...and it actually turns out that burke's text is, itself, a rebuttal to this piece, which i should read and analyze before i analyze burke in an attempt to analyze paine. how far back is this going to go?

http://www.constitution.org/price/price_3.htm

actually, burke's response is not to this text but to a sermon published in 1789. note to self that the editor in the burke text has just discredited himself.

i'm going to go through that text anyways because it's fairly short.

this appears to be the text that was actually rebutted:

http://www.constitution.org/price/price_8.htm

yeah. the text (not the sermon) is a response to a text attributed to a james mcpherson, which is considered a response to the declaration of independence itself.

actually, no, that can't be right, it's anachronistic - if the mcpherson text was written in response to the declaration (and it's in the title, so there's no guesswork), it would be after the declaration, which was after the price text. price quotes the mcpherson text in his preface to the fifth edition, and dates it march, 1776, but this must be a later addition to the text, and an unfortunately placed date. so, i'm not going through with that for right now. i do have a copy of the constitution (written later) on my shelf though and will eventually get to it.

rather, it seems to be that price interpreted the mcpherson text partially as a response to his own, rather than only as a response to the declaration. and the declaration, of course, is not very long, so it makes sense to think that any response to it would seek some other source.

but that's not what i'm doing right now.

in context, i think it's important to realize that the american revolution was a dispute amongst members of the trans-oceanic british upper class, rather than something to do with a popular uprising (indeed, popular uprisings were brutally suppressed in this period, with a level of barbarity that would shock most people). people's histories of the period are valuable, but in a way that supplements rather than deletes the upper class philosophical debates.

i mean, all these people - paine, burke, price - were born in britain. only paine even bothered to visit america.

the "philosopher's circle" that price entertained franklin, jefferson, paine and others in was located in london, not philadelphia. it also included the circle of british liberals that first articulated the collection of ideas know known as anarchism.

that goes back to what i said about paine: you want to root for these people, but you know they're out to lunch on some really fundamental assumptions.

and it also goes back to what i said about understanding the american revolution as an internal restructuring of power within the boundaries of the british empire.

it's kind of like when the center of the roman empire moved from rome to constantinople. we sometimes talk about the "byzantine empire" as though it were something different, but we don't forget that it was fundamentally the "eastern roman empire". there were periods under, say, justinian, when the "eastern roman empire" controlled most of spain, africa and italy, while rome was being pillaged by germans. in these periods, the eastern empire was THE empire - and was merely the *roman* empire. likewise, we should be explicitly speaking of the united states both as the western british empire and as THE british empire, especially after 1945.

in the end, the russians might conquer london. well, they might. but the british empire will carry on from washington.

another sort of interesting comparison is that rome was founded on a weak memory of greece - not ethnically, but culturally. the historical foundations of london are blurry, even today, but exist somewhere in a roman cultural tradition. as athens birthed rome, rome birthed london, which birthed washington: stages of a western empire. likewise, there are stages of an eastern empire: persepolis birthed antioch birthed constantinople birthed kiev birthed moscow. and, so understanding the conflict between london and moscow (and now washington and moscow) can be reduced to the conflict between rome and constantinople, and before that between athens and persepolis. the geography has shifted, but the basic struggle (and a lot of the same themes of republicanism v despotism) has remained constant.

again, that's a lot of stasis.