Paine, Thomas
Paine, Thomas
Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was by all odds the most influential revolutionary pamphleteer of the Anglo-American world of the late eighteenth century, a figure of international importance. His pamphlet Common Sense, published in 1776, 13 months after he arrived in Philadelphia from his native England, crystallized the sentiment that led to the Declaration of Independence. His series of papers, The American Crisis, stiffened patriot resistance during the war, in “the times that try men’s souls.” The Rights of Man, published in 1791 and 1792, was written after his return to England in 1787 in response to Edmund Burke’s attack on the French Revolution. This pamphlet stimulated the radical reform movement in England and the Jeffersonian Republican party in the United States and led to the prosecution of Paine in England for sedition and to his election to the French National Assembly. In France from 1792 to 1802, his role in the revolution was minimal; allied to the Girondins, he was imprisoned by the Jacobins during 1794, barely escaping execution. His chief work in France, however, The Age of Reason, which appeared in 1794 and 1795, was probably the most popular deist attack on revealed religion ever written.
Paine’s mind was “speculative but unscholarly” (Clark [1944] 1961, p. xxix), and he was almost completely self-educated. His thought was to a great degree shaped by the experiences of his first 37 years in England, where as a poor staymaker (his father’s craft) and excise collector he developed an impassioned hatred of a “system of government” he held responsible for “the mass of wretchedness” in society (Complete Writings,vol. 1, pp. 404-405). The Quakerism of his father contributed to his humanitarianism and nonconformism. Newtonian science, which he learned from popular lectures in London, gave him confidence in natural law and rationalism as well as a lifelong interest in scientific improvement. (His most notable scientific contribution was the perfection of an iron bridge.) Thereafter he absorbed the ideas of the Enlightenment that were prevalent among his acquaintances in the advanced political groups of his day: in the United States the Philadelphia circle of Franklin, Jefferson, and Rush; in England the reform circle of Tooke, Godwin, and Priestley; in France the moderate republican circle of Condorcet and Brissot.
Paine is generally classified neither as a political theorist nor as an original thinker but as a popularizer who brought the ideas of the Enlightenment to the ordinary man in a lucid and trenchant style. His originality lay in pushing the critique of established unnatural institutions and ideas beyond the immediate consensus of enlightened opinion and in a radical direction. Thus, Common Senserejected not only King George in and any colonial tie to England but all monarchy, arguing for a broadly based republican form of government. The Rights of Man, in defending the French Revolution, advocated a republic for England, irreverently rejected the constitutionalism that was the basis of the Whig rationale of reform, and exposed the government as a class instrument through which the rich profited from war and the poor were exploited by taxes. In the famous fifth chapter of Book 2 of The Rights of Man and in Agrarian Justice, published in 1797, Paine proposed a program—poor relief, public education, old-age pensions, unemployment projects, etc., all to be financed by progressive inheritance and income taxes—that anticipated the welfare state. The Age of Reason, with its book-by-book expose of the inconsistencies of the Old Testament and the New Testament, indicting the obscurantism of Christianity as “an engine of power” which “serves the purpose of despotism” (Complete Writings, vol. 1, p. 600), transformed deism from an aristocratic to a democratic creed.
Paine returned to the United States in 1802, and in his last years was unjustifiably denounced as a Jacobin and an atheist, which opprobrium long characterized orthodox American political and religious opinion of him. His ideas had a brief revival in American labor and reform movements, but his fame was kept alive primarily by agnostics and freethinkers. In England, by contrast, The Rights of Man became “a foundation text of the English working class movement” until about 1880 (Thompson [1963] 1964, pp. 31, 90). From the point of view of conservatives, Paine, because of his optimistic view of human nature and his failure to grapple sufficiently with the kinds of political institutions necessary to guarantee the rights of man, epitomizes the “naivete” of the Enlightenment. He has had a continuing appeal to anarchists for his antistatist tendencies and to liberals and socialists for his radical egalitarianism.
Alfred Young
[For the historical context of Paine’s work, see the biographies ofBurke; Condorcet; Jefferson; Rush ; Tooke.]
bibliography
Aldridge, Alfred O. 1959 Man of Reason: The Life of Thomas Paine. Philadelphia: Lippincott.
Brinton, Crane 1934 Thomas Paine. Volume 14, pages 159-166 in Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Scribner.
Clark, Harry H. (1944) 1961 Introduction. In Thomas Paine, Thomas Paine: Representative Selections. New York: Hill & Wang.
Conway, Moncure D. (1892) 1893 The Life of Thomas Paine: With a History of His Literary, Political and Religious Career in America, France and England.2 vols. New York: Putnam.
Kenyon, Cecilia M. 1951 Where Paine Went Wrong. American Political Science Review 45:1086-1099.
Paine, ThomasThe Complete Writings of Thomas Paine. 2 vols. Edited by Philip S. Foner. New York: Citadel, 1945.
Palmer, Robert R. 1942 Tom Paine: Victim of the Rights of Man. Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 66:161-175.
Thompson, Edward P. (1963)1964 The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Pantheon. ? See especially Chapter 4 on “The Free-born Englishman” and Chapter 5 on “Planting the Liberty Tree.”