The development of Paine’s thought

The development of Paine’s thought

Many of the leading themes in Paine’s thought were introduced in cursory form in Common Sense . Here he drew a sharp distinction between society and Government, arguing that the former was produced by our wants, the latter our wickedness, with Government being thus merely a necessary evil. More important, however, was his attack upon both monarchical Government in general, and the British constitution in particular. He dismissed the claim that the tripartite British model of monarch-lords-commons ‘balanced’ itself successfully because of the checking tendency of each component, insisting instead that British liberty rested solely on the virtues of the Commons, although the monarchy remained the most powerful branch of Government. (In anther tract published in 1776 but only recently identified as Paine’s, Four Letters on Interesting Subjects, Paine made a stronger case for seeing Britain as possessing ‘no fixed constitution’ as such, and as being essentially absolutist because there were no written restrictions on the power of the legislature.) Hereditary kingship Paine assailed in Common Sense as intrinsically unjust, because no family had a perpetual right to give preference to itself above all others. Kings were too fond of waging war and bestowing patronage, and could ascend to the throne in the ignorance of youth and remain until the bewilderment of old age. Proclaiming the colonists’ cause to be that of all mankind, Paine portrayed a glorious epoch of prosperity that would succeed the breach from Britain, in which commerce and foreign trade, freed from mercantilist restrictions, would enrich Americans rather than Britons. The most important argument in Common Sense, thus, was the direct assault upon monarchical Goverament, and the suggestion that a pure republican form of Government could survive amidst conditions less primitive than those described by, notably, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the Social Contract (1762). Equally impressive, however, was Paine’s lack of deference to traditional political authority: Common Sense inaugurated the democratic age by first rendering contemptible and ridiculous the ruling elites of monarchy and aristocracy, and then proclaiming a modern form of republicanism capable of embracing both a substantial population and one engaged in, and enriched by, trade as well as agriculture. Though Paine did warn that commerce had eroded British patriotism, there was here no suggestion of any necessary contradiction between public virtue and commerce, or of the threat of luxury goods to social equality or selfless patriotism. With one blow the pretence to have founded a uniquely free constitution with the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 had been pierced. The classical republican tradition was here laid to rest; from its ashes arose modern republicanism.

Of Paine’s other writings during the period between the American and French Revolutions, his Letter to the Abbé Raynal (1782) is of interest for its claim that commerce could create ‘universal civilization’ by basing the international system upon the fulfilment of mutual need rather than national or dynastic rivalry. Both Dissertations on Government; the Affairs of the Bank; and Paper Money (1786) and Prospects on the Rubicon (1787) addressed the relationships between states, banks and systems of public funding, with the latter warning of the deleterious influence of a burgeoning national debt.

Despite superficial similarities, Rights of Man addressed a vastly dissimilar problem in its effort to defend the French revolutionaries against Burke, and to vindicate their

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principles and promise. For the French Revolution had occurred in an old nation, lacking the essential social equality, easy availability of land, and absence of a resident monarch or territorial aristocracy that characterized the American colonies. The central argument of Rights of Man is popular sovereignty, or the right of any people to manage its own affairs, and to overturn the decisions, and even reject the constitution, established by preceding generations. This gave the French the right to limit, or entirely overthrow, the monarchy, as it did Britons the right to alter the settlement of 1688 if they so chose. (Burke had insisted that this remained unalterable.) The right of self-government in turn was based upon pre-existing natural rights held by all and granted by the Creator as described in the book of Genesis, ‘whether taken as divine authority or merely historical’, and were continued in perpetuity as if God created each person uniquely. The Bible thus crucially established what Paine called 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 natural rights’. In keeping with the tradition popularized by Locke in particular, Burke had argued that certain natural rights had existed at the beginning of society, but that these had been superseded by civil rights, which could alone be discussed meaningfully in an advanced state. Paine, however, contended that all civil rights depended on and could be assessed in terms of pre-existing natural rights. Such rights were therefore possessed universally; if one nation were freer than others, it set an example of God’s intentions, not historical fortuna.

