Thomas Paine: Revolutionary Voice of the Common Man

In the late autumn of 1776, a thirty-nine-year-old English corset-maker’s son, recently arrived in Philadelphia, was working as a literary journalist for the Pennsylvania Magazine and trying, in his own words, to “get into business” in the colonies. He was, by his own private confession, broke. He had tried his hand at half a dozen trades, had failed at most of them, had been dismissed from his position as an excise officer for agitating for a pay raise, and had separated from his first wife after what he called a “soft impeachment” of his marital conduct. He had emigrated to America in 1774 on a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin, who had met him in London and judged him, in the famous phrase, “a man of excellent good sense and great integrity.” Within a year, Paine had written the most widely read pamphlet in the American colonies. Within five, he had written a second pamphlet — The American Crisis — whose first sentence (“These are the times that try men’s souls”) was being read aloud to Washington’s troops at Trenton.

Within ten years he had become the most controversial political writer on either side of the Atlantic. The trajectory is one of the most remarkable in the history of the modern political pamphlet, and it is worth tracing carefully, because the man who made it is, in this writer’s judgment, the most underrated of the major political writers of the eighteenth century.

Paine was, in many respects, an unlikely candidate for the most radical of the major political writers of the Enlightenment. He was, in his social origins, lower-middle-class — the son of a Thetford corset-maker and a member of the Society of Friends. He had a limited formal education, and he was apprenticed to his father’s trade and later worked as an excise officer, a schoolteacher, and a tobacconist. The early years of his life were marked by repeated failures — he was dismissed from his excise position, his first marriage was unhappy, and his various business ventures came to nothing. He was, in the conventional sense, a man of no particular distinction, and the conventional view, that he was a kind of natural talent who had been held back by social circumstances, is, in this writer’s judgment, the right one.

The Arrival in America

The meeting with Franklin in London in 1774 is the pivot of the life. Franklin, then sixty-eight, the most famous American in the world, was in London as a colonial agent. Paine, then thirty-seven, was a frustrated excise officer in Lewes, recently dismissed from his position for agitating for a pay raise. The meeting is one of the most productive accidents in the history of the American Revolution. Franklin gave Paine a letter of introduction to his son-in-law Richard Bache in Philadelphia, and Paine sailed for America in October 1774, arriving in Philadelphia in November, just as the crisis between Britain and the colonies was approaching its climax.

The first twelve months in America were the most productive of his life. He became the editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, the first issue of which appeared in January 1776, and within a year he had written Common Sense, the most widely read pamphlet of the American Revolution. The book was published anonymously on January 10, 1776, and within three months it had sold more than 100,000 copies — an extraordinary figure for a colonial publication. The book was, in its central argument, a defense of American independence and a repudiation of the hereditary principle, and it was, in its style, the most direct and most accessible political writing that had yet appeared in the English language.

The book was, in fact, more than a defense of American independence. It was, in its central argument, a careful restatement of the natural-rights tradition, in the language of the common man. The argument that the British constitution was, in fact, a careful piece of constitutional engineering that had been corrupted by the introduction of the hereditary principle, and the argument that the American colonies had a moral and political duty to declare their independence and to establish a new republican order, were arguments that had been made before, in more technical and less accessible form, by Locke, by Trenchard and Gordon, and by the great Whig tradition of the early eighteenth century. What Paine contributed was not the originality of the arguments but the style — the careful restatement of the arguments in a language that was, in the strict sense, the language of the common man. The book was, in fact, the founding text of the modern tradition of the radical political pamphlet in the English language.

The Rights of Man and the Defense of the French Revolution

Paine returned to England in 1787, and he was in London when the French Revolution began in 1789. He watched with enthusiasm as the events unfolded across the Channel, and he wrote a response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) that became one of the great works of modern political thought.

The Rights of Man (1791–1792) was a systematic defense of the principles of the French Revolution against Burke’s conservative critique. Paine argued that the French Revolution was the beginning of a new era in human history, in which the principles of liberty, equality, and popular sovereignty would be established throughout the world. He attacked the hereditary principle, the aristocratic privilege, and the established church, and he advocated for a comprehensive system of social welfare that would provide for the basic needs of all citizens. The book was, in its central argument, a careful restatement of the natural-rights tradition, in the language of the common man, and it was, in fact, the most widely read and most influential defense of the French Revolution published in Britain.

The book was, in fact, more than a defense of the French Revolution. It was, in its central argument, a careful essay in the modern doctrine of the welfare state. The programme of social welfare that Paine advocated — progressive taxation, family allowances, old-age pensions, public employment — was, in this writer’s judgment, the most ambitious of the eighteenth-century programmes of social welfare, and it was, in fact, the most important precursor of the welfare state of the twentieth century. The programme was, in addition, a careful essay in the modern doctrine of the welfare rights of citizens, and the proper response to the programme is not the postmodern critique but a careful re-reading of the argument in the light of the best of the contemporary work in the philosophy of welfare rights.

The Rights of Man went through dozens of editions, and it was translated into every major European language. The British government responded by issuing a proclamation against seditious writings, and Paine was indicted for treason. He fled to France in 1792, narrowly escaping arrest. The trial in absentia, the verdict of guilty, and the sentence of outlawry were, in fact, the basis of the international reputation that Paine acquired in the early 1790s, and the basis of the radical political tradition that he came to represent on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Age of Reason and the Critique of Religion

Paine was elected to the French National Convention as a deputy for the Pas-de-Calais, and he became a French citizen. He supported the moderate Girondin faction in the Convention, and he voted for the king’s imprisonment but opposed his execution. The fall of the Girondins and the rise of the Jacobins put Paine in danger, and he was imprisoned in December 1793. He remained in prison for nearly a year, during which time he began work on his next major work, The Age of Reason.

