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I wrote the Reflections on the Revolution in France in November 1790 — before the Terror, before the guillotine, before the Revolutionary Wars. My critics said I was catastrophising. Paine wrote his Rights of Man to refute me point by point.

Within three years, my predictions had been accurate. The Revolution had consumed its authors. The rationalist project of rebuilding society on abstract principle, stripped of inherited customs and institutions, had produced not liberty but mass murder by committee.

I was not defending the ancien régime. I was defending the idea that society is a contract between the living, the dead, and the unborn — that you cannot tear up the inheritance of centuries on the basis of a philosophical enthusiasm without producing worse chaos than the imperfect order you destroyed.

Paine called this servility. I called it prudence. We were both right about the Revolution. We reached opposite conclusions from the same facts. This happens more often than philosophers admit.