When Thomas Paine is commemorated, he is most often remembered in a fixed place and time, and as the author of Common Sense. With this 47-page pamphlet, written in plain language, Paine helped shift the opinion of most of the inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies, contributing to the emergence of a new political entity: “the free and independent states of America,” as he famously wrote. (Eric Foner, “Common Sense Addressed to the Inhabitants of
America,” Thomas Paine Complete Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), 54.) This gesture of remembrance is not false. But it is incomplete and raises a few central questions. What does it mean to commemorate a text that was written not to be preserved, but to be activated? How do we recall a voice whose power lies precisely in its circulation, its instability, its capacity to pass from body to body, rather than in its fixation as an object or an authorial figure? And more broadly, what kind of political thinking do we produce when we freeze such texts into monuments, instead of allowing them to continue operating as devices of collective reasoning?

Paine was monumentalized, for instance, in the exhibition “One Life: Thomas Paine, The Radical Founding Father,” held at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from August to November 2009. As the museum stated on its website at the time, “The One Life Gallery within the museum is devoted to the exploration of the life of one individual.” The framing was explicit: one life, one trajectory, one figure to be understood, enclosed, and presented. Paine’s pamphlets appeared behind glass, carefully displayed, protected and isolated from touch.

This is, of course, how museums operate. But vitrines do more than preserve objects: they also decide how those objects are allowed to survive. Under glass, Common Sense—the text that made Paine famous far beyond the borders of North America—is transformed into a founding artifact.

It becomes a relic of political clarity, a text that would have “spoken for itself” once and for all, in 1776. The pamphlet no longer circulates; it rests. It no longer acts; it testifies.

Still, Common Sense was never meant to settle. Paine wrote a text designed to move. He chose plain, easily accessible language not out of stylistic modesty, but because such a language could travel. Common Sense was meant to be passed from hand to hand, read aloud in taverns, discussed in public, repeated without losing its force.

Common Sense is a practice: a practice of reading, of speaking, and of reasoning together. Its effectiveness does not lie only in what it says, but in what it asks the reader to do. This is where my own practice of “research-creation” (in French-speaking universities) or “research by practice” meets Paine’s gesture. As Louis Claude Paquin defines it, research-creation includes “all research processes and approaches that promote creation and aim to produce new aesthetic, theoretical, methodological, epistemological or technical knowledge.” (Louis-Claude Paquin, “Méthodologie de la recherche-création”)

Common Sense is precisely such a process because it is not simply a text we inherit. It is an active demand placed on those who read it. Some are unable to read Paine—not because they lack intelligence, but because Paine requires a very particular disposition of mind: a willingness to suspend habit, to enter a scene, and to allow one’s own reasoning to be put to work.

THE VISCERAL PAINE

This is where my reflection begins. Not with Paine as an author, but with the phenomenology of his reader. Common Sense demands participation. It does not instruct the reader from above; it places them inside a scene and asks them to feel their way through.

This is where imagination enters the political field, not as fantasy, but as a mode of access. Paine knows that distance dulls judgment—that injustice, when it happens elsewhere, remains abstract. So, Common Sense begins by attacking geographical and emotional detachment. Imagination is not an escape from reality; it is the very means by which reality becomes intolerable. As Paine writes:

It is the good fortune of many to live distant from the scene of sorrow; the evil is not sufficiently brought to their doors to make them feel the precariousness with which all American property is possessed. But let our imaginations transport us for a few moments to Boston; that seat of wretchedness will teach us wisdom, and instruct us for ever to renounce a power in whom we can have no trust. (Foner, Collected Writings, 26)

What Paine does here is crucial. He does not argue first. He transports by displacing the reader. He performs a forced relocation of perception. Boston is not introduced as information, but as an experiential threshold. And then the scene tightens:

The inhabitants of that unfortunate city, who but a few months ago were in ease and affluence, have now no other alternative than to stay and starve, or turn and beg. (Foner, Collected Writings, 26)

The choice is not ideological; it is physiological. Stay and starve. Leave and beg. No neutral position remains. Paine continues:

Endangered by the fire of their friends if they continue within the city, and plundered by the soldiery if they leave it. (Foner, Collected Writings, 26)

Here, imagination does not merely visualize; it activates something closer to what we might now call interoception—an awareness of the body’s internal signals. (Franck Luerweg, “Sentir son corps de l’intérieur,” Cerveau & Psycho, 2022/9 N° 147, (2022), 74-78. CAIRN.INFO.) The reader is not asked to sympathize from afar, but to feel the pressure of domination in the body. Hunger. Fear. Exposure. Constraint. The political becomes visceral. This is also why reading Common Sense defies neutrality. What matters is that the reader accepts the experience Paine constructs. The text works only if the reader consents to be affected. In this sense, Common Sense is not written to be interpreted, but to be acted upon. Execution here should be understood literally. The text has a performative force and sets in motion a sequence of operations. First, it destabilizes distance. Then it saturates perception. Only then does reasoning unfold. Logic, for instance, as we’ve seen with this quote about Boston, follows sensation, not the other way around.

This is why Common Sense travels so well across contexts, voices, and centuries. Through interoception, Common Sense allows us to connect to the inhabitants of any unfortunate city or territory. This brings us to a crucial shift: Paine’s voice is never entirely his own. Although Common Sense bears his name, the text constantly dissolves the figure of the author. The “I” retreats. The voice opens. The reader is repeatedly addressed as a thinking agent, not as a follower. Paine writes in such a way that his words always seem on the verge of being spoken by someone else. This is why the pamphlet circulated orally; why it moved through taverns, assemblies, and private homes; why it was read aloud by people who did not consider themselves intellectuals. The text does not require mastery; it bestows it.

In this sense, Paine can be understood as a protosystem rather than a sovereign author. (Sovereign authorship defines a deep understanding of who the
author’s audience is.) By calling Paine a “proto-system,” I mean that he goes beyond merely expressing ideas; he constructs a technical and cognitive arrangement that enables others to think and act politically. Common Sense works less as a finished argument than as an interface: it does not transmit knowledge from author to reader, it produces political competence in the act of reading itself.

In Bernard Stiegler’s terms, quoted by French philosopher Anne Alombert, such a text functions as a technical milieu rather than a message. (Anne Alombert, Penser avec Bernard Stiegler (Paris, PUF, 2025) 220, 222.) Writing is not neutral; it exteriorizes memory, judgment, and imagination, shaping how individuals and collectives come to think. Common Sense operates precisely at this level: it distributes cognition, externalizes judgment, and transforms reading into a collective operation. The reader is not positioned as an interpreter of meaning, but as an agent activated by a device that organizes attention, imagination, and decision. The voice of Common Sense is therefore not singular but distributed. What speaks is not a man, but a system of intelligibility set in motion. The reader is not positioned as an interpreter of meaning, but as an agent activated by a device that organizes attention, imagination, and decision.

Seen from this angle, Common Sense anticipates something uncannily contemporary; a mode of writing that separates intention from effect; a text whose power lies not in what the author meant, but in what the text enables others to do. This is precisely where the connection with contemporary reflections on algorithmic writing begins to appear. Not because Paine was a machine, of course, but because he understood something essential. Authorship can be strategically diluted in order to amplify impact.

Common Sense is a text that does not settle but circulates; that does not preach from above but activates readers from within; that does not command assent but invites participation. We have come to understand Paine not simply as an author who speaks, but as an operator who sets inference in motion. This insight may be deepened by connecting it to a theoretical framework that, at first glance, might seem far from Paine’s world: the contemporary debate on authorship in the age of artificial intelligence.

Expanding this meditation on Common Sense with German scholar Hannes Bajohr’s article “Writing at a Distance: Notes on Authorship and Artificial Intelligence” may seem unconventional, yet it illuminates an essential structure in Common Sense: Paine indeed writes as a proto-system, not as a sovereign subject. (Hannes Bajohr, “Writing at a Distance: Notes on Authorship and Artificial Intelligence.” German Studies Review 47.2 (2024), 315-337. In political theory, a sovereign subject describes an anti-government person or group who share common beliefs.)

According to Bajohr, the advent of large language models (Chat GPT, for instance) challenges longstanding assumptions about what writing is, and who or what can be said to “author” a text. As these models become increasingly capable of producing writing that is, in some cases, indistinguishable from humanwritten text, the very notion of where writing comes from and who wrote it comes into question. The boundary between human and machine agents producing text becomes blurred, and with it, the traditional author’s function becomes unstable. For Bajohr, this crisis is not simply about machines “being authors.” Instead, it opens a space where authorship itself is distributed, where a text can no longer be neatly mapped onto a single individual’s intention. He proposes the idea of distributed authorship, a concept that recognizes a network of actors (human and nonhuman) participating in text production, while acknowledging that this network both extends and challenges classical concepts of authorship. As Paine wrote in the introduction of Common Sense:

Who the Author of this Publication is, is wholly unnecessary to the Public, as the Object for Attention is the Doctrine itself, not the Man. (Pierre Bayard, Demain est écrit (Minuit, Paradoxe, Paris 2005))

This vehicle of thought as a distributed authorship helps us see Common Sense not merely as the product of one revolutionary subject, but as a system of effects, operations, and activations that exceed the author’s intention. Paine’s pamphlet refutes the romantic ideal of the solitary genius. Its life has never resided in the person of Paine, but in the circulation of effects it triggers. It is easier, in this light, to see Paine not as a singular voice but as a proto-system: a text designed to distribute agency rather than concentrate it.

Bajohr’s paper introduces another concept useful here: causal authorship, which measures the distance between agent and text. In the context of writing with artificial agents, this distance can be vast: the human programmer, the model’s training data, and the user’s prompt all contribute to the final output. Yet even in that highly mediated context, authorship is not eliminated but decentered: shared among multiple influences. Similarly, Common Sense was designed to be read, heard, performed, repeated, simplified, and recomposed.

Paine’s role was not to author meaning as an intention sealed behind his signature, but to construct a textual environment where meaning could be generated by the reader. The result: Common Sense became something like an early analog of a distributed text whose influence and effect did not remain within the limits of its original publication, but propagated through countless acts of reading, rewriting, speaking, and quoting.

In the future imagined by Bajohr and already emerging in everyday acts of reading, the first question might be not “Who wrote this?” but “What does this text do to me, to us?” In this light, Paine’s pamphlet becomes less a singular expression and more a textual apparatus: an early form of distributed authorship before computers, algorithms, or language models existed. To frame it differently: rather than writing a pamphlet that would be “owned” by him as an author, Paine wrote a generative device—a piece of writing whose power did not reside within its origin but in its capacity to generate action, judgment, and collective reasoning across a population.

If Paine’s voice was never meant to be fixed, why should we exhibit him as if it were? The challenge of a future-oriented exhibition is not to preserve Paine, but to let him continue. Yet this future is not merely hypothetical. Following French Literature Professor Pierre Bayard’s reflections in Demain est Écrit , where the future is understood as operating retroactively on the present, such a future may already have taken place.

Imagine a gallery where Common Sense is not displayed behind glass, but performed, circulated, and interacted with. Where visitors are invited not to observe, but to participate by reading, responding, debating, and improvising the text in real time. In such a configuration, Paine is no longer a relic. He becomes a living interface, a proto-system of distributed thought. Visitors act as co-producers of the experience; the text’s energy circulates, echoes, and multiplies. Each reading becomes a node in a network of cognition, a point where political imagination is exercised and extended.

As Bayard suggests, the future can function as an interpretative operator, reorganizing the meaning of past events. Paine survives not as an icon, but as an active, distributed force still capable of moving, still capable of performing revolution.

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Paine’s May 8, 1776 Forester Letter

Edited with Commentary by Richard Briles Moriarty

Common Sense moved many towards declaring independence from Britain. But the Pennsylvania Assembly was controlled by those advocating continued dependence on Britain. To neutralize demands to restructure, through a Convention, how Pennsylvania was governed, the Assembly scheduled and created new seats to be chosen in a May 1, 1776 election. A sthe election approached, it was expected to result in a majority supporting independence. Surprising everyone, the “dependent faction” prevailed, threatening to doom the independence movement. Paine and other radicals sought to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Through a May 8, 1776 “Forester” letter, Paine argued that the Assembly itself was illegitimate. Excoriating Quakers who supported reconciliation for travelling “to the summit of inconsistency” so rapidly “as to acquire autumnal ripeness by the first of May,” he warned that their “rotting time” approached. Broadening his assault to the entire “dependent faction,” Paine sought to expose “inconsistency, partiality, and injustice” of that faction, and “like an honest man, who courts no favor, to shew to them the dangerous ground they stand upon” as reflected in the “probable consequences of the late election.”

Paine declared all Assembly members must “take an oath of allegiance to serve the same King against whom this province, with themselves at the head thereof, are at war.” Hypocrisy, Paine roared, never rose “to such a pitch as this!”

By pretending moderation, “we are running into the most damnable sins. It is now the duty of every man from the pulpit and from the press, in his family and in the street to cry out against it. Good God! Have we no remembrance of duty left to the King of Heaven! No conscientious awe to restrain this sacrifice of sacred things? Is this our chartered privilege? This our boasted constitution, that we can sin and feel it not?” Yet that “sin lies not” with the “people” but with “the fountain head” and the delusions it has imposed on others.” The “guilt centers in a few, and flows from the same source, ”that failed to protect Pennsylvania in recent frontier conflicts.

While those favoring independence “had to sustain the loss of those good citizens who are ”fighting in Canada, theTories“ by never stirring out, remain at home to take the advantage of elections” and “Germans, of property, zealots in the cause of freedom, were likewise excluded for nonallegiance.” Yet “the tory non-conformists, that is, those who are advertised as enemies to their country, were admitted to vote on the other side” which is a “strange contradiction indeed!” Adding in Quakers who were “duped by the meanest of all passions, religious spleen,” the “combined impact allowed the” proprietary dependants to support the British and Proprietary power against the public. Despite “having many of our votes rejected, others disqualified for non-allegiance, with the great loss sustained by absentees, the maneuver of shutting up the doors between seven and eight o’clock, and circulating the report of adjourning and finishing the next morning, by which, several were deceived,” the candidates favoring independence did surprisingly well.

Those favoring independence “have stood the experiment of the election, for the sake of knowing the men who were against us. “Alas, what are they!”

What Were the Forester Letters?

In February 1776, a month after Common Sense was published, Congress deep-sixed a draft Committee Report that emphasized how deeply Congress desired reconciliation with Britain because that draft contains hints that independence was an alternate option. While some colonial legislatures cautiously loosened their instructions to Congressional delegates to allow them to consider independence options, Pennsylvania, New York and other colonies persisted in instructing their delegates to actively resist any such efforts. With William Smith, writing as “Cato” in Pennsylvania newspapers, arguing forcefully for reconciliation, the fervor created by Common Sense was insufficient. Paine remained silent as Smith’s published letters piled up. He finally let loose, from March 28, 1776 on, with his Forester letters. Before the May 1 election, Paine focused on refuting arguments made by Smith. After that disastrous election, he did not just shift gears. Paine drove a new vehicle aimed at eliminating the Assembly and transforming Pennsylvania’s government into one controlled by radicals and strongly supporting independence. Without the efforts of Paine and other radicals, July 4 would likely now be just another date on the calendar.

The post Common Sense Was Not Enough appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

Common Sense, published in January 1776, is well known for its strong advocacy of independence from Britain. Less known, but of vital importance, is Paine’s insistence that it is essential to create republics in which the people as a whole—not any one person— are sovereign. Ridiculing the unwritten English “Constitution” that all American factions then cherished as a repository of their rights, Paine asserted that democratic government is properly created only through written constitutions based on the equality of all people and framed by and for the people themselves and for their happiness and freedom. He affirmed in Common Sense that “in free countries the law ought to be King.”

