Unlike the political theorists employed by our own self-important news media, Paine doesn’t think it the duty of the political writer to keep things running quietly and smoothly. His aim is to arm ordinary individuals with the weapon with which to defend themselves against organized deception and arbitrary power.
Those studying the reaction by Americans to Thomas Paine’s ideas, and, perhaps, to him as an individual, will find the judicious selection of works reprinted herein of immense value. Of course, there are works that one feels should have been included, but where does this process end, another six volumes?
The first three years in America were critical to Thomas Paine’s development as a political thinker. They marked his change from being an unknown individual to a man who could influence world events and they were part of the preparation for his later great work The Rights of Man.
It is well known that Paine came close to losing the fight to establish democracy within the ruling circles in the American Colonies, because of the wish of John Adams, an American Federalist Congressman, who wanted to have a monarchy in the new United States of America. Paine would never have accepted this, because, to him, democracy was everything.
Alexander Radishchev (1749-1802) the first Russian radical and Thomas Paine’s contemporary, was the first to understand Paine’s momentous significance for modern history. Radishchev expressed this view already in the 1870s.
Paine used Common Sense to convince the American colonists that to be fully independent and free, the King and what he stood for had to be discarded. A republican form of government had to replace monarchy and nobility.
The traditional way of looking at Paine as an Enlightenment political propagandist or as a Newtonian Deist is not explicit enough to distinguish him from others. Nor do these descriptions of Paine enable one to explain why Paine appeals to such a variety of radical, liberal and even conservative causes.
IN the midst of the controversy over Silas Deane’s negotiations with the French government, the most sensational political scandal of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine brought forth several satirical pieces in verse and prose under a new pseudonym, Comus.
THE BRADFORD EDITION, February 14, 1776 Man knows no Master save creating Heaven Or those whom choice and common good ordain. – Thomson. INTRODUCTION Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial
