Thomas Paine (1) (1737–1809)
Author of Common Sense
For other authors named Thomas Paine, see the disambiguation page.
About the Author
Born to parents with Quaker leanings, Thomas Paine grew up amid modest circumstances in the rural environs of Thetford, England. As the recipient of what he termed "a good moral education and a tolerable stock of useful learning," little in Paine's early years seemed to suggest that he would one show more day rise to a stunning defense of American independence in such passionate and compelling works as Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis essays (1776-83). Paine's early years were characterized by a constant struggle to remain financially solvent while pursuing a number of nonintellectual activities. Nevertheless, the young Paine read such Enlightenment theorists as Isaac Newton and John Locke and remained dedicated to the idea that education was a lifelong commitment. From 1753 to 1759, Paine worked alternately as a sailor, a staymaker, and a customs officer. Between 1759 and 1772, he married twice. His first wife died within a year of their marriage, and Paine separated amicably from his second wife after a shop they operated together went bankrupt. While these circumstances seemed gloomy, Paine fortuitously made the acquaintance of Benjamin Franklin in London in 1773. Impressed by Paine's self-education, Franklin encouraged the young man to venture to America where he might prosper. Arriving in Philadelphia in 1774, Paine quickly found himself energized by the volatile nature of Revolutionary politics. Working as an editor of Pennsylvania Magazine, Paine found a forum for his passionate radical views. In the years that followed, Paine became increasingly committed to American independence, and to his conviction that the elitist and corrupt government that had ruled over him in England had little business extending its corrosive colonial power to the States. Moved by these beliefs, Paine published Common Sense (1776), a test that proved invaluable in unifying American sentiment against British rule. Later, after joining the fray as a soldier, Paine penned the familiar lines in "The American Crisis": "These are the times that try men's souls." Fifteen years later, Paine wrote his other famous work, Rights of Man (1791). Drawing on his eclectic experiences as a laborer, an international radical politician, and a revolutionary soldier, Paine asserted his Lockeian belief that since God created humans in "one degree only," then rights should be equal for every individual. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: From Wikimedia Commons
Series
Works by Thomas Paine
Common Sense, The Rights of Man and Other Essential Writings of Thomas Paine (Signet Classics) (1984) 1,507 copies, 9 reviews
Thomas Paine : Collected Writings: Common Sense / The American Crisis / Rights of (1995) 1,143 copies, 4 reviews
Keystones of Democracy: The Second Treatise of Government, The Social Contract and Rights of Man (2005) 34 copies, 1 review
The Essential Thomas Paine Collection: Common Sense | The American Crisis | Rights of Man | The Age of Reason (2020) 24 copies
Common Sense, The Crisis, & Other Writings from the American Revolution: A Library of America Paperback Classic (Library of America Paperback Classics) (2015) 20 copies, 1 review
The Rights of Man and Other Writings (Books That Have Changed Man's Thinking) (1970) 18 copies, 1 review
Special Edition of Common Sense and The Rights of Man (American Heritage Library, National Rifle Association privately printed edition) (2000) 17 copies, 1 review
Complete Works of Thomas Paine: Containing all his Political and Theological Writings ; Preceded by a Life of Paine (2010) 11 copies
Thomas Paine in His Own Words 6 copies
The Daily Thomas Paine: A Year of Common-Sense Quotes for a Nonsensical Age (A Year of Quotes) (2020) 5 copies
Letter to George Washington 3 copies
Sentido común y Ocho cartas a los ciudadanos de los Estados Unidos (El libro de bolsillo - Ciencias sociales) (Spanish Edition) (2020) 3 copies
The crisis extraordinary 2 copies
Compact maritime 2 copies
SELECTED WRITINGS 2 copies
Thomas Paine Selected Works collection: Common Sense, The American Crisis, The Rights of Man, The Age of Reason (2024) 2 copies
The American Crisis Number I 2 copies
Zdrowy rozsądek 1 copy
Common Sense 1 copy
Of Society And Civilization 1 copy
The Age of Reason (Samizdat Edition with Active Table of Contents), improved 4/2/2011 1 copy, 1 review