Paine envisioned a single legislative chamber, subject to frequent direct elections by the people, that controlled any executive and judiciary departments. He stressed the urgency of establishing a “Charter” immediately, for a “continental form of government…while we have it in our power.”

Beyond prescribing in detail the elements of a future democratic America governed by a written Constitution, Paine made the case in Common Sense for immediate and unified action by the colonists to fight for their independence from Britain, including these eight key messages.

1. Not only should every American care about the assault on their natural rights, but the cause of America is “the cause of all mankind.” Paine stressed that the choices made by Americans in 1776 would affect all who come after them, repeatedly emphasizing the urgency of action. He appealed to their idealism, offering a thought exercise in which people could meet sequestered in a “state of natural liberty” and shape a society starting from fresh principles in which all would remain “perfectly just toeach other.”
2. Government is necessary because people are not always good. To be free, they therefore need security, especially protection from others. But, Paine pointed out, government can cause intolerable suffering as evidenced by the excesses of monarchy and all systems of hereditary succession. All people are equal, and no one has the right to set himself up as a monarch and presume that his descendants will be worthy of leadership. Monarchs are isolated from, and don’t really know the interests of the people. If they are minors, or aged, they can easily be manipulated by those around them. Paine drew on the lessons of history to support his argument and cited the Bible’s rejection of monarchy.
3. Paine asserted that Britain’s claim ofproviding protection for America served only Britain’s interests. Paine believed America was most interested in trade and that, as long as America remained a colony of Britain, it would be drawn into European wars. Those born in America were not enemies of France and Spain and an independent America would beat peace with France and Spain.
4. Reconciliation with Britain was not possible; there must be a final separation. It was absurd for an island to govern a continent that was three or four thousand miles distant.
5. As an independent nation, Paine believed, the American continent could be “the glory of the earth.” He saw it as the“asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe. ”Significantly, Paine called for religious tolerance and diversity of religious opinions.
6. For Paine, the events of April 1775 (the battles in Lexington and Concord) and other “barbarous” actions of Britain further demonstrated the impossibility of reconciliation. Reconciliation would only lead to more revolt later and to dissension among the colonies that were beginning to unite behind a continental government—colonies that were strong in numbers and natural resources. The challenge of fighting for America’s independence should not be left to future generations.
7. In Common Sense, Paine explicitly called for a “declaration of independence.” He asserted that assistance to the American cause from other countries such as France and Spain would come only if America pursued independence rather than reconciliation.
8. Paine saw the potential for America to reopen trade and reconciliation with Britain on different terms, once independence was achieved. He ended Common Sense with an inspiringcall for all to join together as good citizens and friends.

The post How Thomas Paine Made the Case for an Independent and Democratic America appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

General Washington of the Continental Army had no opinion about achieving independence. Most people were advocating reconciliation, to make peace, make a deal and carry on, with Britain still in charge of the American people: men like Benjamin Rush and John Dickinson, praised by history as “Founders,” led the movement for reconciling.

Following the language of Common Sense, 96 local and state Declarations ofIndependence were written, repeating the language of Common Sense, leading to the national declaration, and largely incorporating Paine’s ideals, as well as the steps needed to follow these ideals.

This was the beginning of the Age of Democratic Revolutions, and the concept of democracy based on equality.

When the first edition of Common Sense appeared in colonial bookshops, the work was unsigned, and its author remained a mystery to many readers. It became an instant bestseller.

Robert Bell, the first printer of Common Sense refused to allow Paine to make additions when it came time for subsequent printings, but Paine still had a lot to say.

Another printshop, owned by William and Thomas Bradford, stepped in, put Paine’s name on the cover, and soon, updated new editions poured off their presses.

From a Thomas Paine letter to Henry Laurens, January 14, 1779:

“I think the importance of that pamphlet was such that if it had not appeared, and at the exact time it did, the Congress would not now be sitting where they are (representing independent states). The light with which that performance threw upon the subject gave a turn to the politics of America which enabled her to stand her ground. Independence, followed in six months after it, although, before it was published, it was a dangerous doctrine to speak of…

In order to accommodate that pamphlet to every man’s purchase and to do honor to the cause, I gave up the profits I was justly entitled to… I gave permission to the printers in other parts of this State (Pennsylvania) to print it on their own account. I believe the number of copies printed and sold in America was not short of 150,000 – and is the greatest sale that any performance ever had since the use of letters..”

The post The Context of Common Sense: Analyzing Paine’s Words appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

By Gary Berton 

Part Two of Two Parts – See part one here.

Thomas Paine’s first principles built the structure of democracy. The mechanisms central to Paine’s political theories are rooted in his ideology of first principles. The basic foundation of these principles is equality, and as a direct result, justice. If equality is practiced, then people share equal justice. 

“Mankind being originally equals in the order of creation,” he wrote in Common Sense, “the equality could only be destroyed by some subsequent circumstance.” 

“When a people agree to form themselves into a republic (for the word REPUBLIC means the PUBLIC GOOD, or the good of the whole, in contradistinction to the despotic form, which makes the good of the sovereign, or of one man, the only object of the government) when, I say, they agree to do this, it is to be understood, that they mutually resolve and pledge themselves to each other, rich and poor alike, to support and maintain this rule of equal justice among them. They therefore renounce not only the despotic form, but the despotic principle, as well of governing as of being governed by mere Will and Power, and substitute in its place a government of justice.” (Dissertations on Government, 1786) 

The structure of his democratic theory is like a house: the foundation of that house is equality and justice; everything else rests upon it. If this principle is compromised and weakened, the whole structure is vulnerable to corruption and oppression.

Inherent in the equality/justice principle are rights. both natural and civil — civil rights arising from natural rights. Natural rights are inherent and received upon birth, without exception. Defending these rights is the object of democratic government. 

Resting on this foundation of rights are four support pillars constructing the structure of democracy. (1) Rejection of precedent, (2) No one should live worse than in the state of nature. (3) Recognition of the natural sociability of humanity. (4) Enlightenment and reason solve problems. A few thoughts on each:

1. Rejection of precedent 

Precedent got us into the problems of government. They represent the failures to ensure equality and justice. Precedent is the “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution; it’s the way things were always done, which is the excuse to maintain “tradition.” Precedent is the wall preventing people from building the democratic structures of a better world, Precedent reinforces structures that promote elitism, privilege, and injustice. 

2 No one should live worse than in the state of nature. 

If civilization has progressed, why are masses of the people worse off than if they lived in small groups in nature? That is not progress. The wellbeing of every person is what democracy insists upon. If many or most people live worse off than as small groups in nature, civilization is not progressing; it’s regressing. Why is another discussion for another day. 

3. Recognize the natural sociability of humanity. 

Humans evolved as social animals. The human mind, Paine wrote, is “unfitted for perpetual solitude.” That natural sociability is the basis of democracy. Building upon it is fundamental to democracy.

4. Enlightenment and reason solve problems 

Knowing and using the real world around us must be the basis for knowledge, and applying that knowledge to solve problems. Anything else is invented to manipulate and confuse the people in their decision-making, which is anti-democratic. 

Atop the pillars is a roof protecting the structure of government from outside elements. The roof consists of constitutions with democratic structures and laws. 

Building the opposite structure is the bizarro world of Edmund Burke, whose political theory is oligarchy. His foundation is order, not equality. Burke’s pillars are “defending historical precedent,” following “tradition,” (not the Enlightenment ideals Paine advocated). Burke sought continuity, not change for the better. Burke saw humanity as a collection of “disconnected individuals.” His roof atop government is prescriptive for elite rule, not democratic order, government by the people. 

Paine challenged and changed the entire philosophical structure of government, not just for the people in the 18th century, but for everyone in the world today.

The post Thomas Paine: Founder of Modern Democracy: Part 2  appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

By Fayette Arnold

“Paine Was The Voice Of The Revolution And Was An Independent Thinker On The Level Of Voltaire And Goethe”.

From Thomas Paine Apostle of Freedom By Jack Fruchman Jr. – Paine Scholar

Paine Is An Impressive Figure As He Took A Tax Rebellion And Transformed It Into A Revolution And Independence. This is What Neither Side Expected Or Wanted.

Fayette Arnold, Three St. Croix Lofts Drive, Unit 104, St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin 5402, CHANGING THE 18TH CENTURIES VIEW OF LIFE

“In My Judgment, Thomas Paine Was the Best Political Writer That Ever Lived. What He Wrote Was Pure Nature, And His Soul And His Pen Went Together. Ceremony, Pageantry, And All the Paraphernalia Of Power Had No Effect Upon Him. He Examined Into The Why And Wherefore Of Things. He Was Perfectly Radical In His Mode of Thought. Nothing Short Of Bedrock Satisfied Him”1.

Robert G. Ingersoll

Introduction

Despite Thomas Paine’s numerous contributions to America and the world, his most significant accomplishment has escaped the attention of scholars as well as students of history. There is an important and vital area of his thought and creativity, completely neglected, which illuminates Paine’s unique role in American and World History. One of many factors that make Thomas Paine a great historical figure and force is his transformation of Lockean Philosophy. In fact, he significantly changed the structure and meaning of Locke’s thought system. In modifying the public’s understanding of Locke, Paine altered the character and destiny of American and World History. This may be Paine’s greatest contribution to mankind as well as the seminal aspect of his intellectual activities that makes him one of the world’s most prominent and original thinkers.

Thomas Paine’s ideas and efforts inspired and consolidated the American Revolution. He provided the colonists with the fuel to fire their rebellion. His majestic phrases rang through the colonies and united Americans in a common cause. Paine’s eloquence in speech and the power of his pen imparted the ideals and courage needed for the founding of a new nation. In his efforts to unite and direct the colonists, Paine created what may have been one of his greatest phrases – The United State of America.

The American concepts of freedom, equality, and human rights, which came from the mind and pen of Thomas Paine, set the 18th century world ablaze. He gave Americans and Europeans the rational, inspiration, and confidence to reject outmoded social and political structures of the past and the courage to create new ones that would provide a better future for mankind. Men and women were longing for a social order where there was justice as well as the ability to achieve their human potential.

Democracy would provide the new vehicle for reaching age old aspirations. A modification of the philosophy of John Locke would be a stepping stone to that brighter future. Thomas Paine went far beyond Locke’s thinking and created a new intellectual architecture and world view. Paine broke the bonds of the 18th centuries’ intellectual framework, philosophical, social and political. He shattered the structure that John Locke’s thinking was contained within and which his ideas supported. America is not founded on the ideas of John Locke per se, but upon the transformation of his concepts by Thomas Paine. In altering Locke, Paine gave his ideas meanings that John Locke would not have recognized or accepted.

Paine’s ideas and concepts about freedom, equality and independence were new and unique. They went well beyond the opinions embraced by Europeans and colonial Americans. For example, according to John Locke man was free, equal an independent in the state of nature, but gave up that status when he accepted the “Social Compact” and joined society. In Locke’s own words, “But though men when they enter society give up the equality, liberty and executive power they had in the state of nature into the hands of society… yet it being only with the intention in everyone to preserve himself, his liberty and property”.2 Locke apparently sees no conflict between individuals giving up equality, liberty, and executive power over self and their likely status and treatment within an autocratic society. His “Social Compact” takes away from the individual the very ideals Locke appears to be espousing. In the mind of Thomas Paine, men were free, equal and independent within society. This was a radical notion and a threat to the political and social structure of the 18th century world. The consequences of this shift in thinking were enormous as it fundamentally changed a world view and value system that Europeans had revered for centuries.

According to Locke’s conception of man and society, human beings are not free, equal or independent because they have accepted a “Social Compact”. Locke finds a variety of reasons for condoning inequality and injustice as well as a lack of freedom and independence within the social and political orders. He claims that the invention of money created conditions whereby men give their “consent” and “agree” that the earth’s possessions should be “disproportionate” and “unequal”. Further, Locke proclaims that the unequal conditions of wealth created by money operate outside the “bounds of society” as well as the “Compact”. Although he gives many reasons for human inequality, Locke still states that, “All men by nature are equal. I cannot propose to understand all sorts of equality. Age or virtue may give men a just precedence. Excellency of parts and merit may place others above the common level. Birth may subject some, and alliance or benefits others…”3 It is obvious, except to Locke, that the ideals he professes do not apply in the social and political atmosphere existing in England. Locke is consistently inconsistent in his thinking and cannot logically reconcile his philosophy with the world of reality.

Locke fails to perceive the conflict between his abstract ideals and the reasons he give for their circumvention in the concrete world. In addition, he does not understand that most of the inequality and injustice existing in his day was due to the structure of society and government which favored the few and handicapped the many. His explanation of the reasons for differences in status and wealth within society ignores the impact of social and political arrangements that create inequity and limited opportunity for the majority of the population. Locke’s writings also lack political and social insights that could be utilized to create programs to alleviate injustice and inequity resulting from England’s feudal and autocratic traditions. Of course, his aims were not egalitarian but elitist.

John Locke does not utilize the term republic or republican in his writings, but frequently employs the word commonwealth which he defines as a civilized community. In fact, Locke in his “Essay Concerning Civil Government” uses the word commonwealth over 75 times. Further, the term democracy is only mentioned once and that is for the purpose of defining commonwealth as not meaning democracy. Locke’s philosophy is clearly concerned with the formation of a commonwealth rather than the creation of a republic. Locke affirms this by saying, “By commonwealth, I must be understood all along to mean, not a democracy, or form of government, but an independent community which the Latins signify by the word civitas, to which the word which best answers in our language is commonwealth, and most properly expresses such a society of men”4. Locke’s philosophy is focused on building a civilized society that would avoid the political and social strife that existed in his era. His goal was not to create a government based upon democratic values, but to establish a refined, rational, well mannered, and harmonious social order founded upon a traditional belief in limited monarchy.

Interpreters of Locke’s philosophy have extracted his belief in republican principles from his use of certain words, especially terms like “freedom”, “equality”, and “executive power over self”, and his emphasis on laws being created, not by the king but by the legislature. Locke indicates that the legislature in making laws not only checks the power of the sovereign, it also “puts men out of the state of nature into that of commonwealth”. He believes that the legislature is the means by which men achieve the purpose or end results of their entering into society. The reason human beings accept social institutions are the “enjoyment of their properties in peace and safety”. Further, the “instrument” and “means” of fulfilling this aim are the “laws established in society (by the legislature)”.5

Traditional expositions of John Locke’s philosophy credit him with creating democratic ideas that were responsible for inspiring the American and French Revolutions. In fact, customary explanations of his ideology express the belief that the structure of the American state is predicated upon Locke’s political and social ideals. Conventional proponents of Lockean thought also indicate he embraced the opinion that society and the state are independent of each other. This interpretation of Locke is founded on the conviction that the social order is based upon natural law and commonly shared moral rights. From his notion of natural law, exponents of Locke deduce that he supported the precept that the state and society are separate entities. To Lockes’ interpreters, this implies the formation of a social order that is democratic in nature and which requires very little in the way of government.

However, a close inspection of John Locke’s philosophy reveals that the above points of view are invalid. It is impossible to associate Locke’s beliefs concerning the reasons for as well as the role of government with the theory of natural law. The political and social functions of government devised and implemented by the English Aristocracy and Monarchy are in conflict with the doctrine of natural and moral law. In fact, Locke’s “Democratic Ideals” are abrogated by his “Social Compact” and his belief in Autocratic government. Again, according to Locke, it is government (Laws enacted by the legislature) that takes man out of the state of nature. Only by abandoning the freedom, equality and independence men possessed in the state of nature can mankind live in harmony within society. Locke’s fundamental precepts and the society he is attempting to create are diametrically opposed. It is quite apparent that his social and political orders are not separate entities. In fact, they are one and the same due to his replacing natural law with political laws that are derived from a government ruled by the Nobility and Sovereign. In John Locke’s thought system, God’s law has been replaced by man’s law. This results in the creation of a state and society that are neither separate from one another or republican in nature.

