Himmelfarb, Gertrude. "The French Connection: How the Revolution, and Two Thinkers, Bequeathed Us ‘Right’ and ‘Left’." The Weekly Standard, December 9, 2013.

Excerpt:

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law. So, too, extreme situations make bad policy and worse philosophy. The French Revolution was just such a situation; compared with the French, the English and American revolutions are almost unworthy of the title of revolution. No one took the measure of the extremity of that revolution better than its contemporaries Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. And nobody drew the most far-reaching, antithetical, and enduring political and philosophical lessons from that revolution.

 

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