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Applied Science of Thomas Paine

Applied Science of Thomas Paine, Inventor of the United States of America, in the Physical and Organizational Domains

Albert DiCanzio

An essay based on the author’s presentation at the First Annual International Conference of Thomas Paine Studies, 19 October 2012 with a few script revisions in year 2020

In the interest of more deeply understanding the phrase “the republic for which it stands” in the pledge of allegiance to this flag, let us explore a tripartite proposition. I refer to this exploration as a proposition because, in the allotted time on our schedule, we can undertake no proof but at most explanation of these conclusions. First, that the United States of America, unlike many if not all other nations, is an invention; by this term I mean: a novel application of design principles embodied in a durable mechanism. Second, that its inventor was that quintessential cosmopolitan Thomas Paine. Third, that it falls to participants and followers of this conference, who care about him, to help shore up his design against the ravages of past neglect and future abuse. In thus honoring Paine and his legacy, I propose that we honor a call to action inherent in that legacy, to fully implement his design of a cultural and political paradigm shift, that is, to complete the still incomplete American Revolution.

Do not imagine that I hold Paine first among scientists to call for a cultural paradigm shift. Galileo had thus preceded Paine, as seen in a story I recounted.(1) By disproving the Ptolemaic cosmology, Galileo gave credibility to notions of geokinesis and of self-directed society,(2) relocating Earth away from the center of planetary motions while laying groundwork for Paine to compensate for lost centrality by placing a self-directed society at the center of a world formerly dominated by monarchic and dynastic rule. By also discovering dynamics, Galileo revolutionized how we harness natural laws of a vast universe in which terrestrials now see their unfavored position offering no ready alternative to getting along with fellow inhabitants of an Earth that Galileo largely proved to be a planet. Just as through his writing, Galileo taught physics to Newton; both men enlightened Thomas Paine, who expanded the Newtonian revolution by treating human behavior on the scale of a nation as a natural phenomenon.

In Rights of Man, part 2, Introduction, we read “What Archimedes said of the mechanical powers may be applied to Reason and Liberty. ‘Had we’, said he, ‘a place to stand upon, we might raise the world.’” More than a change of “persons and measures”, the nascent United States embodied in one nation of free and independent states a change of principles and synthesis of ideas that marked out a position on which to freely apply the lever of reason. We see this in hindsight because, unlike some unrealized or fleeting utopian dream, its design, though imperfect, has stood a test of time, following its encapsulation in durable founding documents. How did that design come about? Paine synthesized Locke’s philosophy with the laws of mechanics of Galilei-Newton into the separation of the colonies as an exercise of natural rights with a Constitution and autogovernance, writing: “The revolution of America presented in politics what was only theory in mechanics.”(3)

In The Life and Works of Thomas Paine(4) one finds Thomas Edison having referred to the totality of Paine’s works as “a crystallization of acute human reasoning” and to his specific work Common Sense as embodying “… Paine’s planning of this great American republic, of which he may very justly be termed the real founder”.

Edison’s two observations confirmed me in the intent to consider this question: How did Paine’s immersion in post-Newtonian scientific thinking cross-fertilize the fiery patriotic writings? A first clue to his rhetorical color and inspiration held firm on an inferential track lies in scientific clarity of thought and language. As we now visit elements of Paine’s story, there may arise additional clues both in the scope of his writings and in that of his inventiveness,(5) including uses of laws concerning energy, momentum, leverage, and even the spiderweb as a model.

In 1775, despite massive British interference in colonial affairs, few leading American colonists favored separation. A year later they declared independence. What had happened in the interim? In January 1776, Paine released Common Sense. Ultimately it sold 120,000 copies, inspired the colonies to independence, and enabled Washington to raise an army. The energy transfer of idea-disclosure, amplified by this factor (i.e., the transition from the first reader to all those that followed), became re-amplified by the Declaration of Rights, Article 1 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, of which Franklin was an author and principal intellectual architect, and Paine was a source of philosophical influence. Together they formed an intellectual backdrop for the bill of rights, each amplification resulting from leverage on the fulcrum of Paine’s formidable pen. In Rights of Man Paine told us that he applied mechanical principles to the American Revolution. What passion drove him to scientize the social domain?