Thomas Paine offered mankind an alternative to John Locke’s conflicting and illogical thought system. Paine rejected any philosophy advancing the idea that social and political equality is best achieved in a society ruled by Patricians and Monarchs. In contrast to Locke, Paine created a democratic belief system based upon popular sovereignty. He replaced a medieval view of the social and political orders with an outlook that was both Modern and Egalitarian. By presenting an approach to society and government that was based upon an acceptance of natural law as well as upon his understanding of God’s will for mankind, Paine handed the world a new and different philosophy as well as an expanded world view in which men would be equal, free and independent within the social and political orders. He not only gave old words and ideas new meanings but also greater dimensions and depth. Thomas Paine’s beliefs and not John Locke’s “Social Compact” became the legal and social foundation of American society. Our nation’s intellectual and spiritual character came directly from the mind of Thomas Paine.

THOMAS PAINE AND JOHN LOCKE RE-EXAMINED

Thomas Paine’s fundamental belief system as well as his views on the origin and purpose of government are strikingly different than John Locke’s. His intrinsic principles were based upon a belief in freedom, equality, human rights and security for all of mankind. Paine’s opinions with respect to the reasons for and the objectives of government were, in fact, contrary to those of John Locke. To quote Thomas Paine, “Here then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here is the design and end of government, viz. “freedom and security”.6 His belief in human freedom rested upon the foundation of equal rights. In his own words, “Why then not trace the rights of man, to the creation of man. The illuminating and divine principle of equal rights of man (for it had its origin from the maker of man), relates not only to the living individuals; but to generations of men succeeding each other. Every history of creation… agree in establishing one point, the unity of man; by which I mean that men are all of one degree and consequently that all men are born equal and with equal rights’.7 “His natural rights are the foundation of all his civil rights”.8

Thomas Paine summed up his political and social viewpoint by saying, “Men are born; an always continue, free and equal in respect to their rights. The end of all political association, is, the preservation of the natural an imprescriptible rights of man… 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 limit than those that are necessary to secure to every other man the free exercise of the same rights and these limits are determined by law”.9

Because men are born having equal rights and retain these rights within the social and political order, government according to Paine must be based upon the will of the people. To ensure their rights, citizens must be allowed to direct their own affairs. This belief in the consent of the governed presents a sharp contrast to John Locke’s philosophy in which government and society are based upon rule by monarchs and patricians. The objective of Locke’s social and political thinking is to protect those who have property and social status. Locke’s thought system certainly was not predicated on power to the people. His was an elitist conception of society. Dominate power in the social and political orders was shared by the king and aristocracy. In fact, the purpose of Locke’s writings were to confirm and justify existing conditions in English society and government, conditions that were inherited from a medieval world order and world view.

John Locke’s philosophy was founded upon exclusivity, selectivity as well as patrimony and not upon the universality and equality of mankind. Locke conceives of government as an institution that primarily serves and protects the noble and the few. Thus, government and the power structure that controls it are purposely designed to be undemocratic in nature. Paine believed that government should be constructed and operated so that it directed its efforts to serve the greater good of all citizens. Unlike John Locke, he did not feel that bloodline and property should determine one’s station and opportunities in life. Republican government is not based upon property and pedigree but on majority rule.

According to the philosopher Bertrand Russell, John Locke is “the most influential though by no means the most profound of philosophers”.10 Locke’s philosophy was “little more than a clarification and systematization of prevalent opinion in England”.11 “Even before the reformation theologians tended to believe in setting limits to kingly power”.12 “What Locke has to say about the state of nature and the law of nature, in the main, is not original, but a repetition of medieval scholastic doctrine”.13 Bertrand Russell states that his ideas can be traced back to the writings of “Saint Thomas Aquinas and Hugo Grotius”.14 John Locke in dealing with the concepts of liberty, human rights, and equality was looking to the past at ideals that he felt were already established. Thomas Paine by contrast was looking to the future at ideals that needed to be actualized.

Although John Locke’s thinking was affected by the Renaissance and Reformation, his ideas on government and society find their roots in Medieval Europe. To be more specific, Locke’s philosophy is derived from the thought structure of the medieval Catholic Church which was based upon a combination of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian revelation. The Schoolmen of the middle ages, who were exponents of Scholasticism, propounded arguments to challenge the theory of the divine right of kings in order to justify the Popes position as being superior to that of monarchs. Despite the fact that Locke rejected Scholasticism, his political and social outlook was rooted in this system of thought. The Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation as well as the Enlightenment should not be viewed as sharply divided eras, but as a gradual transition occurring during a period of over 1300 years. The various ages did react against one another, sometimes with great passion. However, even with their predilection for zealotry, like children rebelling against their parents, much of the parent remained in the child.

Notwithstanding the impact of the past upon Thomas Paine, his philosophy and belief system was not acquired from Scholasticism. Paine’s ideas and ideals were inspired by the Enlightenment and his Deist theological beliefs. He felt that God revealed himself to man through nature. Thus, reason and science were the means of approaching both truth and one’s creator. In brief, Thomas Paine’s philosophy came from the Modern world and not the Middle Ages. America’s world view and value system is derived from Rationalism rather than Scholasticism.

There are additional reasons for concluding that Thomas Paine’s philosophy was not acquired from John Locke. Professor Jack Fruchtman, Jr. in the introduction to his book, Thomas Paine Apostle of Freedom, quotes Paine as saying, “I never read John Locke, nor ever had the work in my hand”.15 Thomas Paine’s philosophy was created from his belief in human reason and his vision of God’s ongoing plan for humanity. It was not acquired from reading John Locke or being influenced by the medieval power struggles of the Christian Church. Paine is clearly a product of the Enlightenment; Locke a reflection of the Reformation, Renaissance and Middle Ages. Unfortunately, we have attributed our modern view of freedom, equality and democracy to John Locke’s philosophical beliefs and have failed to perceive that our American thought and value system is unique and thus quite different than his.

Bertrand Russell also states that John Locke’s concepts with respect to the law of nature and the state of nature are not only unoriginal; they are in addition quite vague. Per Russell, “The nearest thing to a definition of the state of nature to be found in Locke is the following: Men living together according to reason, without a common superior on earth: with authority to judge between them; is properly called the state of nature”.16 Russell comments, “This is not a description of the life of savages, but of an imagined community of virtuous anarchists, who need no police or law courts because they always obey “Reason”, which is the same as “Natural Law”, which in turn, consists of those laws of conduct that are held to have divine origin”.17 Locke’s beliefs that human beings are equal, independent, and rational are naive and contradictory as well as disingenuous. The vague and contrary nature of Locke’s thinking has allowed us to read into his writings ideas and beliefs that he did not embrace. In fact, modern interpretations of his philosophy would have surprised him.

In Locke’s opinion the “State of Nature” was abrogated by a “Social Compact” which created government. The “State of Nature” is not dissolved by just any compact, but only one that can make a single body politic. In brief, Locke begins his thinking with a supposition that he refers to as a “State of Nature”. This state is antecedent to any and all human government. It is ruled by a “Law of Nature” which is based upon divine commands rather than being imposed by human legislation. Men finally emerged from this “State of Nature” by creating a “Social Compact” which became the means for inaugurating civil government. Of course in light of logic and man’s historical experience, the concept of the “Social Compact” seems absurd. However, it may have been the best and most practical explanation people could envisage to account for the creation of government and society.

According to John Locke, “The great and chief end of men uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government is to protect their property, to which in the state of nature there are many things wanting”.18 Property plays a prominent and in fact dominant role in his political and social philosophy. It is obvious from his writings that property is the main reason for creating the institution known as government. In fact, Bertrand Russell proclaims that “Locke is driven by his worship of property.”19 Again, it should be noted that the purpose of government for Paine is to ensure freedom, equality, human rights, and security for all human beings.

Locke’s obsession with property must be emphasized as it reflects a belief system as well as a social and political outlook that is fundamentally at odds with Thomas Paine’s thinking and the American conception of democracy. John Locke’s thought system reserved political influence for those who were eminent both socially and economically. John Locke believed that economic power in the form of money was the real derivation of political power. He felt that predominate political control should be vested within the aristocracy. Those individuals in society who have conspicuous monetary interests should manage government. Citizens lacking pronounced wealth in either property or money did not deserve a voice in the affairs of state. In fact, the aristocracy feared the lower classes because they were the majority within society. A government and society based upon majority rule would not bode well for the nobility. In contrast to Locke, Paine believed in rule by the majority as well as universal suffrage so that all citizens could have a voice in government. Locke’s philosophy was not designed to support democracy or the welfare of the common man. His social, political and economic beliefs were the antithesis of Thomas Paine’s egalitarian views regarding humanity, government and society.

John Locke actually believed that English society and government correspond to his expressed ideals. Thomas Paine rejected the assumption that the English people were free, independent and lived within an egalitarian society. He bluntly stated that their government was not republican in nature. In his words, “If we will suffer ourselves to examine the component parts of the English Constitution, we shall find them to be base remains of two ancient tyrannies, compounded with some new republican materials.

First: The remains of monarchial tyranny in the person of the King.

Second: The remains of aristocratical tyranny in the persons of the Peers.

Thirdly: The new republican materials, in the persons of the Commons, on whose virtue depends the freedom of England.

The first two being hereditary, are independent of the people; wherefore in a constitutional sense they contribute nothing towards the freedom of the state. To say, “that the constitution of England is a union of three powers, reciprocally checking each other, is farcical, either the words have no meaning, or they are flat contradictions.”20 Paine avows that the British government is based upon the principles of despotism. In fact, he feels that in England there are despotic rivalries between the King, Parliament and the Church. The conflicts amongst these three entities were exacerbated because they functioned within a society which evolved out of feudalism. According to Paine, the remaining elements of feudalism within British society were also a form of tyranny. He believed that the fundamental nature of English culture and its government precluded it from being a democracy.

To properly compare the difference between John Locke’s and Thomas Paine’s philosophy, it is necessary to further explore their conflicting viewpoints regarding the nature of society and government. First we will allow Paine to speak for himself and then compare his thought system to John Locke’s. Paine indicates that there are “several sources from which governments have arisen, and on which they have been founded. First, superstition. Secondly, power. Thirdly, the common interests of society and the rights of man. The first was government of priest craft, the second of conquerors, and the third of reason”.21 Paine indicates that monarchy and aristocracy emerged from governments that were founded upon conquest. He is clearly annoyed with the idea of government and society being established on the basis of either superstition or conquest. Paine expresses his dissatisfaction withthese two kinds of government by saying, “I became irritated at the attempt to govern mankind by forceor fraud”.22

Paine indicates that in his day there were only two types of government. He states, “The two modes ofgovernment which prevail in the world are, first, government by election and representation: secondly, government by hereditary succession. The former is generally known by the name of republic; the latter by that of monarchy and aristocracy. These two distinct and opposite forms, erect themselves on two distinct and opposite bases of reason and ignorance”.23 According to Paine, prior to the American experiment there were no revolutions worthy of the name. He sees the American enterprise as the source of modern democracy. In brief, the modern republican form of government began with the American Revolution. Thomas Paine asserts, “What were formerly called revolutions, were little more than a change of persons, or an alteration of local circumstances”.24 “One of the great advantages of the American Revolution has been, that it led to the discovery of the principles, and laid open the impositions, of governments. All revolutions till then had worked within the atmosphere of a court, and never the great floor of the nation. The parties were always of the class of courtiers; and whatever was the rage for reformation, they carefully preserved the fraud of the profession. It is impossible that such governments that have hither to existed in the world could have commenced by any other means than a total violation of every principle, sacred and moral”.25

Paine in his analysis of the inadequacies of British government and society criticizes hereditary rule as irrational and in fact ludicrous. He points out that virtue, wisdom, intelligence and moral character are not evenly passed on from generation to generation. Their quality and variety vary through time to an extent that government is subject to being run by human passions and driven by accidents. Objections to hereditary rule could only be removed if virtue and wisdom as well as other attributes required by an overlord were, in fact, inherited. Paine declares that, “The representative system of government takes society and civilization for its basis; nature, reason, and experience for its guide. The hereditary system, therefore, is as repugnant to human wisdom, as to human rights, and is absurd, as it is unjust. A hereditary governor is an inconsistent as hereditary author”.26

In his writings Thomas Paine builds a strong case for the superiority of republican government due to its rationality and civility. He is also convinced that Britain fails to qualify as a republic, not only because of its governmental structure, but by reason of its lack of a constitution. Paine states that “Government without a constitution is power without a right. All delegated power is a trust, and all assumed power is usurpation”.27 He asserts that a constitution is not created by government, but by an act of the people. A constitution belongs to the nation and is not the property of those who rule. In fact, it is antecedent to and distinct from government. Paine cites America as being an example of a nation where constitutions are established by the authority of the citizenry. In contrasting England to America he declares that, “In the Magna Charta and Bill of Rights…we see nothing of a constitution, but only of restrictions on assumed power. From the time of William (the Conqueror) a species of government arose, issuing out of this coalition or rights…that can be described by no other name than despotic legislation…the only right it acknowledges out of itself, is the right of petitioning. Where is the constitution that either gives or restrains power”?28

Paine concludes his arguments against the British form of government by stating that it is a species of slavery, whereas representative rule establishes and secures freedom. He feels that because England lacks a true constitution there is nothing to regulate or restrain the abuse of power. As a result of the absence of a constitution, government is both irrational and tyrannical. Paine declares, “Government is but now beginning to be known. Hither to it has been the mere exercise of power, which forbade all effectual inquiry into rights, and grounded itself wholly on possessions. The rights of man are the rights of all generations of men, and cannot be monopolized by any”.29

According to modern interpretations of Lock’s philosophy, he believed that Britain was a “republic” because Parliament had the authority to make laws and check as well as control the executive branch of government (the King). Locke felt that power resided in the people or to be more precise in their chosen representatives. However, when referring to political power, the term people to Locke means men of property. In his political and social system, power is in the hands of the Aristocracy and Sovereign. Paine attacked the English government as it represented a combination of tyrannical Royalty and decadent Aristocracy. Because of its power structure and lack of a constitution, British style government placed severe limitations on the concept of democracy. There is a republican element in this system due to the fact that Parliament consisted of a House of Commons as well as a House of Lords. However, the House of Lords was the dominate power and the system of electing people to the House of Commons was far from democratic. The few rather than the many chose the nations representatives. It was not until the 20th century (Parliament Act of 1911) that legislative supremacy shifted to the House of Commons.

It is interesting that Locke in his discourses relating to the structure and functions of government has absolutely nothing to say about the judiciary. This is astonishing as debates regarding the judiciaries role within the framework of government were common. In fact, the subject was a heated topic of discussion in Locke’s day. A strong judiciary would have the potential to alleviate the imbalances of power within the British system of government and cause it to evolve along a more democratic path. Locke overlooked the importance, in fact the necessity, of an independent judiciary as a prerequisite for ensuring that government would be just, impartial as well as truly republican in nature. Not only was Locke’s view of government lacking in balance and substance, he failed to perceive that the government and social system that he was advocating was actually non-existent. To quote Bertrand Russell, “Locke seemed blandly unaware that, in all the countries of Europe, the realization of his programs (philosophy) would hardly be possible without a bloody revolution. The odd thing is that he could announce doctrines requiring so much revolution before they could be put into effect, and yet show no sign that he thought the system existing in his day unjust, or that he was aware of it being different from the system he advocated”.30

Locke’s attitude isn’t surprising if one realizes that he wasn’t advocating modern democracy, but the status quo of British society and government. The purpose of his writings were to provide a Justification for the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 and 1689. John Locke was attempting to defend the past and to do so within the framework of traditional British society. Unlike Thomas Paine, he was not acting to create the future order of mankind. Locke did not envisage our modern American concept of republican government. He had no clue with respect to the nature of our egalitarian world view and value system. In essence, Locke’s philosophy reflected convictions that were popular in his day. Thus, Paine’s and Locke’s thought systems are dissimilar in origin and content. Because they often used similar terminology does not mean their words are synonymous.