The Popular Works of Thomas Paine. Reprinted from Conway's edition of the Complete Works of Thomas Paine. (2011) 1 copy
A letter to the Earl of Shelburne etc. respecting the acknowledgment of American independence 1 copy
Reasons for Wishing to Preserve the Life of Louis Capet. as Delivered to the National Convention. by Thomas Paine. ... (2010) 1 copy
The American Crisis Number V 1 copy
Thomas Paine à la législature et au Directoire, ou la Justice agraire opposée à la loi et aux privilèges agraires (1797) 1 copy
Federal orrery 1 copy
The Essential Thomas Payne 1 copy
The American Crisis and Other Works by Thomas Paine (Unexpurgated Edition) (Halcyon Classics) (2009) 1 copy
Convention nationale. Opinion de Thomas Payne esice,... concernant le jugement de Louis XVI (1792) 1 copy
Associated Works
The American Revolution: Writings from the War of Independence (2001) — Contributor — 708 copies, 3 reviews
The American Intellectual Tradition, A Sourcebook: Volume I, 1630-1865 (1989) — Contributor, some editions — 204 copies
American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation (2012) — Contributor — 146 copies
The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present (2020) — Contributor — 118 copies
The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate 1773-1776: (Library of America #266) (2015) — Contributor — 102 copies
The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Concise Edition (2003) — Contributor — 73 copies, 1 review
American Literature: The Makers and the Making (In Two Volumes) (1973) — Contributor, some editions — 25 copies
American Bible Vol. XII (Selected Writings of Elbert Hubbard, XII American Bible) (1998) — Contributor — 2 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Paine, Thomas
- Other names
- Pain, Thomas (birth)
- Birthdate
- 1737-01-29
- Date of death
- 1809-06-08
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Thetford Grammar School
- Occupations
- pamphleteer
political writer
excise officer - Organizations
- Royal Excise Office
Pennslyvania Assembly
French National Convention - Nationality
- UK (birth)
USA - Birthplace
- Thetford, Norfolk, England, UK
- Places of residence
- Thetford, Norfolk, England, UK
Lewes, Sussex, England, UK
London, Middlesex, England, UK
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Paris, Île-de-France, France
New Rochelle, New York, USA - Place of death
- New York, New York, USA
- Burial location
- New Rochelle, New York, USA; later disinterred and lost
- Map Location
- USA
Members
Discussions
Thomas Paine in His Own Words - FOOLSCAP PRESS 2024 in Fine Press Forum (August 2024)
Thomas Paine and Common Sense in American History (January 2007)
Reviews
This is one of those master texts from one of the United States' founding fathers, but one that I'd only ever heard about and didn't know much about. I picked it up after a recommendation from a memoir I'd read about Hasidic Jewish sects.
A quite explosive text, certainly for its time, but equally for today. Paine takes on all religions, most especially Christianity. He fact-checks the Bible, highlighting some pretty basic logical inconsistencies but also some clear factual inconsistencies. show more Then, he takes on the morality of the Bible, particularly the brutal and bloody Old Testament. His ultimate point is that God, in whom he believes, could not possibly be behind such a bloody and unkind and poorly rendered book such as the Bible.
Now, taking Paine's well-landed arguments, I'd say that there's been a fair bit of research and textual examination on the Biblical manuscripts - I think that it's well settled that, initially inspired or not, the Bible is just as much a product of human tinkering and guiding as anything. That doesn't completely diminish the Bible for me, but Paine is right to look at how it's been misused and molded to be a weapon. Ultimately, a quite thought-provoking book. I dare any believer, especially any member of any denomination of any Christian church, to read this. I double dare ya'. show less
A quite explosive text, certainly for its time, but equally for today. Paine takes on all religions, most especially Christianity. He fact-checks the Bible, highlighting some pretty basic logical inconsistencies but also some clear factual inconsistencies. show more Then, he takes on the morality of the Bible, particularly the brutal and bloody Old Testament. His ultimate point is that God, in whom he believes, could not possibly be behind such a bloody and unkind and poorly rendered book such as the Bible.