Aside from the United States, of which he is also arguably the inventor, there were at least six known inventions by Paine, of which he modeled five of these six:

  1. A smokeless candle that he sent to Franklin in 1785, along with a description of its operating principle.
  2. An automotive carriage with wheels rotating by thrust of exploding gunpowder. In this application of the 3rd law of Galilei-Newtonian mechanics, Paine had put gunpowder to a peaceful use.
  3. An improved crane.
  4. A turbine to propel a steamboat, un-modeled, yet John Fitch, James Rumsey and Robert Fulton, all of whom were granted U.S. patents relating to the steamboat, recognized Paine as its original inventor. By shrinking the time to traverse distance, the steamboat accelerated the conversion of coastal colonies to a continental commercial powerhouse.
  5. A patented method of constructing arches, vaulted roofs and ceilings, derived from Paine’s examination of a spiderweb, and culminating in the iron bridge of 1787-1788. The Sunderland Bridge(6) built at Wearmouth, England in 1796 was designed by Paine with a single cast iron 236-foot-span hingeless arch, an inverted catenary that, like the cycloid advocated earlier by Galileo for bridge construction, yet even more effectively, increased the span without a central support.(7)
  6. A machine for planing wood, used in building models of his bridge.

From the invention fortifying a network of bridge components, Paine modeled a robust network topology for a web of associations among freedom-seeking individuals. The American revolution had thus come to model the Newtonian one.

Analogously to Occam’s Razor used in physics to winnow the best competing explanation of natural phenomena, Paine extracted governmental robustness from simplicity and order in nature, a process in which, he wrote, “I draw my idea of the form of government from a principle implicit in nature which no art can overturn: that the more simple any thing the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered.”(8) Invoking the metaphor of a pulley for checks and balances in essential governmental forms, he wrote: “… for as the greater weight will always carry up the less, and as all the wheels of a machine are put in motion by one, it only remains to know which power in the constitution has the most weight, for that will govern; …” In the Renaissance, Galileo had reached back to ancient Greece, reviving Ionian science from the Dark Ages to create dynamics, groundwork for Newton’s system of the world. By 1776, Newton’s reformulation of Galilean dynamics had blossomed in physics, yet remained unapplied to the social domain until the then-future Paine arrived to apply it.

Paralleling Galileo, Paine turned to that once vibrant era of Athenian democracy to restore and advance autogovernance. The colonies, he explained, will separate and re-form under a declaration of rights, a constitution, and a vacuum of royalty. In 1787, he acknowledged the incompleteness of the American Revolution.(9) Though a second outcome awaited its completion, Paine initially transposed Newtonian momentum to the social domain. Incomplete because it opposed only the most visible slavery, yet this transposition promoted life with liberty and respect for individual property. Inadvertently, 125 years later another inventor elaborated on what Paine had done. The functional relationship of Thomas Paine to Nikola Tesla first came to mind in research of mine aimed at grounding organizational dynamics in the physical dynamics of Galileo.(10)

Tesla, inventor of polyphase alternating current power distribution, in 1900 modeled a human as “a mass urged on by a force”.(11) Human energy he thought measurable by “half the human mass multiplied with the square of a velocity which we are not yet able to compute.”(12) With this non-translatory velocity he associated a human’s “degree of enlightenment.” Laxity of morals, as manifested in organized warfare, was a mass-reducing phenomenon, against which a way to “reduce the force retarding the human mass” would be to eliminate “frictional resistances” such as ignorance. That goal, in turn, called for rational planning whose direction lies “along the resultant of all those efforts” designated as “self-preserving, useful, profitable, or practical”.(13) Under this concept (i.e., Tesla’s concept, my observation) Paine had designed a nation with less friction, and the possibility of rational planning, in an initial condition of autogovernance as a place to stand for launching human achievement. Though Tesla did not elaborate “self-preserving”, Paine proposed that government should assist in providing a secure foundation (i.e., safety from attacks on property) for the pursuit of happiness.(14)

