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Overview
Whatever is my right as a man is also the right of another; and it becomes my duty to guarantee as well as to possess.
In Rights of Man, Founding Father of the United States Thomas Paine makes a compelling case in favor of the French Revolution. Written in response to Edmund Burke’s highly critical Reflections on the Revolution in France, its forceful rebuke of aristocratic rule and persuasive endorsement of self-government made it one of the most influential political statements in history. Paine asserts that human rights are not granted by the government but inherent to man’s nature. He goes on to argue that the purpose of government is to protect these natural rights, and if a government fails to do so, its people are duty-bound to revolution.
Originally published in two parts, in 1791 and 1792, Rights of Man was a popular sensation in the United States, while in England, its incendiary views were seen as a threat to the Crown. For its erudite prose and rigorous argumentation, it remains a classic text of political thought.
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504044431 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 04/11/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 488 |
| Sales rank: | 909,401 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Rights of Man
By Thomas Paine
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4443-1
CHAPTER 1
PART THE FIRST
BEING AN ANSWER TO MR. BURKE'S ATTACK ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
AMONG THE INCIVILITIES by which nations or individuals provoke and irritate each other, Mr. Burke's pamphlet on the French revolution is an extraordinary instance. Neither the People of France, nor the National Assembly, were troubling themselves about the affairs of England, or the English Parliament; and that Mr. Burke should commence an unprovoked attack upon them, both in Parliament and in public, is a conduct that cannot be pardoned on the score of manners, nor justified on that of policy.
There is scarcely an epithet of abuse to be found in the English language, with which Mr. Burke has not loaded the French Nation and the National Assembly. Everything which rancour, prejudice, ignorance or knowledge could suggest, is poured forth in the copious fury of near four hundred pages. In the strain and on the plan Mr. Burke was writing, he might have written on to as many thousands. When the tongue or the pen is let loose in a frenzy of passion, it is the man, and not the subject, that becomes exhausted.
Hitherto Mr. Burke has been mistaken and disappointed in the opinions he had formed of the affairs of France; but such is the ingenuity of his hope, or the malignancy of his despair, that it furnishes him with new pretences to go on. There was a time when it was impossible to make Mr. Burke believe there would be any revolution in France. His opinion then was, that the French had neither spirit to undertake it nor fortitude to support it; and now that there is one, he seeks an escape by condemning it.
Not sufficiently content with abusing the National Assembly, a great part of his work is taken up with abusing Dr. Price (one of the best-hearted men that lives) and the two societies in England known by the name of the Revolution Society and the Society for Constitutional Information.
Dr. Price had preached a sermon on the 4th of November, 1789, being the anniversary of what is called in England the Revolution, which took place 1688. Mr. Burke, speaking of this sermon, says: "The political Divine proceeds dogmatically to assert, that by the principles of the Revolution, the people of England have acquired three fundamental rights:
1. To choose our own governors.
2. To cashier them for misconduct.
3. To frame a government for ourselves."
Dr. Price does not say that the right to do these things exists in this or in that person, or in this or in that description of persons, but that it exists in the whole; that it is a right resident in the nation. Mr. Burke, on the contrary, denies that such a right exists in the nation, either in whole or in part, or that it exists anywhere; and, what is still more strange and marvellous, he says: "that the people of England utterly disclaim such a right, and that they will resist the practical assertion of it with their lives and fortunes." That men should take up arms and spend their lives and fortunes, not to maintain their rights, but to maintain they have not rights, is an entirely new species of discovery, and suited to the paradoxical genius of Mr. Burke.
The method which Mr. Burke takes to prove that the people of England have no such rights, and that such rights do not now exist in the nation, either in whole or in part, or anywhere at all, is of the same marvellous and monstrous kind with what he has already said; for his arguments are that the persons, or the generation of persons, in whom they did exist, are dead, and with them the right is dead also. To prove this, he quotes a declaration made by Parliament about a hundred years ago, to William and Mary, in these words: "The Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, do, in the name of the people aforesaid" (meaning the people of England then living) "most humbly and faithfully submit themselves, their heirs and posterities, for Ever." He quotes a clause of another Act of Parliament made in the same reign, the terms of which he says, "bind us" (meaning the people of their day), "our heirs and our posterity, to them, their heirs and posterity, to the end of time."