According to Bertrand Russell, “Locke is the most fortunate of all philosophers. He completed his work in theoretical philosophy just at the moment when the government of his country fell into the hands of men who shared his political opinions. Both in practice and in theory, the views which he advocated were held, for many years to come, by the most vigorous and influential politicians and philosophers”.31 This statement is true until Paine’s entry upon the world stage in the latter half of the 18th century. Then John Locke would be forever transformed.

The increase in democratization within Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries was due to a delayed and reluctant response to revolutions in American and France. The English government did not just wake up in the 20th century and shift controlling power to the House of Commons because it finally understood John Locke. What impacted and moved the people of England to accept democratic reforms were the ideas and ideals born out of the American Revolution. An extreme slowness to embrace change and a hidebound worship of tradition lies at the heart of British character. To this day, modern English Democracy is combined with an archaic and debilitated monarchy. Bertrand Russell in trying to explain the English temperament, as well as to account for John Locke’s paradoxical thinking states, “A conflict between King and Parliament in the civil war gave Englishmen, once for all, a love of compromise and moderation, and a fear of pushing any theory to its logical conclusion, which has dominated them down to the present time”.32 When dealing with Locke there is an obvious difference between appearance and reality. The simplest way of resolving the evident paradox that exists in Locke’s political and social ideas that sharply conflict with his actual beliefs and life style, is to realize that Locke’s world view and value system are a mirror image of his understanding of past and current British culture. In brief, his value system and world view were not contrary to, but embraced traditional British institutions and their underlying precepts. Again, Locke was attempting to conserve and modify rather than dismantle the structure of the old world order. In brief, he was not trying to create new political and social formations.

In order to more fully comprehend the dissimilarity between the political and social outlook of John Locke and Thomas Paine, it is necessary to understand that they were born over 100 years apart (1632-1704 versus 1737-1809). Both were affected by unique social, political and religious forces and as a result had distinctive concerns and goals. Not only did Locke and Paine live in separate eras, they were from different social classes and did not share the same cultural views. The era in which they lived and their social class status resulted in divergent and conflicting philosophies. Paine’s goal was to usher in a new world order based upon fresh and untried social and political ideals and structures. Locke’s aim was to justify the political and social arrangements already in existence. Locke grew up during a time of civil war and social disorder. He believed that the only foundation for eliminating violence and securing peace within society was through government by a protestant monarchy that was checked as well as controlled by Parliament. In addition to limited monarchy and rule by the aristocracy, he visualized a comprehensive and tolerant church establishment that would embrace the majority of discordant religious sects within society. Locke felt that the appropriate balances between the branches of government, as well as between government and church, would result in civility and harmony within the social order. He was convinced that the current structure of British government and society provided for a peaceful and civilized culture. In contrast, it was Paine’s opinion that “All European governments (France now excepted) are constructed not on the principles of universal civilization, but on the reverse of it…”33 Paine felt that European governments (excluding France)actually placed themselves above the law and ignored both the will of the people and the will of God.

Paine like Locke grew up in a time of social unrest. However, instead of attempting to justify the social and political world about him, he rebelled against its restrictive and oppressive nature. In contrast to Locke, Paine who was born into a lower social class was repulsed by the injustice and adverse social conditions that flourished around him in English society. He said, “When…we see age going to the workhouse and youth to the gallows in a civilized country, something must be wrong in the system of government. Why is it that scarcely any are executed but the poor? Young people should be educated and older people supported…The resources of a country are lavished upon kings, upon courts, upon hirelings. The poor are compelled to support the fraud that oppresses them”…34 Paine displays his anger towards inequitable social conditions by saying, “When it shall be said in any country in the world, my poor are happy, neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them, my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive…When these things can be said, then may that country boast about its constitution and government”.35

Thomas Paine believed that poverty, ignorance and injustice were a national disgrace. In order to eliminate injustice and resolve social problems, he advocated social and political reforms on a grand scale and in a manner that is original and modern. Not only did Paine extol modern republican government and the universal franchises, he recommended and pleaded for state sponsored programs such as medical care, guaranteed employment and compensation, maintenance and security for the elderly and indigent, as well as free universal education. No other person in the revolutionary period was pleading for social security, socialized medicine, free universal education and other forms of state welfare. Thomas Jefferson did suggest a state funded educational program. His plan was created years earlier by a curriculum committee [Jefferson’s educational program was devised by a committee of revisors at the College of William and Mary in 1779. It was presented by Jefferson to the Virginia legislature in 1817. 12.] Paine made it clear that his ideas and proposals were neither paternalistic or Christian philanthropy. According to Paine, these state supported social programs were not charity but a right.

In both social thought and humane policies, Paine stood alone and was ahead of his times. He advanced these and other ideas on government’s civic responsibilities almost 150 years before the rise of social democracy. No similar sweeping social reforms can be found in John Locke’s writings. In fact, they are conspicuous by their absence. Locke has been cited for representing liberal thought that grew out of the Renaissance and Reformation. It should be noted, his thinking is only liberal compared to that of the Middle Ages. It does not reflect modern liberalism which grew out of the Enlightenment. Thomas Paine is the father of modern liberalism. Our American view of the nature of government and society can be traced to his writings and not those of John Locke. The inspiration for radical change, within mankind’s social and political orders, came from the new and not the old world.

Another critical area of thought that distinguishes Thomas Paine’s Philosophy from John Locke’s relates to Paine’s seminal thinking regarding the nature of the relationship between society and government. One of the most original and creative aspects of Paine’s thought system, that made the modern world possible, is the discrimination he made between civil society and government. In brief, he changed mankind’s view concerning the relationship of society and government. “Common Sense” is the first modern political essay to make and defend a distinction (separation) between the concepts of state and civil society. Previous to the printing of this political tract the terms state and civil society were looked at as being the same. All American and European writers, including Locke, utilized the concept of civil society to portray political associations that bound people together. In European tradition the state and civil society are interchangeable terms. Elemental or conclusive power was originally vested in the king and over time increasingly shared with members of the aristocracy. Louis XIV summed up the old worlds political and social point of view (philosophy) when he said, “I am the state”. According to Thomas Paine the people are the state.

Paine turned the 18th century’s concept of government and society on its head. After and because of “Common Sense” people felt that they, rather than rulers and aristocrats, exercised ultimate control over both government and society. Past ways of looking at political and social relationships were inverted. Overlords would be viewed as subject of the citizenry. The divine right of king’s philosophy was challenged by a thought system that placed decisive authority and power in the hands of the populace. A shift in thinking took place in which government of, by and for the people became the new reality. The raison d’etre for government would be the rights and welfare of the people. America’s revolution was a struggle between two diametrically positioned philosophies, rule from the top or rule by the populace.

“Common Sense” treated previous political and social concepts and principles as obsolete and in fact irrelevant. In order to support a republican point of view, Paine had to disconnect the state/civil society couplet. He preferred to use the terms society and government. These words though related were conceived of as being separate entities. Paine believed that government is simply a delegation of power by the public to representatives who are to exercise its use for the common good. Power was to be utilized to provide universal benefits for the citizenry. Government exists to secure individual liberties and to protect the populace from harm whether caused by internal or external sources. In short, the role of government is to ensure the rights, well-being and advancement of its people.

“Common Sense” was brilliantly written and in fact a revolution in the use of language. It mesmerized the American public. Paine’s treatise boldly argued several critical social ideas from an American point of view. His essay did so with great power and enormous consequence. Its originality, creativity and uniqueness stimulated public discussions that forever changed America. After “Common Sense” American and World History would be profoundly altered and find new directions.

There are other factors in addition to those already presented that reveal a difference in the character of these two men. For example, Locke has stated, “Lastly those are not all to be tolerated who deny the being of God”.36 This statement displays a narrow minded and intolerant attitude that can be traced to his medieval world view and value system. Locke’s religious convictions certainly would not support republican government or a secular society. To further complicate the matter of understanding the disparity between Locke’s and Paine’s philosophies, history and reference books state that the enlightenment was an 18th century intellectual movement and John Locke was an exponent of its philosophy. However, Locke was born in 1632 and spent all but the last four years of his life in the 17thcentury. To designate a 17th century man as being the creation of the 18th century is, to say the least, a solecism. Either our dating schemes do not make sense or interpretations of Lockean thought are in error.

It is apparent that mankind’s intellectual activities cannot be neatly classified or demarcated by century boundary posts. Dating is a man made artificial construct. The fabric of history is a single piece. Change occurs continuously over long periods of time and at an accelerating pace as new ideas and inventions make further progress possible. In particular, the struggle between faith and reason has gone on for thousands of years and still persists in the 21st century. A shift in the balance with respect to these two entities has occurred since the Middle Ages. However, faith and reason are strong components of every period in history. It should be observed that no era has been noted for cornering the market on rationality. Thomas Paine, even thought he lived during the Enlightenment, was severely persecuted by the religious right of his day.

In spite of the fact that history is a continuum and boundary markers that differentiate eras are not easy to establish with great precision, each age does have characteristics that make it unique and distinguish it from other historical periods. For example, the Renaissance and Reformation produced ideas that undermined the Medieval world view. In the words of Dr. Crane Brinton, the intelligentsia of these overlapping eras were “Agents of Distinction” who set the stage for a new cosmology and worldview. Their intellectual achievements were impressive and had great impact upon world history by stimulating the development of Protestantism, humanism, rationalism and science. Even though the intelligentsia were progressive within certain fields of thought, in the social and political spheres, they embraced a traditional belief that society is based upon rule by Aristrocrats and Monarchs. Thus, they did not adopt a philosophy and value system that was democratic in nature.

It was not until the 18th century that our modern world view was created. To quote Professor Crane Brinton, “The democratic world-view was formulated in the eighteenth century at the end of three centuries of change”…37″Our central theme is how the Medieval view of life was altered into the eighteenth century view of life. This eighteenth century view of life, though modified in the last two centuries, is still at the bottom of our view of life, especially in the United States”.38 Thus, the Renaissance (14th into the 17th century) and Reformation (16thcentury) were a transition period between the Middle Ages (500 to approximately 1500 AD) and the Enlightenment (18th century) which gave birth to our modern democratic outlook on society and government. During the period of the Renaissance the forces of Feudalism and Scholasticism, which in the past had ordered human life, were visibly shattered. The time period between the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment was significant because, it provided a view of life that was increasingly rational and scientific rather than mystical and theological.

On the important questions regarding the time span for and the interpretation of the Renaissance, the author is accepting Bertrand Russell’s viewpoint. “The Modern as opposed to the Medieval outlook began in Italy (14th century) with a movement called the Renaissance. At first, only a few individuals, notable Petrarch had this outlook, but in the 15th century it would spread to the great majority of cultivated Italians, both lay and clerical”.39 “The period of history which is commonly called `Modern’ has a mental outlook which differs from the Medieval period in many ways. Of these, two are most important: the diminishing authority of the church, and the increasing authority of science. With these two, others are connected. The culture of modern times is more lay than clerical. States increasingly replace the church as the governmental authority that controls culture”.40

In the world that was emerging, during the modern period of history, human reason and science rather than superstition and theology would become the major forces shaping our world. From the 14th to the 18th century mankind’s world was placed on foundations that were more materialistic and less theistic. During the 18th century men were willing to let go of the past and challenge the concept that people and their political and social orders were subservient to Kings, Clerics, and Aristocrats. From this point on the theory that power resided in the hands of Monarchs, Patricians, and the Church was supplanted by a belief in the rights of the common man. In brief, the 18th century contested the idea that the locus of power was in the Sovereign, Nobility and Religious Institutions. It was decided that the center of political authority was the will of the people.

The point of view expressed here regarding features of the various historical eras is critical not only for understanding the transition from the Medieval to the Modern World, it is crucial for comprehending the contributions of both Thomas Paine and John Locke to mankind as well as ascertaining their proper place in the United States and World History.

SUMMARY

In comparing and contrasting John Locke’s thought system with that of Thomas Paine’s, my main concerns are that Locke’s Philosophy, unlike Paine’s, is not modern, original, generative, or democratic. By embracing past and present social and political conditions in England as reflecting an existing egalitarian way of life, John Locke fails to comprehend and support the concepts and ideals of modern republican government. His system of thought differs from Paine’s because it is not based upon government of, by, and for the people. Democracy in our political tradition is predicated on the will of the majority rather than the desires of the few. In Locke’s thinking, the will of the people is precluded as the majority of individuals lack citizenship rights, including the right to vote. What Locke’s philosophy supports is a medieval faith in limited monarchy. It is incomprehensible that one could embrace a political and social system dominated by royalty and the nobility and claim to be an advocate of republicanism. As a corollary, it is also illogical to believe that Locke’s views on government and society are the source and model for American democracy. Paine’s and Locke’s social and political concepts lie at opposite ends of the speculative spectrum.

If we look at a variety of interrelated factors in John Locke’s thinking, such as, a medieval conception of the social and political orders, power in the hands of monarchs and aristorcrats, government not basedupon republican principles, absence of an independent an impartial court system, the majority being denied citizenship rights, preservation of property being the main motive that causes human beings to form governments, man’s position under the social compact, pedigree and property determining one’s opportunities and position in life, lack of a genuinely representative form of government, limited political and social freedoms, a society built upon an operated by despotic institutions, the state and civil society being coterminous; it becomes apparent that a wide intellectual and conceptual gulf exists between John Locke and Thomas Paine. If we add to the above components that represent Locke’s thinking the lack of a true British constitution, it also becomes evident that all of these items whencombined do not reflect the thinking of Thomas Paine or a democratic life style. Again, it is difficult to look at the array of principles, opinions and concepts that John Locke embraced and believe that his thought system is the foundation of American society.

Thomas Paine’s writings and speeches altered Lockean philosophy in particular and European thought in general. A shift in thinking, in which man was regarded as free, equal and independent within society, resulted in a new political and social architecture. Paine’s ideas and ideals not only transformed the philosophy of John Locke and the relationship between citizens and their government, they universalized the concept of revolution. Events in America might lead to the destruction and reordering of Europe’s political and social arrangements. This is one reason Paine was looked upon as a threat to the stability and structure of the 18th century world. America’s revolution would prove to be a harbinger of things to come.

Many people in colonial America and in Europe considered Paine’s agenda for government and society too liberal. Others felt his programs and proposals went beyond liberalism and were in essence anarchic. Thomas Paine did not view himself as being either liberal or radical. He simply believed that his ideas and efforts on behalf of freedom, equality and independence were a means of ushering in a new world order that would bring about the fulfillment of God’s plan for humanity. The values of democracy were in harmony with the universal mind and natural law. They were capable of properly linking human beings to one another as well as to creation and their creator. Thomas Paine persuaded and impelled men to abolish the political and social structures under which they existed. His essay “Common Sense” convinced the colonists that separation from Great Britain and the formation of a republic were a necessity. This composition transformed public opinion and created the American Revolution. In fact, this publication is the dividing line between British American and the United States History. Thomas Paine’s achievements are remarkable and transcend time and place. To give just one example, he wrote the three best-selling books of the 18th century (Common Sense, Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason). These works are the cornerstones of modern democracy as well as 21st century social and political thought.

