In , Paine began work as an excise officer on the Sussex coast. In , he wrote his first pamphlet, an argument tracing the work grievances of his fellow excise officers. Paine printed 4, copies and distributed them to members of British Parliament. In , Paine met Benjamin Franklin , who is believed to have persuaded Paine to immigrate to America, providing Paine with a letter of introduction. Three months later, Paine was on a ship to America, nearly dying from a bout of scurvy.
Paine immediately found work in journalism when he arrived in Philadelphia, becoming managing editor of Philadelphia Magazine. By the end of that year, , copies—an enormous amount for its time—had been printed and sold. It remains in print today. In it, Paine argues that representational government is superior to a monarchy or other forms of government based on aristocracy and heredity.
Paine also claimed that the American colonies needed to break with England in order to survive and that there would never be a better moment in history for that to happen. He argued that America was related to Europe as a whole, not just England, and that it needed to freely trade with nations like France and Spain.
Starting in April , Paine worked for two years as secretary to the Congressional Committee for Foreign Affairs and then became the clerk for the Pennsylvania Assembly at the end of In March , the assembly passed an abolition act that freed 6, slaves , to which Paine wrote the preamble. Washington appealed to Congress to no avail, and went so far as to plead with all the state assemblies to pay Paine a reward for his work.
Only two states agreed: New York gifted Paine a house and a acre estate in New Rochelle, while Pennsylvania awarded him a small monetary compensation. The Revolution over, Paine explored other pursuits, including inventing a smokeless candle and designing bridges. Paine published his book Rights of Man in two parts in and , a rebuttal of the writing of Irish political philosopher Edmund Burke and his attack on the French Revolution , of which Paine was a supporter.
Paine journeyed to Paris to oversee a French translation of the book in the summer of Paine himself was threatened with execution by hanging when he was mistaken for an aristocrat, and he soon ran afoul of the Jacobins, who eventually ruled over France during the Reign of Terror, the bloodiest and most tumultuous years of the French Revolution.
In Paine was arrested for treason because of his opposition to the death penalty, most specifically the mass use of the guillotine and the execution of Louis XVI. He was detained in Luxembourg, where he began work on his next book, "The Age of Reason. Released in , partly thanks to the efforts of the then-new American minister to France, James Monroe , Paine became convinced that George Washington had conspired with French revolutionary politician Maximilien de Robespierre to have Paine imprisoned.
The Federalists used the letter in accusations that Paine was a tool for French revolutionaries who also sought to overthrow the new American government. Even his piece in the summer of Answer to Four Questions on the Legislative and Executive Power is not especially illuminating. Most modern commentators tend not to notice this.
Paine is clearly a democrat, he advocates democratic institutions, and he rejects those of monarchy and aristocracy. But such judgments are often deeply anachronistic. If we examine what Paine actually says, we see that his own perspective was one which evolved and remained inclusive in many areas.
It seems clear that Paine was a republican—but in a changing and always very specific sense. In Rights of Man he understands it as government by election and representation I, —a definition of republic that matches closely that advocated by Madison in the Federalist Papers. In Rights of Man he switches back to the earlier formulation:. But, in many respects, he does little especially innovative. The one major impact of his work was to bring to a wide audience some of the thinking that he shared with both Madison and Jefferson about the distinctive features of the American form of government.
In Rights of Man Paine shifts the ground substantially. He hardly mentions events in France, and barely touches on Burke. What began in America is now seen, not as an exception, but as the trigger for a renovation or the world as a whole.
And, again, it is America that is the model—where the country subsisted with hardly any form of government throughout the revolution and the subsequent period. Moreover, America becomes the model for reform: a society that agrees articles, establishes a constitution, and is able periodically to revise the constitution as the collective act of the people. This is a hymn to representative government, to minimal government, and to government with the primary concern of protecting the natural rights of man more effectively.
It is not a defense of democracy or universal suffrage. In the final chapter of Rights of Man , Paine addresses the expenditure of the British state and to issues of commerce. Since his Letter to the Abbe Raynal , he had expressed a growing confidence in commerce as a means of uniting the interests of nations and rendering outdated and irrelevant the European system of war.