Mr. Burke conceives his point sufficiently established by producing those clauses, which he enforces by saying that they exclude the right of the nation for ever. And not yet content with making such declarations, repeated over and over again, he farther says, "that if the people of England possessed such a right before the Revolution" (which he acknowledges to have been the case, not only in England, but throughout Europe, at an early period), "yet that the English Nation did, at the time of the Revolution, most solemnly renounce and abdicate it, for themselves, and for all their posterity, for ever."
As Mr. Burke occasionally applies the poison drawn from his horrid principles, not only to the English nation, but to the French revolution and the National Assembly, and charges that august, illuminated and illuminating body of men with the epithet of usurpers, I shall, sans ceremonie, place another system of principles in opposition to his.
The English Parliament of 1688 did a certain thing, which, for themselves and their constituents, they had a right to do, and which it appeared right should be done. But, in addition to this right, which they possessed by delegation, they set up another right by assumption, that of binding and controlling posterity to the end of time. The case, therefore, divides itself into two parts; the right which they possessed by delegation, and the right which they set up by assumption. The first is admitted; but with respect to the second, I reply: There never did, there never will, and there never can, exist a Parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the "end of time," or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; and therefore all such clauses, acts or declarations by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void. Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow. The Parliament or the people of 1688, or of any other period, had no more right to dispose of the people of the present day, or to bind or to control them in any shape whatever, than the parliament or the people of the present day have to dispose of, bind or control those who are to live a hundred or a thousand years hence. Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated. When man ceases to be, his power and his wants cease with him; and having no longer any participation in the concerns of this world, he has no longer any authority in directing who shall be its governors, or how its government shall be organised, or how administered.
I am not contending for nor against any form of government, nor for nor against any party, here or elsewhere. That which a whole nation chooses to do it has a right to do. Mr. Burke says, No. Where, then, does the right exist? I am contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed away and controlled and contracted for by the manuscript assumed authority of the dead, and Mr. Burke is contending for the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living. There was a time when kings disposed of their crowns by will upon their death-beds, and consigned the people, like beasts of the field, to whatever successor they appointed. This is now so exploded as scarcely to be remembered, and so monstrous as hardly to be believed. But the Parliamentary clauses upon which Mr. Burke builds his political church are of the same nature.
The laws of every country must be analogous to some common principle. In England no parent or master, nor all the authority of Parliament, omnipotent as it has called itself, can bind or control the personal freedom even of an individual beyond the age of twenty-one years. On what ground of right, then, could the Parliament of 1688, or any other Parliament, bind all posterity for ever?
Those who have quitted the world, and those who have not yet arrived at it, are as remote from each other as the utmost stretch of mortal imagination can conceive. What possible obligation, then, can exist between them — what rule or principle can be laid down that of two nonentities, the one out of existence and the other not in, and who never can meet in this world, the one should control the other to the end of time?
In England it is said that money cannot be taken out of the pockets of the people without their consent. But who authorised, or who could authorise, the Parliament of 1688 to control and take away the freedom of posterity (who were not in existence to give or to withhold their consent) and limit and confine their right of acting in certain cases for ever?
A greater absurdity cannot present itself to the understanding of man than what Mr. Burke offers to his readers. He tells them, and he tells the world to come, that a certain body of men who existed a hundred years ago made a law, and that there does not exist in the nation, nor ever will, nor ever can, a power to alter it. Under how many subtilties or absurdities has the divine right to govern been imposed on the credulity of mankind? Mr. Burke has discovered a new one, and he has shortened his journey to Rome by appealing to the power of this infallible Parliament of former days, and he produces what it has done as of divine authority, for that power must certainly be more than human which no human power to the end of time can alter.