Thomas Paine was the most prodigious political and social polemicist of the revolutionary era. His thinking is far more original and seminal than he has been given credit for by historians. Its scope is immense which is one of many reasons why he is something much more than a “Political Propagandist” and “Pamphleteer”. Such terms have been utilized in denigrating manner in order to limit Paine’s significance as a creative force in American and World History. His thinking encompassed the past, present and future of mankind. Few people in history have affected and changed the world as much as Thomas Paine. John Adams, our second president, said that “History will ascribe the (American) Revolution to Thomas Paine”.41 “Paine crystallized public opinion in favor of revolution and was the first factor in bringing about revolution”.42 John Adams also stated, “I know not whether any man in the world had had more influence on its in habitants or affairs for the last 30 years than Tom Paine. Call it the age of Paine”.43 It was apparent to many of Paine’s contemporaries that the cause of the American Revolution and the creator of the structure and values of Modern Democracy was Thomas Paine and not John Locke. In fact, many highly intelligent men in both America and Europe perceived Paine as being one of the world’s most creative and advanced minds. He was regarded by numerous prominent individuals as a man of genius who changed the nature and composition of government and society. Napoleon Bonaparte grasping Paine’s impact on his era asserted, “Paine deserved a statue in gold in every town”.44 Considering Paine’s contributions to the formation of the American State and the direction of modern World History, his life needs to be reexamined in the light of honesty in order that he may receive the long overdue recognition and respect that he justly deserves.

POSTSCRIPT

“Among enemies and friends alike, Paine earned a reputation as a citizen extraordinary — as the greatest political figure of his generation. He made more noise in the world and excited more attention than such well-known European contemporaries as Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Immanuel Kant, Madame de Stael and Pietro Verri”.45

From TOM PAINE A POLITICAL LIFE

By John Keane (Prologue)

NOTE

John Adams detested Thomas Paine. They were at opposite ends of the republican spectrum. Adams was conservative and Paine even by today’s standards would be considered extremely liberal. However, one thing they did agree on was independence. Thomas Paine not only created modern liberalism, Eugene V. Debs in one of his speeches paid homage to the prophet of freedom by declaring that Paine isalso the father of the modern radical tradition in politics.

QUOTATIONS

1. Foot & Kramnic. The Thomas Paine Reader

New York: Penguin Books, 1989 Pages 32 & 33

2. Burtt, Edwin A. The English Philosophers From Bacon To Mill

New York: Random House, Inc. 1939 Page 455

(Locke – Essay Concerning Civil Government)

3. Ibid Page 424 (Essay Concerning Civil Government)
4. Ibid Page 456 (Essay Concerning Civil Government)
5. Ibid Page 457 (Essay Concerning Civil Government)
6. Foot & Kramnic. The Thomas Paine Reader

New York: Penguin Books, 1989 Page 68 (Common Sense)

7. Foner, Phillip S. The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine

New York: The Citadel Press, 1969 Page 274 (Rights of Man)

8. Ibid Page 275 (Rights of Man)
9. Ibid Page 314 (Rights of Man)
10. Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy

New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1945 Page 600

11. Ibid Page 601
12. Ibid Page 619
13. Ibid Page 623
14. Ibid Page 630
15. Fruchman, Jack Jr. Thomas Paine Apostle of Freedom

New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994 Page 6

16. Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy

New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1945 Page 624 & 625

17. Ibid Page 625
18. Ibid Page 627 19
19. Ibid Page 632
20. Foner, Philip S. The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine

New York: The Citadel Press, 1969 Page 7 (Common Sense)

21. Ibid Page 277 (Rights of Man)
22. Ibid Page 277 (Rights of Man)
23. Ibid Page 338 (Rights of Man)
24. Ibid Page 341 (Rights of Man)
25. Ibid Pages 360 & 361 (Rights of Man)
26. Ibid Pages 367 & 368 (Rights of Man)
27. Ibid Pages 375 & 376 (Rights of Man)
28. Ibid Page 383 (Rights of Man)
29. Ibid Page 396 (Rights of Man)
30. Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy

New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1945 Pages 634 & 635

31. Ibid Page 605
32. Ibid Page 601
33. Foner, Philip S. The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine

New York: The Citadel Press, 1969 Page 399 (Rights of Man)

34. Foot & Kramnic. The Thomas Paine Reader

New York: Penguin Books, 1989 Pages 20 & 21 (Rights of Man)

35. Ibid Page 21 (Rights of Man)
36. Seldes, George. The Great Thoughts

New York: Ballantine Books, 1996 Page 274

37. Brinton, Crane. The Shaping of Modern Thought

Englewood Cliffs New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1963 Page 247

38. Ibid Page 24 20
39. Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy

New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1945 Page 495

40. Ibid Page 491
41. Seldes, George. The Great Thoughts

New York: Ballantine Books, 1996 Page 353

42. Brooks, Van Wyck. The World of Washington Irving

New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1944 Page 57

43. Foot & Kramnic. The Thomas Paine Reader

New York: Penguin Books, 1989 Page 28 & 29

44. Ibid Page 34
45. Keane, John. Tom Paine A Political Life

London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1995 Page IX (Prologue) 21

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Foot & Kramnic. The Thomas Paine Reader

New York: Penguin books, 1989

2. Foner, Phillip S. The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine

New York: The Citadel Press, 1969

3. Fruchtman, Jack Jr. Thomas Paine Aspostle of Freedom

New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994

4. Keane, John. Tom Paine A Political Life

London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1995

5. Paine, Thomas. Common Sense – Rights of Man

Delran New Jersey: The Classics of Liberty Library, 1992

6. Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government

Delran New Jersey: The Classics of Liberty Library, 1992

7. Brooks, Van Wyck. The World of Washington Irving

New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1944

8. Seldes, George. The Great Thoughts

New York: Ballantine Books, 1996

9. Burtt, Edwin A. The English Philosophers From Bacon To Mill

New York: Random House, Inc., 1939

10. Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy

New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1945

11. Russell, Bertrand. Wisdom of the West

New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1959

12. Whittemore, Robert C. Makers of the American Mind

New York: William Morrow & Company, 1964

13. Brinton, Crane. The Shaping of Modern Thought

Englewood Cliffs New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963

14. Bowersock, Brown & Graber. Late Antiquity

Cambridge Massachusetts: The Belknap Press, 1999.

15. Haskins, Charles Homer. The Renaissance of the 12th Century

New York: Meridian Books, Inc., 1960 22

16. Lindsay, A.D. The Modern Democratic State

New York: Oxford University Press, 1962

17. Stenton, Doris May. English Society In the Early Middle Ages

London: The Whitefriars Press LTD, 1959

18. Dawson, Christopher. The Making of Europe

New York: Meridian Books, Inc., 1960

19. McNeill, William H. The Rise of The West

Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1963

20. Rowan, Herbert H. A History of Early Modern Europe

New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc., 1960

21. Morgan, Edmund S. The Birth of the Republic

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1956

22. Degler, Carl N. Out Of Our Past

New York & Evanston: Harper & Row Publishers, 1962

23. Curti, Shryock, Cochran & Harrington. A History of American Civilization

New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers. 1953

24. Taylor, Alan. American Colonies

New York: Viking Penguin, 2001

25. Barzun, Jacques. From Dawn to Decadence

New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2000

26. Bowen, Catherine Drinker. John Adams And The American Revolution

New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1950

27. Boyer, Paul S. Editor. Oxford Companion to United States History

New York: Oxford University Press, 2001 23

The post How Paine Transformed Locke appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

By Richard Briles Moriarty

Thomas Paine and the banning of his works have long been intertwined. Suppression of his Rights of Man by the English government raged as he joined the French National Convention. 

After King Louis XVI was convicted of treason in 1792, Thomas Paine argued that the former king had become “Citizen Louis Capet.” Rather than execute him, Paine said he should be banished to America for immersion and education in republican principles.

During his startlingly bold presentation to the French National Convention, Paine quoted Robespierre’s arguments in 1791 that “the death penalty is essentially unjust and… the most repressive of penalties,” that it “multiplies crimes more than it prevents them” and constitutes “cowardly assassinations” through which one crime is punished by another. 

As Marat assaulted Paine’s arguments, Robespierre remained silent, but likely gritted his teeth as Paine quoted his own eloquent and unanswerable plea against capital punishment. Paine’s persuasiveness nearly turned the tide. 

Paine’s position was dramatically more radical than that of Robespierre and Marat. Instead of treating Louis as a king gone bad, Paine proposed, consistent with his arguments since Common Sense, that all kings, simply because they are kings, are tyrants. 

Paine’s arguments were dangerous to the increasing yet tenuous dominance of Robespierre and the Jacobins. His plea not to kill the king was published by the French government in 1792, yet Paine’s efforts resulted in his 1793 imprisonment. 

Now jump ahead in time. Gutzon Borglum, designer of Mount Rushmore, sculpted an eight-foot statue of Paine for unveiling in Paris on the 200th anniversary of his birth in 1937. The statue showed Paine pleading to the National Convention to spare Louis Capet. 

When Nazi Germany conquered France, the statue was hidden from the Vichy Government, which at the instigation of the Nazis ordered removal of all “statues and monuments of copper alloys situated in public places and administrative locales,” purportedly “to recycle the metallic components for industrial production.” The real purpose was sending metals to Germany for recycling into military uses. 

In 1945, W.E. Woodward predicted that Borglum’s hidden statue would be unveiled in Paris in the near future, which it was in 1948. Despite plans for moving the statue to America, it remains far more appropriately in Paris on display in Parc Mountsouris. 

During World War II, Borglum’s statue was at risk less because Paine’s books were banned by the Nazis — although they were — and more because military lust demanded metal. 

Governments purportedly devoted to free speech are hardly immune to banning Pane’s books. 

R. Wolf Baldassarro observed in a 2011 blog post, “Banned Books Awareness: Thomas Paine,” that Common Sense in the 1950s was barred from U.S. Information Service libraries during the McCarthy era by the government of the United States of America, the country whose name and perhaps existence Paine created through that very pamphlet. 

For more than a quarter-century, from 1795 to 1822, Paine’s The Age of Reason was banned in the United Kingdom, reports The Banned Books Compendium by Grigory Lukin. He noted that an English publisher of The Age of Reason was sentenced in 1797 to a year of hard labor. 

In 1819, Richard Carlile was prosecuted because he included The Age of Reason in a collection of Paine’s works. Carlile read the entire book into the court record, ensuring even wider publication. He then was sentenced to a year in prison. Carlile actually served six years, Lukin wrote, because “he refused any ‘legal conditions’ on his release.” 

Lukin identified the 32 books most often banned worldwide. Two of those books, Rights of Man and The Age of Reason, were authored by Paine. 

As true from Common Sense forward, governments purporting to support democracy and free speech will resist the radical impact of Paine’s thoughts. People themselves can seek out his thoughts, absorb and act on them, a bottom-up legacy which would make Paine rejoice. 

The post Banning Thomas Paine appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

By Gary Berton 

In Common Sense, Thomas Paine introduced the concept of modern democracy. This idea is what the “revolution” in the American Revolution rested upon. Self-rule was a by-product of the concept of government “of the people, for the people, by the people.” 

Before Common Sense, the meaning of “democracy” was diffuse. Multiple meanings of the term since have been used by other forms of government, even oppressive regimes. Holding elections, no matter how corrupt, has become the definition of democracy. 

In Common Sense, Paine began his discussion about government by defining it for his readers: 

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one…. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver, but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows, Thomas Paine on Government at the Birth of Democracy that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others. 

Anarchists and libertarians, plus conservatives, love this quote. They refer to it constantly, but like many historians, they do not read further. 

The paragraph names security as the only purpose of government. This idea became an excuse for oppression. Government ensures the rich are “secure,” but the majority of the people are insecure due to corrupt government. 

To explain the origins of government, Paine told a parable imagining that “a small number of persons settled in some sequestered part of the earth, unconnected with the rest; they will then represent the first peopling of any country, or of the world. 

”In this state of natural liberty, society will be their first thought. Thus necessity, like a gravitating power, would soon form our newly arrived emigrants into society, the reciprocal blessings of which, would supersede, and render the obligations of law and government unnecessary while they remained perfectly just to each other; but as nothing but heaven is impregnable to vice, it will unavoidably happen, that in proportion as they surmount the first difficulties of emigration, which bound them together in a common cause, they will begin to relax in their duty and attachment to each other; and this remissness will point out the necessity of establishing some form of government to supply the defect of moral virtue.” 

Six paragraphs later, after laying out his “design and end of government,” Paine sums up his thesis:

Here then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here too is the design and end of government, viz. freedom and security. And however our eyes may be dazzled with show, or our ears deceived by sound; however prejudice may warp our wills, or interest darken our understanding, the simple voice of nature and of reason will say, it is right. 

Paine changes the design and end of government (“end” meaning the goal) by adding freedom to security. Both are needed. 

His opening paragraph was about the need for security; this last paragraph sums up his thesis. Security and freedom together is Paine’s definition of republican government. “Republican” was the term used at the time for popular government. The “democratic” term came into use from Rights of Man in 1792. 

Sadly, self-interest does darken our understanding, as does fake news, propaganda, and blind obedience. As Paine observed in Rights of Man, “Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.”

The post Common Sense and the Revolutionary Moment  appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

By Gary Berton

Immigration to America was a major impetus for the American Revolution, both physically and intellectually. Thomas Paine welcomed immigrants who were escaping tyranny. In 1776, he wrote in Common Sense, the manifesto of the American Revolution: 

“O! ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only the tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.” 

Common Sense turned a tax revolt into a social and political revolution. 

Other than the indigenous people who originally occupied this continent, the people who were transitioning to becoming American in the 18th century, and Americans of today, are immigrants or descended from immigrants, including kidnapped slaves. And in fact, capital accumulation in America primarily came from three sources: the land stolen from the indigenous nations, the stolen labor power of slavery, and the underpaid labor of the immigrants and their descendants.

Paine was the first American to demand reparations for the crimes of slavery, in his letter to Jefferson in 1808.* He believed that the indigenous nations would live peacefully beside peoples from other parts of the world. He was wrong about that: the commitment to English colonialism infected the minds of too many. In part, the perpetuation of colonialism was due to the failure of democratic structures to take hold. In addition, the ethic of greed came to dominate as the wealthiest people remained in charge of governmental structures. The descendants of the indigenous nations also deserve reparations. 

In every era, immigrants have added to the vibrancy and progress of the nation, bringing not only their talents and energy and cultures, but the possibility and hope of realizing democracy in America. This era is no different. Our Association stands with the principles advanced by Paine; it is why we exist: to educate the world about the most important figure of the age of revolutions, which is still unfolding. Although some historians have attempted to repress him and his ideas, he still influences the choices we have as Americans. 

* The letter to Jefferson signed “A Slave” on November 30, 1808 was attributed to Paine in an article to appear in “Identifying “A Slave”: The Iona College Text Analysis Project Explores a Mystifying Letter to Thomas Jefferson”, Gary Berton, Smiljana Petrovic, Michael Crowder, Lubomir Ivanov, in Mark Boonshoft, Nora Slonimsky, and Ben Wright, eds., American Revolutions in the Digital Age, University of Cornell Press 2024.

The post Thomas Paine on Immigrants and America as an “Asylum for Mankind”  appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

By Gary Berton

Thomas Paine’s Common Sense begins with a discussion on government; in fact, the content of it in general is about a new form of government. It is a manifesto for a new era, arising from the political economy that is emerging, hampered by feudalism. The Enlightenment has substantially weakened that feudal system, and it was time for someone, like a Thomas Paine, to help push it over. Paine was the last Enlightenment figure, and he built a bridge into the era of the democratic movement that we still live in. 