There is more to be observed about the link between Paine and the enlightenment progress of combining science and political structures. I begin a list of the “more to be observed” with axiomatization and postulation. These are institutionalized in science. Their use in politics is illustrated by the phrases “we hold these truths to be self-evident” and “the laws of nature …” and “We the people”. A principle formulated by Paine that I infer to be infrastructural to the Constitutional provision that “We the people” grant and limit the powers of the United States is:

“Mankind are not now to be told they shall not think, or they shall not read; and publications that go no farther than to investigate principles of government, to invite men to reason and to reflect, and to show the errors and excellences of different systems, have a right to appear”.(15)

Such telltale expressions of ideas as self-evident truths, laws of nature, and thinking people, that can be found in documents known to have been influenced, if not also written by Paine in draft form, are marks of an applied scientist and technical innovator.

No less in importance is Paine’s insistence on defining concepts and his habit of defining terms with great care and explanation, the mark of the mathematician that Paine was, and eminently so in the New World. Of a constitution he wrote: “… it will be first necessary to define what is meant by a Constitution. It is not sufficient that we adopt the word; we must fix also a standard signification to it. … A constitution is a thing antecedent to a government, and a government is only the creature of a constitution. The constitution of a country is not the act of its government, but of the people constituting its government.” This preamble is followed immediately by his definition of “Constitution”.(16)

Another category of “more” evidence for Paine’s inventorship of the U.S.A. is found in his attempts to encourage an evidence-based discourse, for example, with Edmund Burke, with whom he poignantly disagreed, reacting by issuing Rights of Man. This habit of communication can be compared with a method of controversy found in analysis of Galileo’s dialogues, the first in history (known to me) to aim dialogue at truth-seeking rather than, as in politics or in courtrooms today, at polemicizing toward some pre-conceived conclusion. The Galilean Dialogue on the Two World Systems aims at transforming disagreement into exposure and evaluation of facts and reasoning on both sides of it into common understanding through open-minded, fair-minded, and rational-minded evaluation of that with which one at first may disagree.(17)

In my own professional experience in the development and testing of mathematical models of business products and processes, I observed that the creation of predictive hypotheses and the design of tests that would evaluate them often require mathematical tools that include statistics, combinatorics, curve-fitting, linear programming, Newtonian approximation, decision analysis, flow systems theory, and theory of competitive strategies. For the most part, development of such tools post-dated the life of Paine, yet clearly it was not in a mathematical vacuum that he invented the iron bridge and several other aforementioned novelties. Some such mathematical tools may be used here and there in elements of political practice. They have been and predictably would continue to be useful in the implementation of restoring and completing the American Revolution. This is true for reasons including that optimizing a web of associations among freedom-seeking individuals entails the mathematics and mechanics of network design and implementation.

Finally, a complete list of “more” evidence for Paine’s inventorship of the United States would require a modern explanation of grounding organizational dynamics in post-Newtonian physical dynamics. This is my one of my personal projects which began in [3], about which a great deal more is to be done. That entire important subtopic would exceed my time and space limits here.

As an instance of science starting with first principles, Common Sense first postulated society distinct from government. Paine had proclaimed in Common Sense the need to declare independence; he was known as the foremost writer in the colonies; a Librarian of Congress(18) found Jefferson’s first draft copied from an earlier document; Paine exclaimed “The decree is finally gone forth. Britain and America are now distinct empires”,(19) about the time of the appointment by Congress of a committee to draft the Declaration.