But Mr. Burke has done some service — not to his cause, but to his country — by bringing those clauses into public view. They serve to demonstrate how necessary it is at all times to watch against the attempted encroachment of power, and to prevent its running to excess. It is somewhat extraordinary that the offence for which James II. was expelled, that of setting up power by assumption, should be re-acted, under another shape and form, by the Parliament that expelled him. It shows that the rights of man were but imperfectly understood at the Revolution, for certain it is that the right which that Parliament set up by assumption (for by the delegation it had not, and could not have it, because none could give it) over the persons and freedom of posterity for ever was of the same tyrannical unfounded kind which James attempted to set up over the Parliament and the nation, and for which he was expelled. The only difference is (for in principle they differ not) that the one was an usurper over living, and the other over the unborn; and as the one has no better authority to stand upon than the other, both of them must be equally null and void, and of no effect.
From what, or from whence, does Mr. Burke prove the right of any human power to bind posterity for ever? He has produced his clauses, but he must produce also his proofs that such a right existed, and show how it existed. If it ever existed it must now exist, for whatever appertains to the nature of man cannot be annihilated by man. It is the nature of man to die, and he will continue to die as long as he continues to be born. But Mr. Burke has set up a sort of political Adam, in whom all posterity are bound for ever. He must, therefore, prove that his Adam possessed such a power, or such a right.
The weaker any cord is, the less will it bear to be stretched, and the worse is the policy to stretch it, unless it is intended to break it. Had anyone proposed the overthrow of Mr. Burke's positions, he would have proceeded as Mr. Burke has done. He would have magnified the authorities, on purpose to have called the right of them into question; and the instant the question of right was started, the authorities must have been given up.
It requires but a very small glance of thought to perceive that although laws made in one generation often continue in force through succeeding generations, yet they continue to derive their force from the consent of the living. A law not repealed continues in force, not because it cannot be repealed, but because it is not repealed; and the non- repealing passes for consent.
But Mr. Burke's clauses have not even this qualification in their favour. They become null, by attempting to become immortal. The nature of them precludes consent. They destroy the right which they might have, by grounding it on a right which they cannot have. Immortal power is not a human right, and therefore cannot be a right of Parliament. The Parliament of 1688 might as well have passed an act to have authorised themselves to live for ever, as to make their authority live for ever. All, therefore, that can be said of those clauses is that they are a formality of words, of as much import as if those who used them had addressed a congratulation to themselves, and in the oriental style of antiquity had said: O Parliament, live for ever!
The circumstances of the world are continually changing, and the opinions of men change also; and as government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it. That which may be thought right and found convenient in one age may be thought wrong and found inconvenient in another. In such cases, who is to decide, the living or the dead?
As almost one hundred pages of Mr. Burke's book are employed upon these clauses, it will consequently follow that if the clauses themselves, so far as they set up an assumed usurped dominion over posterity for ever, are unauthoritative, and in their nature null and void; that all his voluminous inferences, and declamation drawn therefrom, or founded thereon, are null and void also; and on this ground I rest the matter.
We now come more particularly to the affairs of France. Mr. Burke's book has the appearance of being written as instruction to the French nation; but if I may permit myself the use of an extravagant metaphor, suited to the extravagance of the case, it is darkness attempting to illuminate light.