Now, taking Paine's well-landed arguments, I'd say that there's been a fair bit of research and textual examination on the Biblical manuscripts - I think that it's well settled that, initially inspired or not, the Bible is just as much a product of human tinkering and guiding as anything. That doesn't completely diminish the Bible for me, but Paine is right to look at how it's been misused and molded to be a weapon. Ultimately, a quite thought-provoking book. I dare any believer, especially any member of any denomination of any Christian church, to read this. I double dare ya'. show less
Thomas Paine was a leading public intellectual of the 18th-century American Revolution, with his pamphlets Common Sense and The American Crisis as chief texts of the "spirit of 1776." He followed these publications with his Rights of Man to defend the French and American revolutionary efforts against reactionary political sentiment in England. His final major work The Age of Reason was written as an expatriate in France. The first and shorter part he composed under the shadow of imminent show more arrest and possible execution, without recourse to a copy of the Bible that it criticizes. The second part includes a more detailed evaluation of Christian scripture, on grounds of both its provenance and internal features.
"Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself than this thing called Christianity" (189-90). Raised by Quakers, Paine was an exemplary Deist of his period and staunchly anti-Christian. His distaste for Christianity is entirely consistent with and often justified by his Deist piety, refusing to attribute to the godhead sentiments and behaviors offensive to human conscience.
Paine's dismantling of claims that the Bible should be regarded as the "Word of God" remain effective today, performed entirely around the evident sense of the texts themselves, without recourse to the "higher criticism" already being developed in Paine's time, which was to prove so damning to the historical pretenses of Bible reception. He does verge on source criticism at a couple of points in discussing the evident "Gentile" origins of certain component texts of the Bible, but simply refers to the judgments of Jewish authorities (Abenezra and Spinoza) and the texts' inconsistency with ancient Hebrew culture and religious sentiment (124-5), rather than any putative source texts. Paine's attacks on the moral features of the supposed heroes of the Bible have not lost any of their force or relevance.
While Aleister Crowley was later to take up as a rallying cry Paine's maxim that "Mystery is the antagonist of truth" (76), I would not say the Beast intended it in just the same unsubtle sense as the venerable Revolutionary, although mystery's envelopment of truth in Paine's argument foreshadows Crowley's incantation. Paine classes mystery with miracle and prophecy as the three invidious organs of revealed or "fabulous" religion (75, 80-2), which he opposes to the "true" religion grounded in scientific admiration for nature and individual conformity to reasoned ethics.
Miracle is faulty for "degrading the Almighty into the character of a show-man, playing tricks to amuse and make the people stare and wonder" (79). The enlightened man of reason (dare I say "magician") will stare and wonder at unadorned reality, of course. As regards prophecy, Paine makes an important distinction between the archaic sense that he finds for the word in the Hebrew Bible, where it evidently means musical performance and/or poetry (35-7), and the "modern" sense in which "prophet" takes the place of "seer" indicating a claimant to divinely-guided psychic foreknowledge (81-2, 111 citing 1 Samuel 9:9). "Prophet" thus ultimately descends to a mere synonym for "liar," particularly in such cases as Isaiah, whose prognostication was contradicted by the subsequent course of events (133-4).
A full chapter of the first part of The Age of Reason is dedicated to "The Effects of Christianism on Education," sadly relevant to the US of the 21st century. The Christian institutions of education substitute indoctrination for learning, in order to profit by the resulting ignorance and cognitive dissonance. Today, we can see the further turn of the wheel in which Christians accuse sincere secular efforts to foster learning with the psychologically projected charge of "indoctrination," since that is the only function they can see in schooling. Current attacks on public libraries and new laws to put schoolteachers in ideological straight-jackets manifest such perspectives in policy, although the recurring phenomenon is as old as the US nation-state, a polity distinctive for its historical adoption of anti-literacy laws.