The aim and end of all governments was thus to uphold natural rights. Paine distinguishes in Rights of Man between three forms of Government: those based on priestly rule, those based on monarchy or aristocracy, and those founded on popular sovereignty. Only the latter fully recognized the necessity of upholding natural rights by an agreement made amongst the whole people. Here Paine again forcefully contended that Britain had no written ‘constitution’ as such. Instead, free nations required their peoples to delegate authority to a constitutional convention to decide in outline upon constitutional arrangements, and then to seek popular approval thereof before enshrining any decisions in written form. Rights of Man contains a frontal assault on the existing British system of Government, which restricted the franchise to a tiny minority, ensured that the legal system protected the privileges of the propertied elite, defended a monopolistic Anglican Church and rested on an oppressive and grossly unfair system of taxation. Various commercial monopolies interfered with freedom of trade, whilst game laws prevented small farmers from hunting even on their own land. Primogeniture and entail ensured the concentration of landed property in the hands of the aristocracy.

These were the central contentions of Rights of Man, Part One. During the year preceding the appearance of Part Two, a pamphlet war of epic proportions had broken out in Britain that appeared to fuel a growing sympathy for parliamentary reform, or even more substantial innovations. In Part Two Paine restated his case, but with some important modifications and additions to his general principles. He again laid great stress on the applicability of popular democratic institutions of the American type to Europe, and the economic advantages of abolishing expensive monarchies and courts, large standing armies and exorbitantly paid governments. All hereditary Government, he now reiterated, was ‘in its nature tyranny’. Democracy was cheap: it would reduce taxes greatly as a result, and the money released would promote universal opulence among the lower orders. Democracy was pacific: it would abolish the universal propensity to These were the central contentions of Rights of Man, Part One. During the year preceding the appearance of Part Two, a pamphlet war of epic proportions had broken out in Britain that appeared to fuel a growing sympathy for parliamentary reform, or even more substantial innovations. In Part Two Paine restated his case, but with some important modifications and additions to his general principles. He again laid great stress on the applicability of popular democratic institutions of the American type to Europe, and the economic advantages of abolishing expensive monarchies and courts, large standing armies and exorbitantly paid governments. All hereditary Government, he now reiterated, was ‘in its nature tyranny’. Democracy was cheap: it would reduce taxes greatly as a result, and the money released would promote universal opulence among the lower orders. Democracy was pacific: it would abolish the universal propensity to

Yet Part Two was in one notable respect less optimistic than Part One, especially where commerce was concerned. For Paine now seemed to acknowledge that however much prosperity might be unleashed by democratic republicanism, poverty might still exist. To combat this possibility, he suggested a remarkable programme of social reforms that has been seen as providing the first set of proposals to underpin the welfare states of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He now announced that the goal of Government was providing ‘for the instruction of youth, and the support of age, so as to exclude, as much as possible, profligacy from the one, and despair from the other’. Funds were to be dedicated to educating the children of the poor, providing subsistence for those unable to work after the age of 50, and for all after age 60, for helping poor mothers and demobilized soldiers and sailors, assisting the funeral costs of the poor, and even constructing two workhouses to employ some of the poor of London. These measures were to be paid for by a progressive tax on inheritance. At the same time the poor’s rate, or tax on landed property, could be abolished completely. But most importantly, they indicate that Paine had altered his view of Government substantially by early 1792: far from being merely a necessary evil, it could play a powerful redistributive role in assisting the poor and ensuring the maintenance of social equality.

The reputation of Rights of Man thus rests on six key themes: (1) republicanism: Paine broke clearly from the Whig and even radical interpretation of the British constitution, by which the settlement of 1688 had established the best possible form of Government; his rejection of the notion that the British constitution was balanced, his support for a pure democracy defined by a written constitution formed by a constitutional convention and approved by the people; and his rejection of monarchy as such in favour of an elected executive, and a unicameral elected representative body, constituted a dramatic redefinition of the boundaries of political understanding; (2) natural rights: Paine’s insistence on the universal possession of equal natural rights (with corresponding duties to uphold the rights of others) transcended existing debates about historically grounded liberties, and the precedence of civil over natural rights in modern societies; despite later assaults on rights doctrines by utilitarians and Marxists in particular, the language of rights retains enormous importance in modern politics; (3) commerce and equality: Paine’s approach to commerce was more than ‘liberal’: far more than David Hume or Adam Smith, for instance, he ambitiously assumed universal commerce would, in conjunction with republicanism, promote the abolition of war; nor was he seriously concerned with the threat to republican virtue of such a widespread and opulent commercial system; Paine’s willingness to provide a safety net for the poor, however,