While I am writing this there are accidentally before me some proposals for a declaration of rights by the Marquis de la Fayette (I ask his pardon for using his former address, and do it only for distinction's sake) to the National Assembly, on the 11th of July, 1789, three days before the taking of the Bastille, and I cannot but remark with astonishment how opposite the sources are from which that gentleman and Mr. Burke draw their principles. Instead of referring to musty records and mouldy parchments to prove that the rights of the living are lost, "renounced and abdicated for ever," by those who are now no more, as Mr. Burke has done, M. de la Fayette applies to the living world, and emphatically says: "Call to mind the sentiments which nature has engraved on the heart of every citizen, and which take a new force when they are solemnly recognised by all: — For a nation to love liberty, it is sufficient that she knows it; and to be free, it is sufficient that she wills it." How dry, barren, and obscure is the source from which Mr. Burke labors! and how ineffectual, though gay with flowers, are all his declamation and his arguments compared with these clear, concise, and soul- animating sentiments! Few and short as they are, they lead on to a vast field of generous and manly thinking, and do not finish, like Mr. Burke's periods, with music in the ear, and nothing in the heart.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements Introduction Thomas Paine: A Brief Chronology A Note on the TextRights of Man Part One Part Two
Appendix A: Monarchs of Great Britain
Appendix B: Price and Burke
- From Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of our Country (1789)
- From Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
Appendix C: From Thomas Paine, Letter Addressed to the Addressers on the Late Proclamation (1792)
Appendix D: Five Versions of the Versailles Incident
- From Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
- From Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)
- From Helen Maria Williams, Letters Written in France (1790)
- From Correspondance de Madame Élisabeth de France, Soeur de Louis XVI (1868 [1789])
- Stanislas Maillard describes the Women’s March to Versailles, 5 October 1789 (1790)
Appendix E: Contemporary Reviews
- From Analytical Review (Jan–Apr 1791)
- From Analytical Review (Jan–Apr 1792)
- From The Monthly Review (May 1791)
- From The English Freeholder (1 June 1791)
Appendix F: Published Responses to Paine
- From Rights of Englishmen, An Antidote To the Poison Now Vending by the Transatlantic Republican Thomas Paine (1791)
- A Letter from a Magistrate (1791)
- From A Defence of the Constitution of England (1791)
- From Letter to Thomas Paine, In answer to his late publication On the Rights of Man (1791)
- From A British Freeholder’s Address to his Countrymen (1791)
- From A Plain Address to the Common Sense of the People of England (1792)
- From Hannah More, Village Politics (1793)
- Daniel Isaac Eaton, “A New Song: God Save Great Thomas Paine.” Hog’s Wash, or a Salmagundy for Swine (1794)
Appendix G: Cartoons
- James Gillray, “The Rights of Man; or Tommy Paine, the little American Taylor” (23 May 1791)
- W. Locke, “Mad Tom, or the Man of Rights” (1 September 1791)
- James Sayers, “Loyalty against Levelling” (15 December 1792)
- James Gillray, “Fashion before Ease; or, A good Constitution sacrificed, for a Fantastick Form” (2 January 1793)
Appendix H: The Trial of Thomas Paine (December 1792)
Select Bibliography
Introduction
A participant inboth the American and French revolutions and in the governments that first arose from them, Thomas Paine is best remembered as the highly popular pamphleteer whose incendiary Common Sense (published in January 1776) was largely responsible for motivating the American colonists to declare independence. He was born in England on January 29, 1737, and his impoverished early life offered scant evidence of the qualities that would later elevate him to literary and historical prominence. Taking the first available opportunity to improve his lot, he moved to America in 1775, coincidentally arriving at the time when revolutionary fervor was just taking hold. Common Sense's famous rallying call for an American declaration of independence was followed by a series of Crisis papers in which Paine inspired Washington's demoralized troops with such notorious phrases as "These are the times that try men's souls." His subsequent writings, urging the French and English to abandon their oppressive styles of government and replace them with representative republics, also met with great public success, but they had less practical effect than Common Sense and the Crisis papers. They were written with the same vigor and literary flare as his earlier works and contained numerous striking turns of phrase that remain in the public consciousness, but the revolutionary tide had begun to ebb and Paine had failed to adjust his rhetoric. By clinging overmuch to his genuinely radical egalitarianism and attacking unwarranted privilege wherever he found it, especially in the institutions of organized Christianity, he eventually alienated almost all of his onetime allies and ultimately died almost unnoticed in 1809. His words, however, went on to live a life of their own, persisting in such popularly quoted phrases as, "Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil."
Few who knew Paine in his youth could have expected him to achieve what he rightly, if immodestly, called "an eminence in political literature." Raised a Quaker, like his father, in Thetford, England, he was fortunate to have been sent to Thetford Grammar School, where apparently he was sufficiently trained in English to write uncommonly lucid prose later in life. The events of his early years are little known and seem to have been largely unremarkable. He followed his father into the corset-making trade, which he seems unhappily to have pursued when no other opportunities presented themselves.