No other progressive figure, no writer on rights, no author of treatises on humane existence, no philosopher like a Price, a Voltaire, a Burke, or a Rousseau did what Paine did: he drew a line in the sand and said no monarchy, ever, and instead it must be a democratic representative system, free from ruling classes. Utopian at first sight, but enduring. 

So why would he begin his treatise with this: “Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.” 

That first sentence above in the quote is cited by every anarchist and libertarian writer. It is even quoted by good historians, like Jack Fruchtman, as the essence of Paine on government. WRONG. (We saw him in Part 1 of “American Freethought” saying the “necessary evil” part.) 

Paine knew his audience, and he started exactly where most people were at that time, that government is oppressive, but needed. But he then unfolds a thought experiment, where people inhabit unoccupied land, and set out to form an association to regulate themselves. Throughout the next six paragraphs, Paine reveals a new possibility, which turns government on its head.

In the beginning he stated that the purpose (end) of government is security: “Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government…” After he explains how representative government works for the people, he changes the definition of government by turning it over, and instead of security, it becomes “Here then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here too is the design and end of government, viz. freedom and security. And however our eyes may be dazzled with show, or our ears deceived by sound; however prejudice may warp our wills, or interest darken our understanding, the simple voice of nature and of reason will say, it is right.” 

He adds “Freedom” to “Security”. Why haven’t historians quoted this? It changes the whole point of his argument from a negative to a positive. 

Freedom, rights, and equality can only be established through proper government, which is a government with a foundation of equality in rights and justice. The rest is propaganda and big lies. 

To establish that type of government, it must be by, for, and of the people. (Lincoln, a Paine reader). When Dr. Fruchtman left that out, he leaves the whole point out, Paine’s point: government of the people as a whole, however we devise a system to do that (as Paine did leave it to us), is the only way to be free – it is not the absence of government, but the democratic form of government that can guarantee equal rights, opportunity, and yes, freedom. Without that governing structure, we fall prey to con men and women, big lies, autocracies, and constant upheaval.

The post A Necessary Evil  appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

Harvey Kaye is the Ben and Joyce Rosenberg Professor of Social Change and Development at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. This essay was printed in TPNHA’s journal in May, 2001, and it first appeared in his book, Firebrand of the Revolution (Oxford U. Press, 2000).

We should never fail to recount the story of the American Revolution. We should never forget that our nation was forged in struggle, a struggle — however inadequate and in need of continual renewal and advancement — that was revolutionary. And we should never fail to appreciate the fundamental role of the radical Thomas Paine in helping us to realize what we might become. Would there have been an American Revolution, an American war for independence, had Thomas Paine not written his stirring pamphlet Common Sense? Most likely, yes. However, the American Revolution might not have been the kind of republican and democratic struggle it became, and the course of the nation’s development would likely have been quite different.

Born January 29,1737, in Thetford, England, Thomas Paine was the only son of Joseph Pain, a Quaker staymaker, and Frances Cocke, the daughter of an Anglican lawyer. Neither a happy nor an affluent couple, Joseph and Frances nevertheless were extremely fond of their son and committed to his receiving a formal education. In addition to educating the boy in the Bible at home, they enrolled him in the Thetford Grammar School. Among his studies, he most enjoyed science and poetry.

But Tom’s parents could afford to keep him in school only so long. When he turned 13, they apprenticed him to his father. In his father’s workshop, he learned not only the craft of corsetmaking, but also the dissenting and egalitarian spirit of the Quakers and the historical memory of “turning the world upside down” in the English Revolution of the 1640s and 50s.

An artisan’s life apparently afforded insufficient excitement for the young man. Two weeks before his twentieth birthday, Tom ran away to serve aboard an English privateer, hoping to gain adventure and a bit of money. The encounters, rigors, and oppressions on board must have taught him a great deal, but hen soon had enough of life between “the devil and the deep blue sea.” After just a year, he disembarked for London, to work again as a journeyman staymaker.

During the next decade and a half, Tom suffered more than his share of tragic disappointments, mistakes and failures. In 1759,he set up shop as a master craftsman on the southeast coast where he met and married his first love, Mary Lambert. Yet, sadly, within a year Mary died in premature childbirth and, for lack of trade, Tom was forced to give up the business.

In 1764,he secured appointment as an excise officer, but he was expelled a year later, supposedly for having stamped goods without inspecting them (a not-unusual practice of over-worked excise officers). During the next few years he kept himself going by working as a staymaker, a teacher, and a preacher while he petitioned for reinstatement in the excise service.

Finally, in early 1768, he received a new posting, to Lewes in Sussex. There he boarded with a tobacconist, whose daughter, Elizabeth Ollive, he married on the shopkeeper’s death. Tom also became active in local affairs and a “regular” in the political debates at the White Hart Tavern. He soon developed a friendly reputation as a man who enjoyed a few good drinks and had a “skill with words.”

Recognizing his talents, Paine’s fellow officers chose him to lead their campaign for higher salaries. Thus, in 1772 he penned his first pamphlet, The Case of the Officers of Excise, and moved to London to lobby Parliament. His sojourn back in the capital both increased his knowledge and resentment of aristocratic government and politics and renewed his awareness of the popular radicalism of the middle and working classes. Additionally, it enabled him to renew his interest in natural philosophy through attendance at science lectures – occasions that placed him among circles of intellectuals and freethinkers which, fortuitously, included Benjamin Franklin.

Unfortunately, the campaign failed and the Excise Commission discharged Tom for ignoring his official duties. Making matters worse, the tobacco shop also failed, and Tom and his wife agreed to separate.

Now 37 years old, with few resources and without prospects, but possessed of a seemingly indefatigable willingness to try again, Tom resolved to go to America. The renowned Ben Franklin himself provided Tom with a letter of introduction, but little could either man have suspected that the mix of memories and skills, which Paine carried with him, would prove so volatile when brought into contact with America.

America would inspire Paine and he would not only refashion his own life, he would contribute, as well, to refashioning American life. Just a year after his arrival, he would declare: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” And his words would fire the imagination of his new compatriots.

The America to which Paine journeyed was thriving, dynamic, and rebellious. The population of the l3 colonies had reached almost 3 million. The vast majority lived in the countryside, but Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Charleston had developed into prosperous regional capitals.

Colonial life did not simply reflect life in the mother country. Americans were more pro-monarchy than the English themselves; but with the king and his ministers an ocean away they could afford to be. While rich gentlemen “lorded it” over others, actual aristocrats were a rare breed in America. And, though religious toleration varied from colony to colony, the Church of England never secured the authority it held at home. Rather, religious pluralism and enthusiasm characterized American life.

Moreover in contrast to Britain, America had little unemployment or poverty. Although the same property-holding qualifications to vote applied in America as in Britain, the colonies were far more democratic places. More than half of colonial white men held enough property to vote; they governed themselves through elected assemblies (subject to the veto power of royal governors); and they enjoyed the freest press of the eighteenth century. Like their British cousins, colonials celebrated their liberties, and the middle and lower classes – though excluded from formal political debates – effectively registered their views through street-crowd actions.

America seemed exceptional, yet serious contradictions marked the developing society. Fundamental inequalities shaped colonial life and antagonisms were intensifying. Women’s lives varied based on class and marital status, but all women suffered the restrictions of male domination. Colonials prided themselves on their liberties, but their economies depended upon denying freedom to others. To gain passage to America, poor white immigrants subjected themselves to indentured servitude. More cruelly, a vicious trade brought Africans to work as slaves and they numbered half a million. The rebelliousness of servants and slaves distressed their masters. And not far away lived the Native American peoples, determined to resist colonial expansion as best they could.

Real inequalities also prevailed among free whites. Landlordism and tenantry spread, periodically inciting farmers to riot in protest. Property also shaped urban life. Wealthy merchants had built fortunes on transatlantic commerce. Together with the southern planters and northern landlords, they constituted provincial ruling classes and dominated colonial assemblies. Also, an intellectual elite of lawyers and prominent Protestant clergy developed in close connection to these ruling classes.

Of course, the urban majority belonged to the working classes. The “master mechanics,” owned their own shops and hired journeymen and apprentices. These skilled artisans were Tom Paine’s folk. Literate and often interested in science and public affairs, they aspired to an independent livelihood and community respect, gained through hard work, moderation, and self-improvement. As well, they desired a greater role in public affairs.

Below the artisans, propertyless laborers grew in number, including sailors, dockworkers, hired servants, and the unskilled. Though better off in America than in Britain, they well knew both that they lacked the rights of the propertied and that the rich were growing richer. Their rising sense of injustice, and readiness to express it, made their superiors nervous.

Holding these diverse colonials together, and binding them to the empire, was their shared sense of “Britishness” (though not all were actually British or even of British descent). Like their British counterparts, they believed they enjoyed rights which other peoples did not – rights secured through the ages and assured by the English Constitution. Ironically, the very demands of the British Empire would soon wear away at the colonials’ attachments to Britain and its institutions.

Britain’s triumph in the Seven Years War – known to us as the French and Indian War (1756-63) – drove the French from Canada and secured British domination of North America and the Atlantic world. But victory and supremacy had a high price, exhausting the treasury and forcing the British Government to raise taxes and seek additional sources of income.

King George III and his chief financial minister, George Grenville, logically assumed that the costs of colonial security should be borne by the colonials themselves. The colonials did not share that assumption; they felt they had paid for the North American war with their blood.

As well, the British Government sought to more effectively regulate American commerce, and to protect Native American treaty rights against white encroachment. The resulting policies instigated a series of imperial crises.

In 1763, Grenville laid out a “Proclamation Line” along the Appalachian Mountains, which restricted white territorial expansion to the west. And during the next decade he and his successors announced a string of new taxes and regulations governing colonial commerce and administration: the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, the Quartering Act, the Declaratory Act, the Townshend Acts, the Tea Act, and the so-called Coercive or Intolerable Acts.

The British Government believed that the (unwritten) English Constitution gave it the authority to make laws for the colonies, for all Englishmen were supposedly represented in Parliament whether or not they actually voted for its members. But most Americans believed that Parliament was acting in an arbitrary and unconstitutional way, and violating their rights as Englishmen by making laws without their active consent.

Angered by events, colonial leaders delivered speeches and wrote pamphlets decrying tyranny and the threat to liberty. They rightly worried about agitating the colonial masses, for their own words and actions did just that. And, once mobilized, middle and lower-class folk grew less and less willing to defer to their “betters.” They gathered in street protests; they hung figures in effigy; and they attacked British officials and their property.

Colonial defiance made the system unworkable. But every time Parliament repealed its latest revenue-raising law, it turned around and enacted new taxes. In reply, the colonials staged boycotts and actions like the Boston Tea Party. Occasionally, such confrontations turned violent, as in the Boston Massacre, when British troops fired into a protesting crowd and killed several people.

Resistance escalated. Colonials organized, first locally, then across colonial lines, creating groups like the Sons of Liberty and the Committees of Correspondence. By 1774, the dispute had become a full-blown imperial crisis. It came to a head when Parliament closed Boston Harbor and essentially placed Boston and the Massachusetts colony under siege. Outraged, the colonies sent delegates to Philadelphia for the First Continental Congress in September 1774. They promised aid to Massachusetts, called for a continental boycott of British goods, and issued a declaration against “taxation without representation.” Meanwhile, militias trained more seriously and the “Minutemen” readied themselves. The British had united the colonials in rebellion.

It was at this time that Paine sailed to America, landing in Philadelphia only weeks after the First Continental Congress adjourned. The eight-week voyage did not augur well for his future. The crossing was horrible, if not horrific. Following the usual seasickness, a deadly epidemic known as “ship fever,” probably typhus, struck passengers and crew alike. When they finally docked on November 30, l774, Paine had to be carried ashore on a stretcher and spend the next few weeks recuperating.

Given his past, Paine was remarkably fortunate (not just for having survived the journey). Traveling as a free man, with Franklin’s letter of introduction and a bit of money in his purse, Paine’s own status contrasted sharply with that of the majority of new arrivals. One hundred of the 120 passengers with whom he sailed came as indentured servants, and Philadelphia’s Slave Market could easily be seen from his rented lodgings.

In early January, Paine roused himself to get out and about. Though only a square mile in size, Philadelphia – with a fast growing population of 30,000 and America’s busiest harbor – had emerged as the unofficial commercial and cultural capital of British North America. The city’s prosperity and diversity clearly impressed him. Founded by William Penn, a Quaker, Pennsylvania had served as a haven for the Friends and Philadelphia reflected its Quaker heritage. Its European population included native and immigrant English Quakers, Anglicans and Catholics, German Lutherans and Mennonites, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, and Jews.

Philadelphia’s politics also appealed to Paine. The merchant elite controlled economic affairs and colonial government. However, they faced challenges from below. The skilled mechanics resented the merchants’ domination and they began to demand a direct role in government. Not only the wealthier artisans, but also the poorer mechanics and laborers, numbers of whom had enlisted in Pennsylvania’s militia, started to demand rights of political participation. Such things thrilled Paine – and yet the paradox of white servitude and black bondage in the midst of a prosperous, liberty-loving and spirited people astounded him.

As Franklin had directed, Paine first arranged to meet Richard Bache, who immediately took a liking to the new arrival and promised both to help him find employment as a children’s tutor and to introduce him to the city’s leading figures.

Also, as he had in London, Paine quickly took to spending time in bookshops. One afternoon, the owner of his favorite shop, Robert Aitken, engaged him in conversation about his literary interests, leading Paine to show him several of his own writings. Aitken then amazed Paine by offering him the editorship of the Pennsylvania Magazine, a new periodical that he planned to co-publish with John Witherspoon, the president of the college of New Jersey (later renamed Princeton). Incredibly, only weeks off the ship, Paine had a new career as a journalist.

The first issue appeared on January 24, 1775. The magazine flourished. Paine himself contributed essays, poems and scientific reports, written, as was the custom, under various pseudonyms, such as “Atlanticus,” “Vox Populi,” and “Justice and Humanity'”

Expressing renewed optimism and a progressive view of the future, Paine developed a writing-style and a vocabulary that reflected the promise he sensed in American life. Notably, in his opening editorial he warned against “historical superiority” the idea that the present age represents the highest and final stage of history.

Appreciating American possibilities, Paine also confronted America’s contradictions. He criticized aristocratic and lordly pomposity. In one essay he considered the oppression of women. In yet another he vigorously aatacked slavery, calling for its abolition and insisting upon America’s responsibility to support the slaves following emancipation. Not long after, Franklin returned to Philadelphia and established the first American Anti-Slavery Society with Paine as a founding member.

Though Paine wrote critically of British imperialism, he continued to favor reconciliation. That is, until April I9, l775,when British troops opened fire on colonial militia at Lexington, Massachusetts leaving 8 militiamen dead and 10 wounded. News of the battle — “the shot heard round the world” — turned Paine into an American patriot and radical. Forsaking his Quaker background, he now argued the legitimacy of violence in defense of liberty and, in the poetic verses of The Liberty Tree, he aligned himself with the American cause.

Yet, what exactly was America’s cause: The restoration of “Englishmen’s rights”? The reform of the imperial system? or outright separation? Radicals — like Samuel Adams, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson — privately discussed separation but, publicly, they merely proposed reorganizing America’s colonial relationship to Britain. And even that seemed too extreme to many.

The Pennsylvania Magazine prospered under Paine’s editorship. Nevertheless, Paine’s relations with his bosses soured by the summer of 1775. Witherspoon turned against Paine for having the audacity to actually edit Witherspoon’s words. In revenge, Witherspoon spread rumors that Paine drank heavily, a slur that would follow him to the grave. Paine did drink, mostly wine and brandy, but not at all to the extent his enemies claimed. At the same time, salary questions divided Paine and Aitken. Increasingly confident of his literary abilities, Paine had requested a raise. Aitken refused. In the autumn, Paine left the magazine.