Regardless of the extent to which Paine may have influenced the fundamental documents of the United States of America, a nation whose name and original support are due to him, the friendship and cooperation of Benjamin Franklin with Paine cannot rightly be overlooked. Franklin too was an inventor and, by virtue of discovering the polarity of electricity, one of only three native American discoverers of laws of nature known to me.(20) It is implausible that merely by accident Franklin, having been introduced to Paine by one of the latter’s fellow mathematicians in his native England, understood Paine’s genius as a fellow product of the Newtonian revolution and arranged for him to live and work in England’s colonies. As far as I have been able to determine, the Declaration of Independence may have been as much or more the work of Franklin, Jefferson, and the latter’s committee members as Paine’s, but Paine’s ideas are reflected in it.(21)

As evidence, consider Paine’s leading role in producing a preamble to the French Constitution, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens adopted by the National Assembly of France(22) and containing these declared rights (DRs) among others that echo the sentiments of Paine expressed in Rights of Man: DR 2: “The end of all Political associations is the Preservation of the Natural and Imprescriptible Rights of Man; and these rights are Liberty, Property, Security, and Resistance of Oppression.” DR 4: “Political Liberty consists in the power of doing whatever does not Injure another. The exercise of the Natural Rights of every Man, has no other limits than those which are necessary to secure to every other Man the Free exercise of the same Rights; and these limits are determinable only by the Law.” DR 5: “The Law ought to Prohibit only actions hurtful to Society. What is not Prohibited by the Law should not be hindered; nor should anyone be compelled to that which the Law does not Require.” DR 12: “A Public force being necessary to give security to the Rights of Men and of Citizens, that force is instituted for the benefit of the Community and not for the particular benefit of the persons to whom it is intrusted.” It is noteworthy that the behavior of many public officials in the United States has not even risen to the height of the bar that Paine raised for France in DR12.

In Paine’s writings I find an internally consistent blend of classical liberalism with what now is called capitalism. His civic philosophy synthesizes property and the flow of rewards to achievers with the idea of social insurance for all. In 1967, the term “capitalism” assumed its modern meaning by being defined simply as “a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned”.(23) An assumption built into this definition is: control of property is never, under no circumstances, separated from ownership. Paine noted; “There are two kinds of property. Firstly, natural property, … such as the earth, air, water. Secondly, … acquired property – the invention of men”,(24) the latter being acquired by contract.

In the commercial arena, Paine opposed intervention by a foreign monarch and domestic interference with the development of robust monetary foundations as exemplied by the Coinage Act of 1792. Paine “was trying to free commercial relations from a type of oligarchy. It developed into capitalism, and the forces aligning against monarchy have their root in a nascent capitalism.”(25)

Independently of that endeavor, Paine was faithful to what would later come to be known as capitalism. Case in point: “In ‘Agrarian Justice,’ he developed the first realistic proposal in the world to abolish systematic poverty: a universal social insurance system comprising old-age pensions and disability support and universal stakeholder grants for young adults, funded by a 10% inheritance tax focused on land.”(26) Lest this be wrongly seen as a redistribution of property, to see otherwise consider Paine’s argument for the proposal. Passing over some of his preliminary argument, I bring you to these two postulations: (1) “[T]he first principle of civilization ought to have been, and ought still to be, that the condition of every person born into the world, after a state of civilization commences, ought not to be worse than if he had been born before that period. … (2)”the earth in its natural, uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race. In that state, every man would have been born into property.” Ultimately his argument culminates in: “Every proprietor of cultivated lands owes to the community a ground-rent … for the land which he holds”.(27) Here he explains why, given principles (1) and (2), cultivators of large land parcels owe a percentage rent to be collected as a tax. By this argument, Paine demonstrates the absence of expropriation or what might otherwise be seen as anti-capitalistic intent in his “social insurance”.

