Chapter 3 surveys a number of themes, issues, and campaigns to discern how far Paine fits within each: populist language, universal suffrage based on natural rights, the abolition of poverty, women’s emancipation, anti-slavery, cosmopolitanism, Irish emancipation, and the championing of ‘revolution’ as such. In case after case, it finds that Paine’s position has been exaggerated or misconceived. His language was carefully contrived, and his rhetoric echoed that of contemporary preaching rather than populist politics; his ideas on poverty stemmed from England’s ‘old poor law’, not from future class politics; he disapproved of slavery in private but largely ignored it in public, and was not part of the anti-slavery movement; he was a monoglot exile, not at home in other countries; he did not see the significance of Irish disaffection; and he did not theorize ‘revolution’ as such.