My Dover paperback copy of The Age of Reason reproduces the 1896 Putnam's edition by Moncure Daniel Conway, which reconciled the first-published French text with the later unauthorized English edition, noting the variances in footnotes. Conway also appended some correspondence by Paine regarding the work: one letter to "a friend" clarifying the book's thesis, and another in response to his Revolutionary comrade Sam Adams. The latter clearly shows the Deist anti-Christian Paine to have a greater magnanimity of spirit than his Puritan interlocutor Adams. show less
"Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself than this thing called Christianity" (189-90). Raised by Quakers, Paine was an exemplary Deist of his period and staunchly anti-Christian. His distaste for Christianity is entirely consistent with and often justified by his Deist piety, refusing to attribute to the godhead sentiments and behaviors offensive to human conscience.
Paine's dismantling of claims that the Bible should be regarded as the "Word of God" remain effective today, performed entirely around the evident sense of the texts themselves, without recourse to the "higher criticism" already being developed in Paine's time, which was to prove so damning to the historical pretenses of Bible reception. He does verge on source criticism at a couple of points in discussing the evident "Gentile" origins of certain component texts of the Bible, but simply refers to the judgments of Jewish authorities (Abenezra and Spinoza) and the texts' inconsistency with ancient Hebrew culture and religious sentiment (124-5), rather than any putative source texts. Paine's attacks on the moral features of the supposed heroes of the Bible have not lost any of their force or relevance.
While Aleister Crowley was later to take up as a rallying cry Paine's maxim that "Mystery is the antagonist of truth" (76), I would not say the Beast intended it in just the same unsubtle sense as the venerable Revolutionary, although mystery's envelopment of truth in Paine's argument foreshadows Crowley's incantation. Paine classes mystery with miracle and prophecy as the three invidious organs of revealed or "fabulous" religion (75, 80-2), which he opposes to the "true" religion grounded in scientific admiration for nature and individual conformity to reasoned ethics.
Miracle is faulty for "degrading the Almighty into the character of a show-man, playing tricks to amuse and make the people stare and wonder" (79). The enlightened man of reason (dare I say "magician") will stare and wonder at unadorned reality, of course. As regards prophecy, Paine makes an important distinction between the archaic sense that he finds for the word in the Hebrew Bible, where it evidently means musical performance and/or poetry (35-7), and the "modern" sense in which "prophet" takes the place of "seer" indicating a claimant to divinely-guided psychic foreknowledge (81-2, 111 citing 1 Samuel 9:9). "Prophet" thus ultimately descends to a mere synonym for "liar," particularly in such cases as Isaiah, whose prognostication was contradicted by the subsequent course of events (133-4).
A full chapter of the first part of The Age of Reason is dedicated to "The Effects of Christianism on Education," sadly relevant to the US of the 21st century. The Christian institutions of education substitute indoctrination for learning, in order to profit by the resulting ignorance and cognitive dissonance. Today, we can see the further turn of the wheel in which Christians accuse sincere secular efforts to foster learning with the psychologically projected charge of "indoctrination," since that is the only function they can see in schooling. Current attacks on public libraries and new laws to put schoolteachers in ideological straight-jackets manifest such perspectives in policy, although the recurring phenomenon is as old as the US nation-state, a polity distinctive for its historical adoption of anti-literacy laws.
My Dover paperback copy of The Age of Reason reproduces the 1896 Putnam's edition by Moncure Daniel Conway, which reconciled the first-published French text with the later unauthorized English edition, noting the variances in footnotes. Conway also appended some correspondence by Paine regarding the work: one letter to "a friend" clarifying the book's thesis, and another in response to his Revolutionary comrade Sam Adams. The latter clearly shows the Deist anti-Christian Paine to have a greater magnanimity of spirit than his Puritan interlocutor Adams. show less
Back in grade school, we were taught that the American founding fathers were uniformly Christian and established the nation on that basis. But as it turns out, that's not entirely true. Only some of them were genuinely Christian, while others were Deists or somewhere in-between. Thomas Paine, perhaps the most outspoken among them, went against the grain of his time and wrote The Age of Reason, a damning and witty multi-part takedown of organized religion and the King James Bible. The general show more reception was far from favorable, and Benjamin Franklin himself even advised Paine against publishing the second part of the book, concluding that "If men are so wicked with religion, what would they be if without it?"
