Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Paine
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Annotated Edition ◽  
The People ◽  
The World

‘An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot . . . it will march on the horizon of the world and it will conquer.’ Thomas Paine was the first international revolutionary. His Common Sense (1776) was the most widely read pamphlet of the American Revolution; his Rights of Man (1791-2) was the most famous defence of the French Revolution and sent out a clarion call for revolution throughout the world. He paid the price for his principles: he was outlawed in Britain, narrowly escaped execution in France, and was villified as an atheist and a Jacobin on his return to America. Paine loathed the unnatural inequalities fostered by the hereditary and monarchical systems. He believed that government must be by and for the people and must limit itself to the protection of their natural rights. But he was not a libertarian: from a commitment to natural rights he generated one of the first blueprints for a welfare state, combining a liberal order of civil rights with egalitarian constraints. This collection brings together Paine's most powerful political writings from the American and French revolutions in the first fully annotated edition of these works.

Debating the Nature of the Young Republic in Song

2020 ◽  
pp. 63-102
Author(s):  
Laura Lohman
Keyword(s):  
Public Participation ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Elected Officials ◽  
Political Opposition ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Universal Principles ◽  
The People

Americans used music to disseminate competing concepts of republicanism during Washington’s second term as president. As the unfolding French Revolution accelerated Americans’ engagement with the debate over aristocracy versus equality, Americans increasingly choose the medium of music to voice their political opposition. While Federalists perceived democracy as something to be curtailed, their emerging Republican opponents advocated active public participation in politics and “universal principles” of liberty and equality. Republicans challenged the Federalists’ fundamental premise that the people must defer to the wisdom of elected officials drawn from the elite. In song, Americans voiced their political opposition through a cosmopolitan language of natural rights inspired by Thomas Paine and resisted growing British influence. Federalists launched a counterattack by connecting Republican opposition to unlawful, violent rebellion.

The Unexpected Revolution

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. C. D. Clark
Keyword(s):  
American Revolution ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Rights Theories ◽  
New View ◽  
The Revolution

Chapter 4 offers a new view of the American Revolution in terms more of negations than of affirmations: not the instantiation of modernizing natural rights theories or republicanism, but the result of older and passionate negations on both sides of the Atlantic, often religious. It reinterprets Paine’s Common Sense against the older contexts proposed in this book, and argues that the pamphlet, although important, was not transformative and ubiquitous. It traces Paine’s subsequent writings while in America, responding to and interpreting the course of the Revolution, and concludes that Paine’s understanding of that important episode was less than has been thought; rather, he largely remained within an English frame of reference, as did, indeed, most American colonists. He understood the American Revolution, then, in English terms.

Writing Generation: Revolutionary Bodies and the Poetics of Political Economy

2018 ◽  
pp. 135-161
Author(s):  
Annika Mann
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
William Blake ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Poetic Discourse ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status

This chapter reconsiders the emergence of political economy, biology, and literature as separate fields of research—disciplines—by examining representations of noxious generation in the politics and poetry of the late eighteenth century. In the debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine over the status of the French Revolution, both writers collapse biological theories of reproduction and political theories of social collectivity, depicting generation as the proliferation of embodied collectives stimulated by print. In their poems The First Book of Urizen (1794) and “To a Little Invisible Being, Soon to Become Visible” (probably composed in 1799), William Blake and Anna Barbauld critique that collapse, even as they reflect upon how that collapse is itself facilitated by the tools of poetic discourse, by form and figure. Both poets explore how the “visible form” of writing, the structure of the book, and the figure of the womb are complicit in the generation of new kinds of bodies in the world. In so doing, Blake and Barbauld expose the unavoidably shared ground of poets, political economists, and scientists at the very moment those writers began increasingly articulating their own separateness.

Paine, Thomas (1737–1809)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Kuklick
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Political System ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
Revolutionary Politics

Thomas Paine, born in Norfolk, England, spent his early years as an undistinguished artisan and later excise officer. In 1774 he emigrated to America and settled in Philadelphia where he became a journalist and essayist. His Common Sense (1776) and sixteen essays on The Crisis (1776–83) were stunning examples of political propaganda and theorizing. In the late 1780s, in Europe, Paine wrote The Rights of Man (1791–2) and attacked the English political system. During the French Revolution he was a Girondin in the French Convention and wrote The Age of Reason (1794, 1796), savagely criticizing Christianity. He died in New York in 1809, an important figure in the sweep of the revolutionary politics in America, England, and France at the end of the eighteenth century.

INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW SERIES: UNCOMMON “COMMON SENSE”

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-49
Author(s):  
Akinobu Kuroda
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Opposite Direction ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
High Quality ◽  
Short Supply ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common

The common sense of modern times was not always “common” in the past. For example, if it is true that inflation is caused by an oversupply of money, a short supply of money must cause deflation. However logical that sounds, though, it has not been so uncommon in history that rising prices were recognized as being caused by a scarcity of currency. Even in the same period, a common idea prevailing in one historical area was not always common in another; rather, it sometimes appeared in quite the opposite direction. It is likely that the idea that a government gains from bad currencies, while traders appreciate good ones, is popular throughout the world. In the case of China, however, its dynasties sometimes intentionally issued high-quality coins without regard to their losses. East Asia shared the idea that cheap currency harms the state, while an expensive currency harms the people. This is in considerable contrast with a common image in other regions that authorities gained profits from seigniorage.

Hegel's Critique of the Triumph of Verstand in Modernity

1997 ◽  
Vol 18 (01) ◽  
pp. 54-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Houlgate
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Crucial Importance ◽  
The People ◽  
Universal Suffrage ◽  
The World ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Revolution

In his lectures on the philosophy of history Hegel passes this famous judgement on the French Revolution. “Anaxagoras had been the first to say that nous governs the world; but only now did humanity come to recognize that thought should rule spiritual actuality. This was thus a magnificent dawn”. What first gave rise to discontent in France, in Hegel's view, were the heavy burdens that pressed upon the people and the government's inability to procure for the Court the means of supporting its luxury and extravagance. But soon the new spirit of freedom and enlightenment began to stir in men's minds and carry them forward to revolution. “One should not, therefore, declare oneself against the assertion”, Hegel concludes, “that the Revolution received its first impulse from Philosophy” (VPW, p 924). However, Hegel points out that the legacy of the revolution is actually an ambiguous one. For, although the principles which guided the revolution were those of reason and were indeed magnificent – namely, that humanity is born to freedom and self-determination – they were held fast in their abstraction and turned “polemically”, and at times terribly, against the existing order (VPW, p 925). What ultimately triumphed in the revolution was thus not concrete reason itself, but abstract reason or understanding (VPW, p 923). In Hegel's view, the enduring legacy of such revolutionary understanding was, not so much the Terror, but the principle that “the subjective wills of the many should hold sway” (VPW, p 932). This principle, which Hegel calls the principle of “liberalism” and which we would call the principle of majority rule, has since spread from France to become one of the governing principles of modern stat. It has been used to justify granting universal suffrage, to justify depriving corporations and the nobility of the right to sit in the legislature, and in some cases to justify abolishing the monarchy. What is of crucial importance for Hegel, however, is that such measures have not rendered the state more modern and rational, but have in fact distorted the modern state.

“Despite the contradictions”

2020 ◽  
pp. 185-194
Author(s):  
Christine Jeske
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Racial Inequalities ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social Narrative

This chapter offers closing thoughts that reiterate and summarizes the main points of the book. The chapter explores the ways people make a careful survey of their situation and work out a method to yield growth despite life's contradictions and pressures. If their lives look at times like wind-torn shrubs, that does not mean that they are poorly adapted or lethargic. Instead, it offers evidence of the hard work it takes to thrive in a world where the good life is hard to find. It shows that a dominant myth blaming inequality on laziness has guided, upheld, and justified racial inequalities in South Africa and the world since the earliest mercantile and colonial encounters between Europeans and Africans, and this narrative was never eradicated, despite antislavery, civil rights, and anti-apartheid movements that achieved important legal and structural changes. The struggle to change this social narrative is an unglorified resistance with no clear ending point, but it is essential to the pursuit of the good life. It also shows evidence that in order to generate employment while aiming for the higher goal of seeking good, South Africa must address the history of antiblack disrespect that perpetuates dysfunctional employment structures. The people described in this book refuse to conform to narratives of inevitable happy endings or easy hope, but neither do their stories end only in despair.