Few who knew Paine in his youth could have expected him to achieve what he rightly, if immodestly, called "an eminence in political literature." Raised a Quaker, like his father, in Thetford, England, he was fortunate to have been sent to Thetford Grammar School, where apparently he was sufficiently trained in English to write uncommonly lucid prose later in life. The events of his early years are little known and seem to have been largely unremarkable. He followed his father into the corset-making trade, which he seems unhappily to have pursued when no other opportunities presented themselves.
Paine married in 1759, but his wife died only one year later. In 1771, he married again, but this union ended in permanent separation in 1774. That same year he moved to London, where he was introduced to Benjamin Franklin, who was in England on behalf of the American colonies. With a letter of introduction from Franklin to his son-in-law in Philadelphia, Paine headed for America and the greater prospect of gainful employment. His budding interest in the political tumult of the time caused him almost immediately to leave the mundane tutoring job that Franklin's son-in-law had secured for him and become a journalist. It is suspected that during his first year in America Paine had a hand in writing several articles published under pseudonyms, but these offered little indication of the literary talent and rhetorical acumen that would immanently catapult him to fame.
In January 1776, at the age of thirty-nine, Paine's life of anonymous obscurity came to an abrupt end with the publication of his hugely popular pamphlet, Common Sense. The brisk and spirited arguments presented in this work in favor of American independence and against colonial reconciliation with England seized the American imagination and irrevocably turned American sentiment toward independence - the declaration of which followed only six months later.
Common Sense bore all the hallmarks of Paine's subsequent masterpiece, the Rights of Man. Stylistically, it was clear, concise, direct, and fiery. It captured the revolutionary spirit of the most elevated Enlightenment authors, brought their ideas to the level of the average reader, and injected them with an unparalleled sense of urgency. The Enlightenment's leading proponents all held that the individual, through the exercise of his or her own reason, could understand the laws of nature ordering the universe as well as those that ought to govern free and moral individuals and societies. In Common Sense Paine fused the Enlightenment's general notion of progress with the specific cause of the American colonists: "The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances hath, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all lovers of mankind are affected.... The laying a country desolate with fire and sword, declaring war against the natural rights of all mankind, and extirpating the defenders thereof from the face of the earth is the concern of every man to whom nature hath given the power of feeling...."
Loosely echoing thinkers like Locke and Rousseau, Paine distinguished between "society," the natural product of the association of peoples based on their mutual needs and affections, and "government," the sole rational purpose of which is the protection of societies' members from threats to their pursuit of happiness and freedom. Paine cogently argued that government rests on the natural bonds of society and obtains its power and authority solely from the (often unconsciously given) consent of the governed. Monarchies and aristocracies, according to Paine, were at their core frauds that had to be maintained through ignorance and force. Their purpose was to redistribute through taxation the property of the majority to a few wealthy landowners and members of the royal court. Moreover, Paine stipulated, since the most persuasive rationale for raising unbearably high taxes was a "war of necessity," monarchies and aristocracies were inevitably driven to international provocations. In contrast, a government directly rooted in the needs and desires of its people and directly answerable to them - i.e., a representative republic - would be inclined to do everything possible to encourage peaceful relations with other nations for the sake of increased commerce and general prosperity. In light of these considerations and the unprecedented opportunity the American colonists possessed to found a benevolent republic based on the knowledge of the natural rights and true interests of all mankind, Paine argued that the idea of restoring the colonies' allegiance to the crown was unthinkable.
Following the conclusion of America's war of independence, Paine briefly retired from politics in order to pursue his scientific and engineering interests, most famously designing a single-arch iron bridge, on behalf of which he traveled to France in 1787 and then to England the following year. It was not long, however, before he was once again drawn into politics, this time by the growth of revolutionary activity in France and the publication, in November 1790, of Edmund Burke's conservative attack upon the French revolutionaries and their principles.
Burke was a member of the British House of Commons and in this role had consistently been a supporter of the cause of American independence. Paine was friendly with Burke, and the two had spent time together while Paine was in England following the American Revolution. But when Burke let loose a withering attack on the French Revolution in a speech to Parliament on February 9, 1790, and then elaborated upon it for hundreds of pages in his famous Reflections on the Revolution in France, Paine could not resist taking up the gauntlet.
