ABSTRACT
A STRIKING FEATURE of moral and political argument in the modern world is the extent to which it is innovators, radicals, and revolutionaries who revive old doctrines, while their conservative and reactionary opponents are the inventors of new ones. So the contract theorists and the believers in natural rights in the seventeenth century were reviving features of medieval doctrines, while the doctrine of the divine right of kings was essentially a sixteenth-and seventeenth-century invention. So also, at the time of the French Revolution, it is Tom Paine who revives Locke, and it is Burke who invents a quite new form of the appeal to tradition. Paine is not a source of philosophical argument in himself; his importance lies in the way in which he, and more especially, his French associates helped to force the moral traditions of the English ruling oligarchy away from the doctrine of natural rights. How did they do this?
