuval Levin's phD dissertation made readable for the rest of us. helps give clarity in explaining why left and right often talk past each other, because their competing world views are founded in entirely different assumptions of the good, which stretches back 250 years
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- Chris
- 09-25-24
The Roots of our (Particularly USA) Progressive & Conservative Liberalism
Really enjoyed the book and had to listen to the conclusion twice to appreciate Levin’s read on our currently strained politics. I had heard of Paine and Burke, but (perhaps still) did not know much about them or their views and how their legacy shaped Western political evolution. Having recently listened to some great podcasts on the French Revolution (‘Rest is History’) and the founding of the USA (‘Empire’)—both tragic instances of the violence (hallelujah not only that) that is our common human legacy amidst the interadvental permixtum—and finding myself to a large extent politically homeless in recent years—it was good to hear Levin’s outstanding—and very fair— treatment of these two giants. While I am now reminded of the importance of remaining conservative and praying for wisdom to navigate “gradually,” I am also appreciative that Paine—notwithstanding his radical and utterly untethered views—contributed something good to our legacy (concern for the poor might be it). I am however increasingly cautious about attaching “isms” to our political “identities”. Overall great book. Tolle lege.
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