The final chapter of Rights of Man develops the same view, suggesting the incompatibility between monarchical regimes and the growth of commerce and national wealth, and going on to itemize the taxation raised in Britain to support the costs of monarchical wars.
Paine then develops a series of welfare proposals that seem to have no underlying principle of justice, but are proffered wholly as a way of redirecting spending. He advocates that poor relief be removed as a local tax and replaced by central provision from government coffers; that pensions be offered for those advanced in age, starting at 50, and in full form at 60; that provision be made for the education of the poor; that maternity be benefit be granted to all women immediately after the birth of a child; that a fund be established for the burial of those who die away from home; and that arrangements be made for the many young people who travel to the metropolis in search of a livelihood to provide initial accommodation and support until they find work.
Paine ends by identifying provision for those who have served in the army and navy, and suggesting that, as demands on the public purse from these sources declines, then items of indirect taxation might also be lifted, and the burden of taxation gradually shifted towards a progressive taxation on landed property, coupled with the abolition of primogeniture, and a progressive tax on the income from investments. Unlike the final chapter of Rights of Man, Agrarian Justice provides a principled defense for welfare provision, rooted in a conception of the original equality of man and the equal right to a subsistence from the earth.
These payments are a matter of right, not of charity. The money is to be raised from progressive taxation in inherited wealth and will contribute to its more equal distribution.
To modern critics it may seem odd to couple the essentially libertarian sentiments of the opening of the second part of Rights of Man with a major raft of welfare reforms. But Paine clearly did not think about these reforms as an extension of government.
Although he does not make the point, they seem to be more a matter of administration, and that is in keeping with his essentially consensual view of the formal exercise of responsibilities by those invested with the confidence of the nation as a whole. See Van Parijs and Vanderborght, He provides two main arguments.
In the Letter… he argues that as every man over the age of twenty-one pays taxes in one form of another, so everyone has a right to vote—or a form of entitlement through contribution.
To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case. In his account of the origin of rights in Rights of Man , he suggests that those like Burke who appeal to the authority of antiquity simply do not go back far enough:. For a man so frequently called an atheist, Paine shows a remarkable confidence in the divine order of the creation.
The Age of Reason is not an atheist tract, but a deist one. It combines scathing criticism of claims to authority for the bible by religious authorities, with an expression of confidence in a divinely ordered world, revealed in nature through the exercise of reason, that drew heavily on the lectures he had attended in London prior to leaving for America, given by James Ferguson and Benjamin Martin.
Indeed, he seemed to have committed their account to memory, and uses the text to lay out the order of the universe, to speculate on the possibility of a plurality of worlds, and to dismiss all claims for mystery, miracles and prophecy. Although the later parts of Age of Reason descend into detailed interpretation and controversy, and lose much of their intuitive appeal, the first part is a powerful confession of rationalist faith in a divine creator whose design can be appreciated by man in the Bible of Creation, whose principles are eternal, and which rejects as meaningless the claims to authority and the theology of the Christian Churches.
And as simple government avoids us becoming the dupes of fraud, so simple belief protects us from the fraud of priestcraft, which so often runs hand in hand with despotism. They follow much of the deist writing of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. But, as with much Paine wrote, the bluntness and sweeping rhetoric that alienates the more philosophically inclined modern reader were an essential element in his success and his continuing importance.
Paine spoke to ordinary people—and they read him in their thousands—indeed, he was often read aloud in public houses and coffee shops. He claimed no authority over them, but helped them to doubt those who did claim such authority, whether civil or religious, and he affirmed over and over again their right and responsibility to think for themselves and to reach their own judgment on matters.
In many respects, he was a moderately respectable radical, with a deep suspicion of the hierarchical systems of Europe, a brimming confidence in his own judgment that his experience in America confirmed—which expressed itself in his willingness to tackle a range of subject areas, including bridge-building and scientific experiments—and with a growing sense that he knew how to communicate, with powerful effect, with a popular audience at exactly the point at which that popular audience was beginning to feel and test its political influence.