To complete Paine’s mission, among other actions that can be taken are: 1. … to restore his legacy. History has denied Paine proper gratitude for inventing the United States. Athens, after exiling its great general Themistocles who had saved the country from Persian invaders, and after forcing on its great philosopher Socrates a choice of exile or a cup of hemlock, fell into decline and never recovered. Similarly, the United States, nearly oblivious to its inventor, has been in decline as measured by the Index of Economic Freedom and other metrics. 2. … to hold officials to their oath of office,(28) to remove the slavery of fiat currency inflation, consistently with Paine’s advocacy of the death penalty for those who would move for legal tender laws(29) and to free commerce from the imposition of trade restrictions and taxation without consent of the people. 3. … to develop organizational dynamics. The design (and re-engineering) of a nation is a work of organizational dynamics, not to be confused with what is casually and tenuously called “organizational dynamics” in universities today. Tesla articulated a qualitative concept of directed human motion affected by rational planning and by innovation; his phrase “which we are not yet able to compute” suggested that he thought it could ultimately be quantified. Kurt Lewin aimed at defining a topological space suitable to represent social interaction. Until their successor(s) in organizational dynamics anchor that discipline in Galilean physical dynamics, inadequate theoretical grounding will exist for fortifying the American Revolution. That is an aim of my ongoing current research.(30)

Additionally, patriots can presently support scholarly research on Paine’s legacy by donating to organizations of their choice, such as The Thomas Paine National Historical Association in New Rochelle. This litany is incomplete and enumerates only those fulfilling actions of which I have conceived independently of a forthcoming work which would be far more complete. It is my hope and expectation that Rad Freeman’s work will receive serious attention by scholars.(31)

From those who have raised their voices above their faculties to claim through ignorance of inconvenient facts that our country was founded entirely on oppression, it would be refreshing to hear or read an explanation why they have been so silent about the inventor of the United States having been a consistent foe of slavery, both physical and mental, and an uncompromising promoter of human happiness. Where is the recognition and gratitude for this man Paine who endured severe risks and hardships, devoting his life to the elimination of all forms of oppression in at least two countries and worldwide through his writings?

Dear reader, sursum corda! Is it necessary or prudent to attack a revolution on account of some darkness in its history? A revolution is a human endeavor that embraces some mistakes and some darkness, as when revolving about the sun our planet is eclipsed by the moon. The leading revolutionary of the United States has written: “The sun needs no inscription to distinguish him from darkness; and no sooner did the American governments display themselves to the world, than despotism felt a shock and man began to contemplate redress.”(32) For a limited time, an option exists to sustain the shock to despotism. Might we honor the brilliance in the revolution’s history and intent by completing and fulfilling it?

What darkness can anyone find that was in Paine’s blueprint for this country? Can you find any? Gratitude to the inventor means more than words. It means action that would culminate in the application of inventor Thomas Paine’s principles that were provably morally correct. A revolution is not a rebellion; these two are geometrically and consequentially different. From Galileo’s physical demonstrations of the Copernican/Keplerian planetary arrangement, we learn that Earth is a planet that spirals around the sun in an elliptical-helical orbit, climbing against gravity and never leaving that source of light. The spiralling is, in its cycle, a revolution, and the consequence is not only light but also life; a social revolution would climb toward both. By contrast, a rebellion is a destructive social movement that may produce death or removal of persons or organizations, replacing some actors with other actors; its consequences are events of a type that includes coup d’état and/or insurrection. It solves nothing. It is a zig-zag kind of motion not climbing to light but yielding the darkness in continuing loss of liberty.

What is the liberty at which Paine’s revolution has been aimed? In the absence of full development of this subtopic, we can provisionally define liberty as the free exercise of property rights. Because you own your life as a natural right and have a natural right to liberty, no external source is required for these rights. Naturally, you also have a right to what you produce, including your ideas, and the non-intellectual productions of others that you acquire ethically by contract. There is no protection for these rights until there has been a full revolution. The revolution spirals away from any darkness of the founding to embrace the light in Paine’s invention of a nation. The revolution requires construction not destruction.