Paine quit not simply because he became fed up with his employer. More important, he had decided upon a new and very daring project: to write a pamphlet calling for separation from Britain.

Ever since the Battles of Lexington and Concord in April l775, a state of war had prevailed. In May 1775, the Second Continental Congress had convened in Philadelphia and created a Continental Army under the command of George Washington. Still, peace overtures continued and American goals remained undefined. Tom Paine, the newcomer, would revolutionize American thinking.

Paine’s writings had started to garner significant attention and he had been befriended by one of Congress’s more radical members, the young Philadelphia doctor, Benjamin Rush. When Paine told him of his writing plans, Rush counseled moderation, fearing the time was not yet right. However, Paine would not be deterred. He was absolutely convinced that although Americans did not speak openly of it they yearned for independence. Whatever his reservations, Rush welcomed Paine’s commitment and, in turn, Paine regularly sought his new friend’s editorial advise.

Starting in September 1775, Paine devoted his energies to producing the pamphlet. History beckoned, and he could not afford to hesitate. Determined to reach the broadest possible audience, he held nothing back. He summoned forth his memories of Britain and his affection for America. He drew upon his readings of eighteenth-century liberal and republican political thought- readings that emphasized individual freedom and contended that individuals constitute representative government to protect their rights to life, liberty and property. Paine articulated those ideas with his understanding of popular, democratic political aspirations. He quoted the Bible, he cited historical examples, and called upon the force of reason itself.

After completing the manuscript in December, he sent copies to Sam Adams and Ben Franklin for their consideration. They liked it and suggested only minor revisions. Rush then introduced Paine to the Philadelphia publisher, Robert Bell, who, sympathetic to its arguments, accepted the (dangerous) commission of printing it. Paine wanted to call his pamphlet Plain Truth, but Rush proposed another title, Common Sense, and Paine listened.

Oon January10, 1776, Common Sense swept onto the American scene and into American consciousness. In just two weeks the first printing sold out. Soon, supply could not keep up with demand. With or without permission, presses around the colonies issued new editions, including one in German for immigrants. During the next few months, 150,000 copies were distributed in America alone (the equivalent today would be 15,000,000 – making it, proportionately, the nation’s greatest bestseller ever). And in very little time translations appeared in Europe.

Paine originally signed his pamphlet “Written by an Englishman.” However, within weeks folks had figured out who that Englishman was. Paine himself relished the attention, but he sought no material rewards. He declined all royalties, insisting that any profits be used to purchase mittens for Washington’s troops.

Paine wrote Common Sense to transform the colonial rebellion into a war for independence. But he did more than that. He called upon Americans to recognize their historical possibilities and historic responsibilities. Harnessing their shared- but, as of yet, unstated thoughts, and expressing them in language bold and clear, he urged them to make a true revolution of their struggles.

He forcefully declared the American cause to be much more than a question of separation from Britain. Announcing that “The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth,” he proclaimed it a campaign against the tyranny of hereditary privileges and for a democratic republic.

Even before he issued the call for independence, Paine dealt with Americans’ surviving emotional attachments to the King and Britain. Against those who reverently praised the benevolence of the English Constitution, he insisted that “it is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government that the crown is not as oppressive in England as in Turkey.”

Paine revealed the monarchy to be a ridiculous institution whose origins were anything but divinely ordained: “A French bastard [William the Conqueror] landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original. — It certainly hath no divinity in it… The plain truth is, that the antiquity of English monarchy will not bear looking into.”

Appealing to Americans’ religious and egalitarian sentiments, he added that “hereditary succession” compounds the evil of monarchy: “For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever.”

He humorously observed that “One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings, is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.” And he charged that “monarchy and succession have laid (not this or that kingdom only) but the [whole] world in blood and ashes.”

Paine utterly rejected the proposition that Britain was America’s “parent country.” He described British conduct as selfish and shameful: “Even brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon their families.” If anything “Europe, not England, is the parent country of America,” he contended: “This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe…we claim brotherhood with every European Christian…” Paine then turned to America. He appealed directly to Americans’ economic interests. Yet, in addition to outlining their tremendous commercial prospects, he offered a vision of independence that asked them to see themselves as “Americans.” He wrote so as to compel them to comprehend themselves as a people no longer subject to king and noble but – as was their “natural right” – free and equal before God and “the law” and governing themselves through democratically-elected representatives.

Urging unity, Paine portrayed America, not as thirteen separate entities, but as a nation-state: “Now is the seed time of continental union, faith and honour…Our strength is continental not provincial.” In favor of a republican government, he proposed a one-chamber Continental Congress headed by a rotating President. Finally, he surveyed America’s physical and material riches to prove it had the resources to actually accomplish the revolution.

Philosophers have argued about the originality of Paine’s ideas. But one thing is certain: They were radically original in both appeal and consequence. Elite colonial intellectuals had penned many a speech and pamphlet, but they had narrowly addressed themselves to the upper classes.

Paine – artisan by upbringing and intellectual by effort – addressed himself to Americans of all classes. The very style and content of his words entailed a more democratic conception of “the people” than had prevailed up to that time. Paine not only wrote so working people could understand, but also to integrate them into the political nation. Capturing the imagination of artisans and farmers in an unprecedented fashion, Paine recruited them to the cause of independence and encouraged them to restructure the political and social order. He devised a new, more democratic language of politics and way of arguing about politics than ever before had existed.

Praising America’s religious diversity, Paine connected the advance of religious freedom to the cause of independence and the creation of a new polity. America would serve as a model to the world and, welcoming of immigrants, as a refuge:

O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the world is over-run with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. -Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.

Paine’s vision of a democratic republic was potentially unlimited. This point was well understood, not only by loyalist Tories who desired reconciliation with England and vehemently denounced Common Sense and its author. It was also well understood by elite-minded patriots like John Adams who, while pleased by the call for independence, spoke critically of Paine and his ideas because they feared the popular, radical-democratic aspirations that his pamphlet evoked.

For Paine, the American Revolution possessed world-historical importance:” The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind,” he wrote. In fact, whereas before this time “revolution” had meant to merely “revolve,” as in an orbit, hereafter it would mean to overthrow an old regime and create a new one.

Weeks passed before anyone in the Continental Congress responded openly to Paine’s arguments. Apparently, delegates did not know what to do. But they created a great commotion in other parts. In Virginia, Edmund Randolph observed that Common Sense “insinuated itself into the hearts of the people”; in Massachusetts, Deacon Palmer noted that “I believe no pages were ever more eagerly read, nor more generally approved. People speak of it in rapturous praise”; and in the field commanding the Continental Army, George Washington reported how Paine’s pamphlet “is working a wonderful change in the minds of many men,” adding that his own reading of it had finally persuaded him of the need to break with Britain.

Reservations persisted. The propertied rich feared the new politics of the working classes, but most figured they would be better trying to lead than resist it. In the spring, colonial assemblies began to issue resolutions calling for independence and instructing their delegates at Philadelphia to follow suit. Finally, in June, Congress appointed a committee headed by Thomas Jefferson to draft an American Declaration of Independence. Paine was not a member of that committee, but all had read his Common Sense. And, on July 4,1776, the United States of America declared its independence. Paine’s contributions to the making of the American Revolution – indeed, to the making of the Age of Revolution and the modern world – had only just begun. He would go on to write the invaluable American Crisis Papers, the radical-democratic Rights of Man, the freethinking Age of Reason, and the social-democratic Agrarian Justice. For good reason he remains a hero, most of all to radicals, socialists, and religious freethinkers.

Paine clearly deserves a most prominent place in American memory. His words led the way in turning our rebellion into a war for independence, and our war for independence in to a revolution. Moreover, he helped to endow the nation’s history with a radical-democratic impulse, one which would encourage not only eighteenth-century workingmen to refashion the nation, but also later generations of American men and women who have found themselves oppressed and marginalized.

Contrary to the ambitions of our own powers that be: The stuggle for liberty, equality and democracy has not ended. I just hope we will continue to honor Paine, not only in our histories, but also in our politics.

The post ‘Common Sense’ and the American Revolution appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

Prepared for Delivery to the Thomas Paine National Historical Association and the Thomas Paine Foundation, Philadelphia, Pa, January 26, 2001.

Americans like many other people are lovers of anniversaries, especially when there is a zero or a five at the end of the heralded date (which is maybe why we celebrated the millennium in 2000 rather than 2001). Thomas Paine’s first real splash in the public eye occurred when his Common Sense appeared 225 years ago on January 10, 1776, a date which, we must remember, was nearly six months before Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence. In many respects, Paine was ahead of his compatriots in demanding separation from Britain. In any case, it is easy to argue that while many Americans talked among themselves of independence, Paine was the first to write about it in clear, lucid, stirring terms that were immediately accessible to anyone who either read his pamphlet or had it read to them.

Now I have been accused of citing Paine too much to comment on modern social and political problems. Some folks hold that historical figures obviously lived in particular periods, spoke a language that was peculiar to their time and place, and that the role of the historian is to try to figure out the intentions and meaning of their language on their terms, not ours. In other words, they say, you cannot take a person from his historical context, move him into the twenty-first century and expect to have him say reasonable things about our problems and issues. Well, in fact, they are right: I have found what I claim to be “a usable Paine,” as they charge, and will continue to use his wisdom, his observations, and his approach to problem-solving until they are no longer usable.

So what does Common Sense tell us today 225 years after its first appearance in this city-when America’s relationships with Britain were seriously deteriorating? Certainly, we have no such problems with Britain today. Indeed, we have no such problems with any nation. There is no doubt that the United States of America (a term that I still say Paine coined in the second essay in his American Crisis series, despite the arguments by William Safire of the New York Times) is the strongest country in the world from an economic and military perspective.2 What we may not be is the most ethical, and this is the lesson we may first learn from Paine’s work.

First. what is “common sense” and how do we know what it is when we see it (as Potter Stewart said of pornography in 1964)?3 Here’s story that while Paine did not use it. He would have, had he known it. A knight was riding through a forest one day when he came upon an arrow right in the middle of bull’s eye in a tree. Since this was not particularly unusual, he didn’t think much of it, but he became increasingly astounded when he came across several of them. They must have numbered ten or fifteen, and each arrow was perfectly centered in the bull’s eye. At last the knight came upon a young boy with a bow and arrow, and so he asked the lad whether he had been the one who had shot all those arrows. The boy answered, yes, it was he who had done the deed. But how did you learn to do it so well, asked the knight. The boy replied that he used common sense: he simply first shot the arrow into the tree, and then painted the target around it. . . . This is not because he was either lazy or unskilled, but that he just used “common sense.”

If only everything could be so clear.

For Paine, one thing was in fact clear (and a reflection of common sense): he knew that human beings had a “natural love of liberty.”4 And he knew too that people considered “freedom as personal property,” property of which no person could deprive others without violating nature.5 These phrases are Paine’s (though not from Common Sense, but rather from his later writings in 1778 and 1782). The problem for Americans in 1776 was how to capitalize on these two observations, which he drew from common sense? How should (or could) he make them realize that there really was no longer any alternative to separation?

His response was to figure out a way to tell them just that in irrefutable and indeed absolutist terms. He did just that by arguing in ways that immediately grabbed their attention. Fewer words during the revolutionary era are greater than these from his great pamphlet (though I’d argue that maybe some of Jefferson’s in the Declaration come close): “We have it in our power to begin the world over again” and “now is the seed-time of continental union, faith, and honor.”6 His intention was clear: to move America forward toward independence, and to do it now. More often than not, he thought that it took a great man, one actually like himself, Thomas Paine, to stimulate them to act. When this reawakening happened, they exercised “common sense.”

Some commentators have defined common sense as being coequal with a person’s moral powers.7 This interpretation, though essentially correct, is incomplete. Common sense was certainly part of human affections, our innate moral sensibilities. But common sense also included our ability to reason. Now, Paine was no epistemologist. He never set forth a lucid, cogent argument, as for example had Locke or Hume, to determine how the mind operated or how man knew anything at all. But he did have definitive ideas about how people knew how to conduct their lives. They do so through both their affections and their reason-through passion and reason.

Paine was not the first writer to use the phrase common sense as a faculty for understanding, nor was he the first to use it as a corollary to human moral sensibilities. Lord Shaftesbury though clearly an elitist, had, as did the eighteenth-century Scottish Common Sense philosophers, such as Thomas Reid. Although these philosophers’ works were available to him, Paine probably never read Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks (1711) or Reid’s Inquiry (1764). Even so, common sense, as a sensory faculty, a kind of sixth sense, encapsulated his idea of what a natural human being was and ought to be.8 The term was well known and obviously in broad usage at the end of the eighteenth century, including America.

For Shaftesbury, Reid, and Paine, common sense was an all-encompassing faculty of mind and feeling that gave people the power of immediate discernment.9 The Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid observed that common sense forced him to “to take my own existence, and the existence of other things upon trust,” and to believe that snow was cold and honey sweet.10 These things were knowable spontaneously when people first encountered them. For the skeptic to deny this phenomenon undermined the true basis of human knowledge.

But how did common sense operate? Although epistemologically vague, Paine used it to express both reason and sensibility.11 Common sense was the means by which the mind understood the way the heart felt about reality. It had nothing to do with abstract reasoning or metaphysical concepts. It was wholly empirical, since it was based only on sensory perceptions. After all, the Americans did not need abstract ideas of freedom to convince them that the British oppressed them. They needed only to listen to the dictates of their common sense. As Paine noted, “common sense will tell us.”12 It will tell us because the powers of the mind and the heart are like lightning bolts of spontaneous discernment. The mind knew and the heart felt that “however our eyes may be dazzled with snow, or our ears deceived by sound; however prejudice may warp our wills, or interest darken our understanding, the simple voice of nature and our reason will say, it is right.”13 To see how this works, it is imperative, in short, to analyze the linguistic and epistemological roots of the expression common sense.

First, common sense by necessity included a person’s ability to reason. As Paine said in The Age of Reason, “the most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.”14 As for America’s relationship to England prior to 1776, “it is repugnant to reason. . . to suppose that this continent can longer remain subject to any external power.”15 Indeed, he once declared that the new era of politics in which he lived was “the age of reason.”16 Paine did not say it was “the age of common sense!” And of course, he named one of his books with that very title. Common sense was, therefore, clearly a function of man’s rational capabilities, his ability to reason.

But common sense included affection as well. It did not feel right to men, that relationship with Britain, because it violated their moral sensibilities. All one must do to gauge whether the colonies ought to remain linked to Britain was to judge the relationship by “those feelings and affections which nature justifies.. . . Examine the passions and feelings of mankind,” he said, and judge that relationship by the standards that nature supplied.17 During the war with Britain, as the military situation deteriorated, “what we have to do,” said Paine, “is as clear as light, and the way to do it as straight as a line.”18 This light

• this clarity – was what common sense provided to people. Such clarity, if one could follow one’s true nature, gave them two options.

First, they could achieve positive political and social changes. They would know by both reason and affection, what was right, what was wrong in society and government. Second, common sense was the vehicle for people’s inventiveness. As common sense informed them when and how to make or invent revolutions, by extension it was also the creative spark that moved them to enhance progress. Human inventions improved life for everyone. When Paine was struggling with the design of his iron bridge, he realized he had to moderate his “ambition with a little ‘common sense’ in order to make the necessary modifications.”19 It was a powerful turn of phrase that Paine undoubtedly knew would deeply impress his wide American audience.

Every person, he taught, possessed common sense. The problem was that it became impaired when brute force enslaved the people, when kings and lords (ruffians and their banditti) made their subjects do their will.20 They deprived them of their freedom to choose, and they destroyed or badly compromised their sense of self. When that happened, common sense was distorted. People no longer thought straight (as a line), and nothing was clear (as light). Such force had a numbing effect on their minds and hearts. They might never even feel the pain of that force and might never be aware of it.