The Age of Reason (1794–1807) was Paine’s most controversial work. It was a systematic critique of organized religion, especially the Christian church, and it argued that the only proper foundation for religious belief was the evidence of natural reason and the observation of nature. Paine rejected the Bible as divine revelation, attacked the doctrines of the Christian church as corruptions of a pure original religion of reason, and advocated for a kind of naturalistic deism. The book was, in its central argument, a careful restatement of the deist tradition, in the language of the common man, and it was, in fact, the most widely read and most controversial work of the deist tradition in the English language.

The book provoked an enormous controversy. It was denounced by clergy of all Christian denominations, and it made Paine one of the most unpopular figures in America and Britain. The book was, in fact, the most important precursor of the modern tradition of the secular critique of organized religion, and the proper response to the book is not the postmodern critique but a careful re-reading of the argument in the light of the best of the contemporary work in the philosophy of religion.

The scholarly assessment of the Age of Reason has been transformed in the last forty years. The older view — most influentially argued by the British historian of political thought Elie Halévy in The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (1928) — was that the Age of Reason was, in fact, a careful piece of the deist propaganda of the late eighteenth century, and that the proper response to the book was the recognition that the deist tradition was, in fact, a transitional moment in the history of European thought. The more recent view, in the work of the British historian of political thought Mark Philp, of the American literary historian Peter Linebaugh, and of the late Cambridge historian of political thought Quentin Skinner, has been that the Age of Reason was, in fact, a careful essay in the radical political tradition of the late eighteenth century, and that the proper response to the book is the recognition that the radical political tradition was, in fact, a more important feature of the late eighteenth century than the older accounts allowed.

The Last Years

Paine was released from prison in November 1794, thanks in part to the intervention of the American minister to France, James Monroe. He returned to America in 1802, and he spent the last years of his life in New York and New Rochelle, where he died on June 8, 1809, at the age of seventy-two.

The circumstances of Paine’s last years were unhappy. His religious views had made him widely unpopular, and he was denied the public recognition that his earlier achievements might have warranted. He was buried on his farm in New Rochelle, and his grave was unmarked for many years. Only in the twentieth century was his reputation fully rehabilitated, and he came to be recognized as one of the most important political writers of the modern age.

The circumstances are worth pausing on. The man who had written the most widely read pamphlet of the American Revolution, who had been elected to the French National Convention, and who had been one of the most important political writers of the eighteenth century, died in poverty and in relative obscurity, and was buried in an unmarked grave. The rehabilitation of his reputation, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was the work of a small group of American and British radicals, most influentially the British freethinker George Henry Lewes, the American freethinker Robert Ingersoll, and the British socialist and freethinker Thomas Huxley. The rehabilitation was, in this writer’s judgment, a careful piece of historical work, and the proper response to the rehabilitation is not the postmodern critique but a careful re-reading of the works in the light of the best of the contemporary work in the history of political thought.

A Judgement

Paine is, in this writer’s judgment, the most underrated of the major political writers of the Enlightenment. The reason is partly that the natural-rights tradition, of which Paine was the most radical representative, has been the object of a great deal of criticism, most famously in the work of Jeremy Bentham, who dismissed the natural-rights tradition as “nonsense upon stilts.” The Benthamite critique is well taken in some respects, but it should not obscure the fact that the natural-rights tradition has, in fact, been the basis of a great deal of practical political work, and that the proper response to the critique is not the abandonment of the tradition but a careful re-statement of the doctrine in the light of the best of the contemporary philosophical and political work.

The reason is partly that the welfare-state tradition, of which Paine was the most important precursor, has been the object of a great deal of criticism, most famously in the work of the Chicago-school economists, who have argued that the welfare state is, in fact, a careful piece of economic intervention that has, in the long run, more costs than benefits. The Chicago-school critique is well taken in some respects, but it should not obscure the fact that the welfare state has, in fact, been the basis of a great deal of practical political work, and that the proper response to the critique is not the abandonment of the welfare state but a careful re-statement of the doctrine in the light of the best of the contemporary work in the economics of the welfare state.

The reason is partly that the secular critique of organized religion, of which Paine was the most important representative, has been the object of a great deal of criticism, most famously in the work of the contemporary “new atheists,” who have argued that the secular critique is, in fact, a careful piece of atheist propaganda that has, in the long run, more costs than benefits. The new-atheist critique is well taken in some respects, but it should not obscure the fact that the secular critique has, in fact, been the basis of a great deal of practical political work, and that the proper response to the critique is not the abandonment of the secular critique but a careful re-statement of the doctrine in the light of the best of the contemporary work in the philosophy of religion.

The most lasting of Paine’s contributions is, in this writer’s judgment, the radical political tradition that he came to represent. The tradition has been the basis of the modern radical political tradition, of the modern welfare-state tradition, of the modern secular tradition, and of the modern tradition of the political pamphlet in the English language. The tradition has also been the object of a great deal of criticism, most famously in the work of the conservative political philosophers, who have argued that the radical political tradition is, in fact, a careful piece of utopian propaganda that has, in the long run, more costs than benefits. The conservative critique is well taken in some respects, but it should not obscure the fact that the radical political tradition has, in fact, been the basis of a great deal of practical political work, and that the proper response to the critique is not the abandonment of the tradition but a careful re-statement of the doctrine in the light of the best of the contemporary work in political philosophy.

The Arrival in America

The Rights of Man and the Defense of the French Revolution

The Age of Reason and the Critique of Religion

The Last Years

A Judgement

Further Reading