Paine was vehemently attacked in his own lifetime—if the scurrilous biography was not invented for him it certainly attained something of an art form in his depiction. He was outlawed in England, nearly lost his life in France, and was largely ostracized and excluded when he returned to America. A sizable collection of papers at his New Rochelle farm were destroyed in a fire, and his oeuvre remains contested, at least at the margins. Biographers have drawn heavily on early work by Moncure Conway, but while several new accounts appear each decade few add much to our knowledge.
But until very recently he has remained on the edges of the canon of political thought, easily dismissed by those who want more substantial philosophical fare, and subject to fits of enthusiasm by writers who are either insufficiently attuned to the complexities of the period or are simply uncritical. Such an attitude does poor service to the history, to the ideas, or to the man. Life 2. Political Theory 2. Religion 4. But he goes on to insist that When a people agree to form themselves into a republic…it is understood that they mutually resolve and pledge themselves to each other, rich and poor alike, to support this rule of equal justice among them… and they renounce as detestable, the power of exercising, at any future time any species of despotism over each other, or of doing a thing not right in itself, because a majority of them may have the strength of numbers sufficient to accomplish it.
CW II, As a result, The sovereignty in a republic is exercised to keep right and wrong in their proper and distinct places, and never suffer the one to usurp the place of the other. A republic, properly understood, is a sovereignty of justice, in contradistinction to a sovereignty of will.
CW II, This position sits uncomfortably with more direct and active interpretations of the sovereignty of the people or any general will. In Rights of Man he switches back to the earlier formulation: What is called a republic is not any particular form of government. It is wholly characteristical of the purport, matter, or object for which government ought to be instituted, and on which it is to be employed, res-publica, the public affairs, or the public good….
Republican government is no other than government established and conducted for the interest of the public, as well individually as collectively.
See Van Parijs and Vanderborght, 2. In his account of the origin of rights in Rights of Man , he suggests that those like Burke who appeal to the authority of antiquity simply do not go back far enough: If antiquity is to be an authority, a thousand such authorities may be produced, successively contradicting each other; but if we proceed on, we shall at last come out right; we shall come to the time when man came from the hand of his Maker…we have now arrived at the origin of man, and at the origin of his rights…It is authority against authority all the way, until we come to the divine origin of the rights of man, at the Creation.
Here or inquiries find a resting-place, and out reason finds a home. I, 3. Religion For a man so frequently called an atheist, Paine shows a remarkable confidence in the divine order of the creation. Conway ed. Hazel Burgess ed. See Philp , p. Contemporary Writing F. Oldys [pseud for G. Mitchell ed. Paine presents pages of biblical evidence detailing God's wrath at the idea of the Jews having a king. The conclusion Paine reaches is that the practice of monarchy originates from sin, and is an institution that the Bible and God condemn.
Paine calls hereditary succession an abominable practice. He says that even if people were to choose to have a king, that does not legitimize that King's child acting as a future ruler. Furthermore, hereditary succession has brought with it innumerable evils, such as incompetent kings, corruption, and civil war. Having dispensed with the preliminary theoretical issues, Paine sets in to discuss the details of the American situation.
In response to the argument that America has flourished under British rule, and therefore ought to stay under the king, Paine says that such an argument fails to realize that America has evolved and no longer needs Britain's help. Some say that Britain has protected America, and therefore deserves allegiance, but Paine responds that Britain has only watched over America in order to secure its own economic well-being.
Paine adds that most recently, instead of watching over the colonies, the British have been attacking them, and are therefore undeserving of American loyalty. Paine says that the colonies have little to gain from remaining attached to Britain. Commerce can be better conducted with the rest of Europe, but only after America becomes independent.
Paine also asserts that if the colonies remain attached to Britain, the same problems that have arisen in the past will arise in the future. Paine argues that it is necessary to seek independence now, as to do otherwise would only briefly cover up problems that will surely reemerge. Paine even proposes the form of government that the independent colonies should adopt.
His recommendation is for a representative democracy that gives roughly equal weight to each of the colonies. Paine explains why the current time is a good time to break free of Britain.
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