1. Burke identified people who made a social contract for a government as people permanent and likely to last for generations.
Paine thought it was wrong to consider any government action affecting people after this generation.
2. What do YOU think?
I'm struggling to answer these questions. I don't know their answers.
"Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure--but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee...taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties....As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primaeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and the invisible world, according to a fixed compact...." --Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution (1789)
"Every age and generation must be as free to act itself in all cases as the age and generation which preceded it. The vanity and presumptions of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow. Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated." --Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1792)
1. Based on these excerpts, how would Burke identify the people who make a social contract for a government? How would Paine do so?
A: ?
2. With which of these arguments do you think most Americans would agree? Why do you think so?
A: ?
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