But Franklin's implication here is condescending and foolish. People don't go turning into amoral monsters if they stop believing in religion or a higher power. Morals and ethics shouldn't be reliant on spirituality and allegiance to a church, and certainly aren't exclusive to them. Franklin makes it sound like religion is a benevolent force holding back humanity's "evil," and that testing it with the power of inquiry is tantamount to loosing anarchy upon the world. And it's not as though Paine was advocating for atheism—he was advocating for Deism.
Having gone through a phase of Deism myself a couple years ago, it's neat to read about Paine's views on spirituality and the idea of "Nature's God" as seen through the lens of environmental studies and mathematics. However, Paine's Deistic views and explanations fall apart here and there while under some scrutiny. Paine never really stops to probe or take his own views further, never once questioning if "God" being a singular entity makes sense, or if such an omnipotent being would actually operate in accordance to the physics of our universe or not. But at the core of their beliefs, Paine and his fellow Deists valued critical thought and were against things like superstitions and miracles. Despite my many disagreements with Deism now, Paine is a convincing writer and his unwavering support for "God" makes this an interesting read in its own right (and it was before Darwin's time, so I'll cut Paine some slack).
The bulk of this book is Paine's critique of organized religion. His reasoning is sound and his writing style is both snappy and direct. The book itself becomes somewhat lengthy, but it's entertaining thanks to Paine's acerbic tongue. As for the jist of Paine's worldview, in one of the early chapters he boldly writes:
Well, there you have it. For the Bible, Paine's argument against it is: Since the accounts within it are so muddled, contradictory and rely primarily on blind belief in "divine revelation," it follows that the Bible is simply the managed writings of men, and nothing more. Paine lampoons the Testaments' major events, comparing them to preceding Grecian myths (i.e., Giants vs. Jupiter being a parallel to Lucifer and 1/3 of the angels vs. God), and then against the irrefutable principles of astronomy and geometry; that which can be proven. The natural, primordial world, says Paine, is the word of God, not at all to be compared with what is written and altered in a collection of books deemed holy by men. To Paine, any claims of having the word of God in writing is a laughable farce.
Speaking of laughter, Paine loves to crack wise. For instance, he calls the story of Jonah a satire because "it strikes against the character of all the Bible-prophets, and against all the indiscriminate judgements upon men, women and children...." He also calls into question whether or not the people of Nineveh would've viewed Jonah as some kind of demon. Wouldn't you, if you saw a leviathan spit out a doomsayer who claimed to have been in the creature's stomach for three days and three nights?
Well, if that happened then I might actually start believing in God again.
There are also many digs at Jesus. This part in particular made me crack up:
The latter half of the book reiterates the points made about the New and Old Testament in the first half, and though it can get a bit stale, it's a more in-depth critique that Paine felt was a necessary add-on in response to the religious arguments that the first part of the book raised. I found the first part of Paine's book complete enough, although it could be because I'm already well-acquainted with the characters and stories of the Bible.
Paine only loses me when it comes to his brand of Deism. It's a decent worldview for the time period, certainly a kind of proto-atheism insofar as its rejection of scripture-bound religion, but there parts of it that don't make sense. And then, why not Polytheism instead, or other "Natural God" theisms? Paine doesn't say. But, really, that's not quite the point of the book. Paine's other arguments make sense, and are sometimes quite funny, so for that alone this is a satisfying read. While much of this book only reaffirmed my own view of organized religion, it was still an impressive and thorough dismantling of Christianity. Certainly the most thorough one I've read to date. show less
But Franklin's implication here is condescending and foolish. People don't go turning into amoral monsters if they stop believing in religion or a higher power. Morals and ethics shouldn't be reliant on spirituality and allegiance to a church, and certainly aren't exclusive to them. Franklin makes it sound like religion is a benevolent force holding back humanity's "evil," and that testing it with the power of inquiry is tantamount to loosing anarchy upon the world. And it's not as though Paine was advocating for atheism—he was advocating for Deism.