These are again “times that try men’s souls”, new times and dark times, yet times that have been nurtured by a supreme exemplar of converting inner passions to patriotic action.(33) Can you sense the ongoing presence of Paine in the United States? In the days after the 9/11 terrorist attack on the USA, I personally heard in the U.S. media – and even in advertising – this passage from Paine’s Crisis Papers but without crediting him: “THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman”. Thomas Paine did not stop at inventing the United States but left us guidance toward completing the invention. Action now to fortify and finish his work can pay down the price of the freedom that he bequeathed us.

Footnotes: 1. Albert DiCanzio, (2), a comprehensive scientific biography of Galileo in the English language. 2. Cf. Manfred Weidhorn, The Person of the Millenium: The Unique Impact of Galileo on World History (iUniverse, 2005). See also DiCanzio, Albert, “Book review of The Person of the Millennium” (Perspectives Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation. 59.2, June 2007), 155. 3. Thomas Paine, (7), 157-158, 160. 4. William M. Van der Weyde, (1) Vol. 1, vii-viii 5. For a more complete in-context discussion of Paine’s inventiveness and the background of his invention of the United States, see this forthcoming book, which I highly recommend to this audience: Rad Freeman, Saving Our Country: by Implementing The American Revolution in Full (as far as I have determined, this author is the first to tie modern economic science to the American Revolution as its completion). However, the responsibility for observing and choosing examples, mentioned here, of these phenomena in Paine’s writing is mine. 6. Henry Grattan Tyrrell, History of Bridge Engineering (University of California Libraries, 1911) 7. “The idea and construction of this arch is taken from the figure of a spider’s circular web, of which it resembles a section, and from a conviction that when nature empowered this insect to make a web she also instructed her in the strongest mechanical method of constructing it.” (Specification of Thomas Paine, (9), Vol. 5, p. 3, as quoted in Rad Freeman, Saving Our Country: by Implementing the American Revolution in Full, forthcoming, Act IV). Here it is noted that Paine had obtained a patent from George Hanover III in 1788 for his method of constructing such span-increasing arches. It was a milestone in bridge technology arriving two centuries after Andrea Palladino’s invention of the truss. (Linton Grinter, Theory of Modern Steel Structures, NY: MacMillan, 1942, 7.) 8. Thomas Paine, (6), 6-8 9. There is no question that Paine regarded the American Revolution as incomplete. “The Revolution can only be said to be complete, when we shall have freed ourselves, no less from the influence of foreign prejudices than from the fetters of foreign power (Paine, Thomas, Rights of Man, (in 9, orig. pub. 1791-2, vol. 4, Society for Political Inquiries, p. 312). In addition, Paine enumerated in Rights of Man, part ii, (vol. 5 in Van der Wyde) a litany of unmet conditions for a country to boast of its constitution and its government. 10. Albert G. DiCanzio, (3) 11. Nikola Tesla, (8), 177. 12. Ibid. Emphasis supplied by the present writer. 13. Ibid. 178, 182, 189. 14. Thomas J. DiLorenzo, (4), 64-65. 15. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, (in (9), orig. pub. 1791-2), vol. vi, pp. 226 16. Ibid. 17. I credit and applaud Maurice Finocchiaro for this discovery and revelation about”Two World Systems” and the introduction and definition of the terms “open-minded”, “fair-minded”, and “rational-minded” that I first found on 27 May 2010 in Finocchiaro, Defending Copernicus and Galileo: Critical Reasoning in the Two Affairs (Springer, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 280, 2010). 18. Julian Boyd, The Declaration of Independence; the Evolution of the Text (The Library of Congress, 1943). 19. Moncure Daniel Conway, ed., (1) vol. 1, pp. 161, 166. 