Excited to no end by the prospect that the French Revolution was the first European fruit growing from the seed of rational republican government planted in America, Paine was at a loss to understand how a man who had eloquently supported the American Revolution could turn upon the very principles which had motivated it at precisely the moment when they appeared to be taking hold in Europe. It was Paine's outrage at Burke's reactionary conservatism in defense of England's corrupt monarchy and bloated aristocracy that gave birth to the Rights of Man.
In the Rights of Man, Paine vigorously sets forth a comprehensive account of his extraordinarily radical Enlightenment humanism. The work was issued in two parts: the first containing both an attack on Burke's defense of the crooked English system and a description of the "rights of man" as endorsed by France's revolutionary National Assembly, the second primarily occupied with a detailed plan for using existing British tax revenue to set up a welfare state and eliminate poverty. The most important aspect of the Rights of Man is that it reveals far more explicitly than any of his other works that at the core of Paine's ideology lies a belief that political and economic inequality is rationally indefensible and morally intolerable. It was on this principle that, when push came to shove, Paine would not give an inch, whereas his more pragmatic allies recognized that, in order to actually run a government, adherence to such a principle must be curtailed.
Paine would hear none of this. Throughout his polemic against Burke, his defense of the rights to "liberty, property, security, and resistance of oppression," and his detailed scheme for redistributing existing tax monies to the poor there runs a persistent theme: "It is time that nations should be rational, and not be governed like animals, for the pleasure of their riders." The central argument of the Rights of Man is one that earned Paine some fleeting friendships in revolutionary France but ultimately cost him many allies in America and led to his being outlawed for sedition in England. It is also one that would win him few adherents among the prosperous and powerful in any nation today. The truth of the contemporary human condition, according to Paine, which needs only to be recognized in order to be changed, is as follows: Men are born by nature equal and good, content to live with a relatively equitable distribution of material goods, provided these are adequate to the maintenance of a comfortable life. But the majority of people are everywhere corrupted by a few rapacious members of the species who use force and deception to establish governments, the sole purpose of which is to satisfy their unlimited avarice. Such governments enslave their people, driving the bulk of them into desperate circumstances in order to pay for their rulers' debauchery, and conduct wars simply to legitimate excessive taxation and perpetuate a decadent status quo.
The enlightened governments that would arise in the wake of the age of revolutions would, Paine believed, be dramatically different, and he described the criteria by which they should be measured as follows: "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; the rational world is my friend, because I am the friend of its happiness: when these things can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and its government."
After publishing the Rights of Man, Paine went on to play an active role in the early stages of the French Revolution and to write the Age of Reason, the third and last of his major works, in which he attacked organized religion, and Christianity in particular, for colluding with oppressive governments in the subjugation of mankind. This work, however, merely served to further tarnish Paine's reputation in America and Europe, both of which had by this time taken big steps away from the sort of revolutionary freethinking he espoused. In fact, a rise in reactionary conservative thinking would dominate the intellectual currents of both continents for the rest of Paine's life, and so the man who first coined the phrase "United States of America" would ultimately die and be buried in the country of that name without public recognition of his contribution to its existence or to the cause of human freedom.
Paine's prediction of the global spread of representative government has been borne out by the events of the last two centuries, but his hopes that this would inevitably produce a more equitable distribution of property have not. The industrial revolution and the rise of monopoly capitalism in the nineteenth century brought with them an ever-widening gap between rich and poor and a growing trend toward the abusive treatment of labor. It was in this context that Paine's brilliantly articulate and impetuous writings against entrenched wealth and in favor of the elimination of poverty were rediscovered by American and European workers' rights movements. Though the strength of such movements has waxed and waned since the mid-1800s, Paine's stature as spokesman for the oppressed and underprivileged has slowly but steadily risen to the point where he is now celebrated in his native England and his adoptive America as, if not a favorite son, at least a remarkable and important member of the revolutionary era's political and literary pantheon.
David Taffel is the author of Nietzsche Unbound: The Struggle for Spirit in the Age of Science and managing editor of The Conversationalist, a global news and culture website. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the Graduate Faculty of the New School University where his dissertation was awarded the Hans Jonas Memorial Prize for Philosophy.