Die Aufnahme von Thomas Paines Schriften in Deutschland

PMLA ◽  
1959 ◽  
Vol 74 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 365-386
Author(s):  
Von Hans Arnold
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
The World

Es Erscheint an der Zeit, der Aufnahme von Thomas Paines Schriften in Deutschland einmal nachzugehen. Sie standen seinen deutschen Zeitgenossen nicht nur in deren eigener Sprache zur Verfügung, sondern gewannen für sie eine Bedeutung, die im allgemeinen bisher unbeachtet geblieben ist.Um dieser Bedeutung gerecht zu werden, muß die Untersuchung auch die Aufnahme unter den Deutschen in Amerika mit einschließen; denn die Wechselbeziehungen waren mannigfaltig. Sie erstreckten sich zuweilen rückwirkend auf das amerikanische Geistesleben, ja sogar—wie es vereinzelte Anhaltspunkte deutlich machen—auf Thomas Paine selbst. Als Friedrich von Gentz zur Jahrhundertwende in seinem Hislorischen Journal den Unterschied zwischen der französischen und der amerikanischen Revolution herausstellte und dabei Paines europäischen Radikalismus scharf verurteilte, traf er einen Ton, der den gemäßigten John Quincy Adams, seinerzeit Minister Plenipotentiary der Vereinigten Staaten in Berlin, so begeisterte, daß dieser von dem Essai sogleich anonym eine englische Übersetzung anfertigte und nach Philadelphia zum Drucken sandte. Wieweit sich Paine eines deutschen Widerhalls auf seine Schriften bewußt war, läßt sich genau nicht bestimmen; jedoch ist gewiß, daß sein Kontakt mit Deutschen und mit Deutschland enger war, als man bisher annehmen konnte. Seine eigenen Schriften sind irreführend, wenn er in der American Crisis mit einem Zukunftsbild von den Gefahren einer Besetzung Amerikas durch die “Hessen” aufwartet oder sich in den Rights of Man eines solchen erinnern will, der ihm berichtete, deutsche Untertanen äßen Stroh, wofern es ihr Fürst nur beföhle. Die Söldnertruppen waren schwerlich die einzigen Deutschen seines Umgangs in Amerika, und gar in Paris gab es neben dem Preußen Anacharsis Clootz genug, durch die er sich über deutsche Verhältnisse unterrichten konnte. Hier traf er Georg Forster und Carl Friedrich Cramer, und es ist wahrscheinlich, daß er von den vielen anderen Mitgliedern der deutschen Kolonie doch wenigstens die persönlich kannte, die auch in der englischen verkehrten. Jedenfalls wird die Übersetzung der einen oder anderen seiner späteren Schriften geradezu vor seinen Augen stattgefunden haben. Ja schon bei der ersten deutschen Ausgabe von Common Sense in Philadelphia hatte er möglicherweise seine Hand mit im Spiel; denn das Vorwort läßt darauf schließen, daß den Herausgebern der anonyme Autor wohlbekannt war. Eine deutsche Antwort auf Common Sense blieb schon in Amerika nicht aus; den einzigen Beweis aber, daß er nicht ganz im unklaren über die deutsche Aufnahme seiner Schriften war, liefert Paine erst viele Jahre später in Europa. In seiner Vorrede zu einer Neufassung der Rights of Man erklärt er nämlich 1794: “The Chancellor at Berlin, or the Judges at Vienna shall not punish unfortunate individuals for publishing or reading what tyranny may be pleased to call my libels upon their different States.” Er beschließt jetzt ausdrücklich: “I write for the world at large.”

Freedom: The History and the Future of a Disputed Idea

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Jessica Whyte
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Paris Commune ◽  
The Third ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
Reign Of Terror

Around 1882, the photographer Albert Fernique photographed a group of Parisian workers gathered around trestles and benches inside a workshop. The floor is strewn with piles of wood and the ceiling beams tower above the workmen. Even so, the space is dwarfed by a massive, sculpted shoulder, draped in Roman robes, which dominates the background of the photograph; two workers watching the scene from a beam just below the roof appear to be perched on it like sparrows. The shoulder belonged to the statue, Liberty Enlightening the World—a gift to the United States from the France of the Third Republic. Work on the statue began here, in the workshop of the sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, only a year after the suppression of the Paris Commune. More people were killed in that one Bloody Week (la semaine sanglante) in 1874 than were executed in the entire Reign of Terror following the French Revolution. If the statue was supposed to symbolize liberty, this was to be an orderly liberty far removed from the license of the armed Parisian workers and their short-lived utopian government. Unlike her ancestor Marianne, immortalized by Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, the statue does not wear the red cap that, since ancient Rome, had symbolized freedom from slavery. In the wake of the Paris Commune, the Third Republic banned the cap and sought to banish the unruly freedom it represented.

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