Having gone through a phase of Deism myself a couple years ago, it's neat to read about Paine's views on spirituality and the idea of "Nature's God" as seen through the lens of environmental studies and mathematics. However, Paine's Deistic views and explanations fall apart here and there while under some scrutiny. Paine never really stops to probe or take his own views further, never once questioning if "God" being a singular entity makes sense, or if such an omnipotent being would actually operate in accordance to the physics of our universe or not. But at the core of their beliefs, Paine and his fellow Deists valued critical thought and were against things like superstitions and miracles. Despite my many disagreements with Deism now, Paine is a convincing writer and his unwavering support for "God" makes this an interesting read in its own right (and it was before Darwin's time, so I'll cut Paine some slack).
The bulk of this book is Paine's critique of organized religion. His reasoning is sound and his writing style is both snappy and direct. The book itself becomes somewhat lengthy, but it's entertaining thanks to Paine's acerbic tongue. As for the jist of Paine's worldview, in one of the early chapters he boldly writes:
“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”
Well, there you have it. For the Bible, Paine's argument against it is: Since the accounts within it are so muddled, contradictory and rely primarily on blind belief in "divine revelation," it follows that the Bible is simply the managed writings of men, and nothing more. Paine lampoons the Testaments' major events, comparing them to preceding Grecian myths (i.e., Giants vs. Jupiter being a parallel to Lucifer and 1/3 of the angels vs. God), and then against the irrefutable principles of astronomy and geometry; that which can be proven. The natural, primordial world, says Paine, is the word of God, not at all to be compared with what is written and altered in a collection of books deemed holy by men. To Paine, any claims of having the word of God in writing is a laughable farce.
Speaking of laughter, Paine loves to crack wise. For instance, he calls the story of Jonah a satire because "it strikes against the character of all the Bible-prophets, and against all the indiscriminate judgements upon men, women and children...." He also calls into question whether or not the people of Nineveh would've viewed Jonah as some kind of demon. Wouldn't you, if you saw a leviathan spit out a doomsayer who claimed to have been in the creature's stomach for three days and three nights?
Well, if that happened then I might actually start believing in God again.
There are also many digs at Jesus. This part in particular made me crack up:
"The Christian mythologists tell us that Christ died for the sins of the world, and that he came on Purpose to die. Would it not then have been the same if he had died of a fever or of the small pox, of old age, or of anything else?....
If Jesus Christ was the being which those mythologists tell us he was, and that he came into this world to suffer, which is a word they sometimes use instead of ‘to die,’ the only real suffering he could have endured would have been ‘to live.’ His existence here was a state of exilement or transportation from heaven, and the way back to his original country was to die.—In fine, everything in this strange system is the reverse of what it pretends to be. It is the reverse of truth, and I become so tired of examining into its inconsistencies and absurdities, that I hasten to the conclusion of it, in order to proceed to something better."
The latter half of the book reiterates the points made about the New and Old Testament in the first half, and though it can get a bit stale, it's a more in-depth critique that Paine felt was a necessary add-on in response to the religious arguments that the first part of the book raised. I found the first part of Paine's book complete enough, although it could be because I'm already well-acquainted with the characters and stories of the Bible.