20. I credit the founders of the Madeira Beach library for placing in the path of my childhood curiosity literature on Paine and (separately) the Declaration of Independence during an otherwise boring summer vacation from school; later, Andrew J. Galambos of the Liberal Institute of Natural Science and Technology who in a personal conversation made me aware of Franklin’s intellectual intimacy with Paine and identified one of those three native-American scientific discoverers (of chemical potential in thermodynamics and foundations of statistical mechanics), Josiah Willard Gibbs. The other two native-American scientific discoverers are Franklin and Adrian Bejan. 21. Cf. Elizabeth Picciani, “A Transcription, History, and Analysis of the Pennsylvania Declaration of Rights and Constitution of 1776”. According to this researcher, there were at least six authors including Franklin, whose role was “more passive” yet whose writing was at least consistent with the philosophical principles that had been expressed by Thomas Paine. 22. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens adopted by the National Assembly of France “is generally attributed to Paine, with whom Condorcet and Pierre Dumont may have collaborated … Much of its political philosophy had appeared in the American Declaration of Independence.” (9), p. 144 The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens adopted by the National Assembly of France “is generally attributed to Paine, with whom Condorcet and Pierre Dumont may have collaborated … Much of its political philosophy had appeared in the American Declaration of Independence.” (9), p. 144 23. Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (Signet, 1967), 10. Why this definition? It is the simplest available, hence, recalling Occam’s razor and Paine’s above-quoted preference “the more simple any thing the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered”, it would likely have been Paine’s choice. 24. Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice. 25. For these insightful words that assisted me in the realization that Paine’s contribution to the embryonic development of capitalism in the USA occurred despite that term having been unknown to Paine, and for his review of certain early drafts of this essay, a review that implies neither his endorsement nor his disendorsement of the finished product, I thank Gary Berton of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association. 26. Elizabeth Anderson, ‘Agrarian Justice’ and the Origins of Social Insurance, oxfordscholarship.com. 27. Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice, op. cit. (10) 28. Paine has written of acts that include violating an oath of office “When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime” in Age of Reason, (NY, Peter Eckler), 6. 29. “But tender laws, of any kind, operate to destroy morality, and to dissolve, by the pretense of law, what ought to be the principle of law to support, reciprocal justice between man and man: and the punishment of a member who should move for such a law ought to be death.” Thomas Paine, “Dissertations on Government; the Affairs of the Bank; and Paper Money” in William M. Van der Weyde, (9) Vol. IV, p. 299. 30. Albert DiCanzio, (3). The phrase “free exercise of natural rights” is attributable to Rad Freeman (5). 31. Rad Freeman, (5). 32. Thomas Paine, (7), 231. 33. Here I refer, of course, to Thomas Paine, the “supreme exemplar”. A more recent call to restoring the nation he intended came from US President Ronald Reagan in these words: “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.”

REFERENCES

  1. Conway, Moncure Daniel, ed. The Writings of Thomas Paine (orig. pub. NY: Burt Franklin, 1902)
  2. DiCanzio, Albert G., Galileo: His Science and His Significance for the Future of Man (Dover, NH: ADASI, 1996)
  3. DiCanzio, Albert G., Organizational Dynamics and Decision Strategy in the Controversy about Galileo Galilei (UMI Proquest, Diss., 2008)
  4. DiLorenzo, Thomas J. How Capitalism Saved America (NY, Three Rivers Press, 2004)
  5. Freeman, Rad. Saving Our Country: by Implementing the American Revolution in Full, forthcoming.
  6. Paine, Thomas, Common Sense (in (9) orig. pub. 1776) vol. ii
  7. Paine, Thomas, Rights of Man, (in [9], orig. pub. 1791-2), vol. vi-vii
  8. Tesla, Nikola. The Problem of Increasing Human Energy (Whitefish, MN: Kessinger, 1900)
  9. Van der Weyde, William M., ed. The Life and Works of Thomas Paine (New Rochelle, NY: Thomas Paine National Historical Assn, 1925)
  10. Paine, Thomas, Agrarian Justice (in (9) 1797, orig. pub. 1776) vol. x.