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established the limits of his commercial optimism; (4) style and language: the language of Rights of Man is in keeping with its democratic sentiments: Paine aimed to demystify government by satire and ridicule as well as sustained argument, and to empower his readers with a sense of their rights and duties; he also made a virtue of his own humble origins, and appealed constantly to simple moral precepts susceptible of a universal application, famously claiming that ‘Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.’ We know from reports by readers how cathartic their reaction sometimes was, and how widespread was the sentiment that Rights of Man had established, as one Scot put it, that ‘Politics is no longer a Mysterious System but Common Sence.’

Two other more brief political works extended these themes in the 1790s: the Letter Addressed to the Addressers (1792), which is a pithy restatement of his republicanism, and the longer Dissertation on First Principles of Government (1795), which analysed the French constitution of that year. By far the most influential of Paine’s later works, however, was The Age of Reason (1794), which was motivated by the belief that the atheism widely associated with the revolution and republicanism—which Paine opposed—was not their inevitable consequence, and by the belief that orthodox Christianity was not the sole or best means of establishing a Christian system of morality. The sum of Paine’s religious beliefs, as he announced at the beginning of the text, consisted of a belief in one God, the hope for ‘happiness beyond this life’ and devotion to ‘the equality of man’. From these ideals flowed religious duties, which Paine defined as consisting of ‘doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow- creatures happy’. This was Paine’s statement of the ‘true religion’ he sought to assist. Much more controversial, however, was his insistence that the sole proof required for belief in God lay in nature itself, and his concomitant attack on the Bible as a tissue of invention, poetry, history and myth. Part Two of the Age of Reason (1795) examines the Old and New Testaments in detail, and attacks, amongst other things, the book of Genesis as ‘an anonymous book of stories, fables and traditionary or invented absurdities, or of downright lies’, which had interesting repercussions for Paine’s theory of rights. Though

he reaffirmed his deism, defined as ‘the belief in one God, and an imitation of His moral character, or the practise of what are called the moral virtues’, Paine again reiterated that the Bible was ‘a dead letter’ and ‘fit only to excite contempt’. Thereafter the Paineite tradition of radicalism in Britain and the USA in particular found that its promotion of secularism was often an uphill battle. Paine himself, however, helped to found the Church of Theophilanthropy in Paris in 1797, with the aim of proving that the love of man and God alike could be based on no other revelation than nature.

Paine’s final work of importance is the little-read but interesting Agrarian Justice (1797). In this book he extended his reservations about the prospects of laissez-faire to curtail poverty, and indicated that poverty resulted in part at least from low wages and economic exploitation. Central to his argument here was a distinction between natural property, principally in the earth, and artificial property, created by people. The former,

he contended, remained in principle the property of the human race, but since periodic redivision of land was impracticable (a contemporary critic, Thomas Spence, disagreed) landlords owed the dispossessed both a lump sum and an annuity in compensation. Given Paine’s deism and ridicule of the Bible there are similar difficulties here about the origin of this common right, which Paine derived, via the natural jurisprudence tradition, again

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from Genesis, from which he argued that land was ‘the free gift of the Creator in common to the human race’. What is more important to stress, perhaps, is that Paine in Agrarian Justice conceded that poverty tended to increase with the process of civilization, rather than receding before the gains of free trade. He also introduced a new argument about the social context of the creation of wealth, insisting that:

All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man’s own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.

This led him to reinforce his commitment to guaranteeing a substantial measure of social equality (though without moving in the direction of communism) through redistributive taxation, for which Agrarian Justice in essence presents an elaborate argument.