This state of affairs violated man’s nature as a creature with the ability to reason. “Men,” said Paine, “have a right to reason for themselves.”21 When kings and their cohorts stole this right from their subjects, these subjects were no longer whole persons. They were slaves, the puppets of others who used them as they saw fit. They lost their sense of self and became objects-indeed, the property-of others. For Paine, human beings universally shared this same nature. How then did he explain that some men like himself were indeed different?

Here Paine used his natural vs. unnatural theme in a linguistically powerful way, convincing his readers, though with an argument less certain to persuade those more philosophically inclined. He defined the characteristics of the thieves of common sense and human freedom by virtually defining them out of humanity itself. These denatured creatures were usurpers, these kings, these aristocrats, their followers, and later the Federalists, too. They were unable to use their natural powers of common sense. Their desire for dominance and violence proscribed them from living a life of reason and moral affection. “A mind habituated to actions of meanness and injustice, commits them without reflection, or with a very partial one,” he told the Abby Raynal just a few years later.22 They relied only on their basest instincts, not common sense, to seek power over others. Thus, base instinct (in this case, seeking power and dominion) opposed common sense (reason and sensibility).

The British government, especially George III (whom he never specifically named in Common Sense because his target was kingship generally and not individual kings), was such a creature. He once noted in regard to the king’s cabinet that a universal human characteristic was the inability to change once intellectual patterns and habits were firmly set. “Once the mind loses the sense of its own dignity,” he said to Raynal, “it loses, likewise, the ability of judging it in another.”23 Several years later, while in France, Paine modified his view when he advocated that Louis XVI’s life be spared. But in 1776, the Americans had no choice.24

The British government had failed to use its collective common sense to deal fairly with the Americans. Such a failure meant that Britain distorted America’s well-being because the British viewed the Americans in Britain’s own image. Addressing Raynal again, Paine wrote that “the American war has thrown Britain into such a variety of absurd situations, that, in arguing from herself she sees not in what conduct national dignity consists in other countries.”25 For the same reason, the British wanted to plunder the Dutch. They figured that the Netherlands would never resist them, only to find themselves eventually at war anyway. Once a nation no longer used common sense, no matter what that nation did, its actions were illogical, wrong, and immoral. Its actions defied, in short, its natural inclination to do good. This was both affectively and rationally true.

Common sense was in part rooted in a person’s affective nature because implanted in him were “unextinguishable feelings” to do good. These feelings, he wrote in Common Sense, “distinguish us from the herd of common animals,” he said. “Otherwise, the social compact would dissolve, and justice be extirpated from the earth, or have only a casual existence.”26 Man’s affections drove him into the social realm in the first place. This was a result of common sense. He lived with his fellows in a cooperative arrangement for the benefit of all.

A social contract existed between men outside the realm of the sovereign and his lords. “There necessarily was a time when government did not exist, and consequently there could exist no governors to form such a compact with.”27 Although Paine did not identify Locke explicitly, his language describing the social contract was Lockean, and he was never loathe giving a Lockean lesson.28 “The fact therefore must be, that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.”29 A man was fully conscious of the self in this decision-making so that he consciously came together with his fellows to form society for reasons having to do with his natural affections toward others.

As he wrote of these “unextinguishable feelings” and the historic ideal of the social contract, he knew full well that George III and his ministry did not possess such feelings and never would, nor would they ever fully understand the implications of the contract. They felt no sense of justice because they were in fact different. Common sense informed the Americans that a continued relationship with Britain was doomed. “To talk of friendship with those in whom our reason forbids us to have faith . . . is madness and folly”, i.e., it was against reason and sensibility.30 The people themselves must use their common sense to assert their right to participate in governmental decision-making.

Monarchical government in England had distorted the proper relationship between the people and their government. This distortion arose because common sense was lacking. Kings and lords and people like them were inhuman. He avoided having to clarify why he thought human nature was universal by literally reading them out of the human race. It was a powerful argument to hear, one linguistically encapsulated in a highly didactic, imperative tone, even if it were logically bewildering to read of a human being who lacked human nature. Then again, Paine was not addressing an audience of philosophers, but rather an audience of lower and middle class Americans who, he thought, would respond to this imagery in a way that would convince them to support America’s separation from Britain.

So now, what does all this tell us today? How does Paine’s great pamphlet speak to us in the twenty-first century? The answer is not hard to fathom, and it will lead us directly to the reasons why Philadelphia should honor Thomas Paine. First, let’s look at how he might evaluate the latest folly of the American people, the election of George W. Bush to the presidency of the United States. And we need not look far. Among the many famous lines in Common Sense appears these: “Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.”31 I think we may safely say that while we will not have the worst possible government for the next four years, we will have one that Paine would have absolutely adored because it would have given him such fodder for his literary cannon (and I do mean with the double “n”) to attack for its misaligned policies. And to have a know-nothing president, a man who has probably never read a book much less a newspaper, and who has to rely on advisors to make decisions because his knowledge is so weak is something Paine would have found both amusing and maddening. Here is a president without common sense, without any understanding at all, and who could do only mischief in office.

Even worse is the mixture, or what he would have called the admixture, of politics and religion. John Ashcroft has told his audience at Bob Jones University that Jesus is the king of America. For Paine, this is pure arrogance (and of course absolutely wrong). Even in 1776 when we might say that there was a pinch of faith still ingrained in Paine’s heart, he never argued, like Ashcroft, that Jesus is the king of America. In fact, it was the opposite: “the world may know, that . . . in American THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute government the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.”32 Ashcroft, who is to be the top law enforcement officer in the United States, hardly understands this when he proclaims that.Jesus is king of America. In the meantime, in his celebrated interview with the Southern Partisan Quarterly Review, a well-known racist journal (a “sick magazine”, according to Bob Herbert of the New York Times), he proclaimed the fight against slavery as “the perverted agenda” of those who fought to end that horrid practice.33 He wants Americans to pray – privately and in all public institutions, including schools and other government buildings – but when he announces that the attempt to end slavery was “perverted,” how can we possibly believe that he is a man of any faith at all? His attempts to convince us that he didn’t know what Bob Jones University or the Southern Partisan were all about are pretty disingenuous. He is a man without credibility – how could he possibly be otherwise? If he were a man of principle, true principle, he would never have claimed that he would enforce laws that deny those principles. Like his president, he is an opportunist, one of those denatured creatures Paine attacked in Common Sense.

In the meantime, maybe we could say that Paine would favor President Bush’s intentions to cut taxes, even if the vast majority of taxes go to the wealthiest eight percent. As a man of the eighteenth-century as we’ve indicated, he believed that the best government is that government which governs the least, it is but “a necessary evil.” On the other hand, when he outlined in the Rights of Man a full-scale welfare program, including one of the first social security proposals ever set forth, it is clear that he thought there are lots of things a “good” government could do to help its people.34 He also must have known that government had to have the financial wherewithal to handle such major programs and that taxes would have to be levied on Americans. In fact, even those Americans who fought the imperial Britain for independence were not opposed to paying taxes in general – they thought that everyone should pay them, including the aristocracy (and certainly the Penns on their estates in America). Americans regarded taxes as voluntary gifts to the crown – they were not to be imposed by a distant Parliament, but levied on themselves to be sent to London because they, the Americans, wanted to pay them. So when taxes are cut, and they may well be soon, we can be certain that if the Bush administration has anything to do with it, the agencies that will be most hurt will not be defense, but the social programs that cannot stand up to the perils of “compassionate conservatism.”

But should we be doing something about the surplus in terms of paying down the national debt, as the Clinton administration and Gore campaign had proposed? I should think that Paine would have thought that a debt the size of ours (nearing $5 trillion) would easily bankrupt the nation. It has always been a curiosity to many Paine observers that in Common Sense he actually advocated a debt. “Debts we have none,” he wrote, “and whatever we may contract on this account will serve as a glorious memento of our virtue. . . . No nation ought to be without a debt. A national debt is a national bond.”35 But Paine was talking about a new nation – one that needed the massive expenditures to insure that tyranny was not only to die, but would not revive. Thus it was that the debt was to stimulate, as he put it, a national bond: a unity of the people as they paid for their defense, especially, in his view, a navy. America in 2001 is not America in 1776. I suspect he would be horrified to see how the debt has gone way beyond creating national unity and leading to bankruptcy for any other country.

Finally, what would Paine have said about the fact that the United States has become one of the most regulated, if not over regulated, societies in the world? Again, we refer to his observation that government is a necessary evil. When power is concentrated in the hands of the few that, by very definition, is an example of tyranny. To allow, for example, oil companies, the trucking industry, or whatever to do whatever they want because we naively believe that they will always do the right thing is to fall into the trap of denying the reality of human nature. Already the trucking and oil industry has demanded the Bush administration relax, if not terminate, the strict clean air regulations the Clinton administration put in effect last year.36 And who has the president nominated to become the new Secretary of the Interiror, but none other than the chief non-regulator of the environment, Gail Norton, whose years as Attorney General of Colorado saw industry get away with just about anything and everything it desired. There is probably no law enforcement in America, past or present, who sought to undo the Endangered Species Act as much as she did while in Colorado. She would be expected to do as much as a protege of James Watt, who had been her boss at the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which sought to give industry a larger, if not complete, say over the disposition of public lands. Like John Ashcroft, however, she promised to enforce the very laws she opposed for so many years. Again, so much for principle.

I could go on and on, but I won’t bore you with what I think you already know, even if you disagree with some of my observations. I will conclude by saying why I think Philadelphia should honor Thomas Paine. Just last October, a new biography of Benjamin Franklin appeared with the title “The First American.”37 I don’t wish to draw anything from Franklin, even if I possibly could, or to insult those among you who [are], as I am, a lover of Ben Franklin. But I have to say that I originally was going to title my Paine biography “the first American.” I decided not to because I thought it had a bit of a racist ring to it in that the native Americans were really the first Americans, although someone argued that they were not Americans since that concept did not exist until the English first arrived on these shores. But just as Philadelphia and Franklin are so uniquely united in the imagination of most people so are Philadelphia and Paine. (And don’t forget that Franklin was born in Boston and went to Philadelphia when he was seventeen.) Philadelphia without Paine is, to me, a hand without fingers: useless and ugly. I hope that the city honors him, and soon. Thanks for having me here tonight, and thanks so much for listening. I’ll be happy to take questions.

Footnotes

1. Many of the ideas in this presentation were first published in Jack Fruchtman Jr., Thomas Paine and the Religion of Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), chpt. two.
2. Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. II (13 January 1777), in Philip Foner, ed., The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, 2 vols. (New York: Citadel Press, 1945) ,I:59.
3. For Safire’s position, see William Safire, On Language: Name that Nation, The New York Times Magazine, 5 July 3.
4. Justice Potter Stewart made his famous remark, I know it [pornography] when I see it,” in a concurring opinion in the 1964 case of Jacobellis v. Ohio.
5. Thomas Paine, Letter to the Abbe Raynal (I782), in ibid., II, 258.
6. Thomas Paine, “A Serious Address to the People of Pennsylvania on the Present Situation of Their Affairs,” Pennsylvania Packet (1 December 1778), in ibid., II,286.
7. Thomas Paine, Common Sense, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976),82, 120.
8. See, for example, Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),103,289,
9. As is well known, Benjamin Rush took credit for suggesting the title of Common Sense for Paine’s pamphlet. Said Rush in his autobiography, “when Mr. Paine had finished his pamphlet, I advised him to shew it to Dr. Franklin, Mr. Rittenhouse, and Saml. Adams, all of whom I knew were decided friends to American independence. I mention these facts to refute a report that Mr. Paine was assisted in composing his pamphlet by one or more of the above gentlemen. They never saw it till it was written, and then only by my advice. I gave it at his request the title of ‘Common Sense.”‘ George W. Corner, ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), ll4.
10. Shaftesbury’s elitism, which would have been wholly anathema to Paine, was outlined in Lois Whitney, Primitivism and the Idea of Progress in English Popular Literature of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1934),33. For this reason, he receives but a mention here. For a revisionist view, see Michelle Buchanan, “Savages, Noble and Otherwise, and the French Enlightenment,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture,15 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 97-109. See also Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politeness in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Robert Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, I67I-1713 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984). For a useful, but somewhat dated work, see Alfred Owen Aldridge, Shaftesbury and the Deist Manifesto (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, TransactionsV, ol. 41, Pt. 2, l95l).
11. Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, ed. Timothy Duggan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970),19.
12. For Rousseau’s notion of common sense, which is quite close to Paine’s, see the passage in Emile, where Rousseau recounted the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar.” “I am not a great philosopher,” the Vicar said, “and I care little to be one. But I sometimes have good sense, and I always love the truth. . . – Reason is common to us, and we have the same interest in listening to it. If I think well, why would you not think as do I?” “Bon sens” is indeed, for Rousseau here, reason as a universal attribute of men. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, Allan Bloom, trans. (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 266 (emphasis added). See the entire “Profession of Faith”, 266-313.
13. Paine, Common Sense, 105.
14. Ibid., 68. When Fliegelman speaks of Paine’s idea of sensibility, he relates it to nature by saying, “it is nature, not reason, that cannot forgive England.” He thus makes clear the conjunction between nature and affection (in common sense), but he does not cite Paine’s last quoted statement in full when Paine himself conjoined nature with both moral affection and reason. See Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims,103.
15. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, in The Complete Writings,I,463.
16. Paine, Common Sense, 89 (emphasis added).
17. Paine, Rights of Man,268.
18. Ibid (emphasis added).
19. See Wilson Carey McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973),
20. Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. V (21March 1778), in The Complete Writings, I, I25.
21. Thomas Paine to Sir George Staunton, Etq., Spring 1789, in The Complete Writings,II, 1041.
22. Paine used the term banditti when referring to William the Conqueror as that “French bastard landing with an armed banditti . . . is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original.” Paine, Common Sense, 78.
23. Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. VII (21 November 1778), in The Complete Writings,I, 143.
24. Paine, Letter to Abbe Raynal, in The Complete Writings,Il, 252.
25. Ibid.,253.
26. Thomas Paine, “Reasons for Preserving the Life of Louis Capet,” (16 January l793), in The Complete Writings, II, 551-55; “Should Louis XVI be Respited?” (19 January 1793), in The Complete Writings, II, 556-58 (the latter includes Marat’s interruptions of Paine’s speech). Paine’s impassioned plea for the life of Louis XVI may be attributable to a number of things: Paine’s maturity by 1793, his realization that the French under Louis were quite helpful during the American war against Britain, or perhaps his awareness that the revolution itself was potentially heading toward a negative end.
27. Paine, Letter to Abbe Raynal, in The Complete Writings,II, 253.
28. Common Sense, 99-100.
29. ibid., 92.
30. See Caroline Robbins,”The Lifelong Education of Thomas Paine,1737-1809: Some Reflections of His Acquaintance Among Books,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 127 (June 1983) : l4l-42.
31. Paine, Common Sense, 92.
32. 30 Ibid., 99 (emphasis added).
33. Ibid.,65.
34. Ibid., 98. Emphasis in the original.
35. See the column by Bob Herbert, “Unseemly Alliances,” New York Times, 18 January 2001.
36. The program is to be found in the second part of the Rights of Man (see chpt. five, “Of Ways and Means” in that work).
37. Paine, Common Sense, 10l-02.
38. See Douglas Jehl, “Oil Industry Seeks Softening of Clinton Clean-Air Rules”, in The New York Times,25 January 2001A 20.
39. H. W. Brands, The First American:The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Doubleday, 2000).

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