Thomas Paine

The great pamphleteer of the Age of Revolutions — a corset-maker's son from Thetford who arrived in Philadelphia in 1774 with a letter from Franklin in his pocket and, within two years, had written the book that made American independence thinkable to ordinary people. Common Sense (1776) sold in numbers proportionally unmatched since; Paine gave away the royalties.

Where Edmund Burke saw inherited institutions as the accumulated wisdom of the dead, Paine saw them as the accumulated theft of the living. Rights of Man (1791–92), written in answer to Burke's Reflections, is the sharpest Anglophone statement of revolutionary Natural Rights liberalism: each generation has the right to remake its political arrangements; monarchy is a swindle; and a republic funded by progressive taxation should provide for the aged, the young, and the unemployed — a welfare-state proposal a century ahead of its time.

He nearly lost his head in Paris during the Terror (Robespierre's faction considered him dangerously moderate) and returned to America to find his reputation wrecked by The Age of Reason (1794), a fierce deist attack on organized Christianity. He died in poverty in New York in 1809, attended by six mourners, and has had to be periodically rediscovered ever since.

Key ideas

• Republican self-government as a birthright, not a privilege
• Each generation's right to refound its own institutions
• Welfare provision as a claim of justice, not charity
• Plain-spoken writing as a democratic political act

Key works

• Common Sense (1776)
• The American Crisis (1776–83)
• Rights of Man (1791–92)
• The Age of Reason (1794–1807)
• Agrarian Justice (1797)

Secondary sources

• John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (1995) — the standard modern life; places Paine in his full transatlantic political setting.
• Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (1976; rev. 2005) — the outstanding American-focused intellectual biography.
• Harvey J. Kaye, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (2005) — the best short account of Paine's afterlife in American radical politics.