Paine only loses me when it comes to his brand of Deism. It's a decent worldview for the time period, certainly a kind of proto-atheism insofar as its rejection of scripture-bound religion, but there parts of it that don't make sense. And then, why not Polytheism instead, or other "Natural God" theisms? Paine doesn't say. But, really, that's not quite the point of the book. Paine's other arguments make sense, and are sometimes quite funny, so for that alone this is a satisfying read. While much of this book only reaffirmed my own view of organized religion, it was still an impressive and thorough dismantling of Christianity. Certainly the most thorough one I've read to date. show less
Stirring and persuasive, Thomas Paine's short polemic Common Sense retains the passion and immediacy of the moment in which it was written: 1776, with Paine's fellow Americans in rebellion against their British parent. On one level, it is an argument against monarchy in general, but from this angle it is quite limited. Excitable and populist, using naked rhetoric to appeal to the emotions of its intended audience, it lacks the rigour such an argument requires – though it is still fun to show more read. Paine's appeals to Scripture to validate his case seem cynical given the atheism – or at least anti-theism – he espoused.
However, the argument against monarchy is merely the platform on which Paine pursues his true cause. Common Sense is primarily a plea for Paine's fellow Americans to seize their moment and establish their independence, for "no nation under heaven hath such an advantage as this" (pg. 54). He is right – America at that moment possessed strategic and commercial advantages, raw materials, reasonable military power, favourable political circumstances and politicians with the calibre to exploit them. It had momentum, and it's fascinating to detect the note of desperation, or at least unease, in Paine's writing here, that that momentum may be squandered.
We might look back now and see the United States as inevitable, given those advantages and circumstances, but might forget that it was Paine, among others, working frantically at the bellows. In this slight pamphlet, intended for a general audience, we can find the seeds of much of the United States' perception of itself; its political exceptionalism, its libertarian sensibility and its appeal to noble ideals. (We might also, perhaps a bit uncharitably, detect America's selective pursuit of those ideals, such as in Paine's off-hand dismissal of the "Indians and Negroes" who the British "hath stirred up… to destroy us" (pg. 45).)
A stable society, Paine writes in one of his more sober and analytical moments, involves a healthy and mutually-supportive relationship between government and governed; "this frequent interchange will establish a common interest… on this (and not on the unmeaning name of king) depends the strength of government, and the happiness of the governed" (pg. 8). 'Common sense', then, has a double meaning as Paine's title. It is not just Paine proposing that his argument is the only one that makes sense, the only one that discards of the nonsense of kings. The polemic, in its passion for an American republic borne out of revolution, provided for Americans a common sense, a shared vision or idea, of what they should seek to be. show less
However, the argument against monarchy is merely the platform on which Paine pursues his true cause. Common Sense is primarily a plea for Paine's fellow Americans to seize their moment and establish their independence, for "no nation under heaven hath such an advantage as this" (pg. 54). He is right – America at that moment possessed strategic and commercial advantages, raw materials, reasonable military power, favourable political circumstances and politicians with the calibre to exploit them. It had momentum, and it's fascinating to detect the note of desperation, or at least unease, in Paine's writing here, that that momentum may be squandered.
We might look back now and see the United States as inevitable, given those advantages and circumstances, but might forget that it was Paine, among others, working frantically at the bellows. In this slight pamphlet, intended for a general audience, we can find the seeds of much of the United States' perception of itself; its political exceptionalism, its libertarian sensibility and its appeal to noble ideals. (We might also, perhaps a bit uncharitably, detect America's selective pursuit of those ideals, such as in Paine's off-hand dismissal of the "Indians and Negroes" who the British "hath stirred up… to destroy us" (pg. 45).)
A stable society, Paine writes in one of his more sober and analytical moments, involves a healthy and mutually-supportive relationship between government and governed; "this frequent interchange will establish a common interest… on this (and not on the unmeaning name of king) depends the strength of government, and the happiness of the governed" (pg. 8). 'Common sense', then, has a double meaning as Paine's title. It is not just Paine proposing that his argument is the only one that makes sense, the only one that discards of the nonsense of kings. The polemic, in its passion for an American republic borne out of revolution, provided for Americans a common sense, a shared vision or idea, of what they should seek to be. show less
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