The Political Philosophy of Thomas Paine

Introduction

INTRODUCTION Americans with a historical sensibility have long been ambivalent about the leading figures of their founding period. On the one hand, they often grow impatient with the unfulfilled promise of the ideals presented in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. These documents failed to resolve the problem of slavery, they neglected the rights of women, and they dismissed Native Americans’ rights to their lands as increasing numbers of Americans moved westward .1 On the other hand, Americans have been enamored with the founding period from the First Continental Congress to the presidencies of George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas JeVerson. By the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, they began to crave an unprecedented amount of information about those who played principal roles in America’s founding era. This peculiar phenomenon, christened “Founders Chic” in 2001, has been marked by the appearance of numerous books focusing on the illustrious figures of the Revolution against Britain and the drafting of the Constitution— Washington and JeVerson, Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin—and on less prominent figures like Gouverneur Morris and even the maligned Aaron Burr.2 JeVerson’s and Franklin’s images have even graced the front cover of Time magazine.3 The opportunity to study afresh the political philosophies of the notable personalities of America’s founding generation enhances our understanding of their thinking about how they explained their ideas to a new emerging nation founded 1 ;l: on novel political principles, which they thought were untried though workable, risky though exciting. The central question they posed was how to form a government that best celebrated and protected individual rights while not diminishing the community ’s security. The answer was their defense of the democratic republic. Their diVerences arose in the particular way they preferred to structure the republic to ensure and guarantee the citizens’ rights and liberties.4 The Founders Chic phenomenon has included Thomas Paine, an Englishman by birth, an American by choice and necessity. More than any eighteenth-century political writer and activist, Paine defies easy categorization. A liberal and a radical with at times conservative economic views, Paine’s contradictions make him appear to be a believing and nonbelieving Quaker, who was no pacifist. Later in life, he became a deist, holding that God’s creation was all we need to know about Him, except when we detect a tincture of theism in his writings; at times, he reveals his belief in God’s controlling hand in history and, as we will see, he even suggested that he himself possessed a divinely appointed role.5 Meanwhile, Paine has been excoriated as an unreconstructed atheist and a radical, even romantic revolutionary on two continents. But just who was Thomas Paine, and what drove his thinking? Many commentators have asked this question , leading to so much attention devoted to him in academic and nonacademic circles that the study of his life and thought has become a growth industry in America, England, and France. No fewer than eight new biographies, including three in French, have appeared over the past twenty years.6 Numerous book-length commentaries and several essays on his writings have been published in learned journals and the popular press.7 A new Library of America edition of his works has now fixed him securely in the canon of American literature, as only writers considered genuinely “American” have their writings included among its publications.8 At least one political pundit, who himself has extensively commented on Paine’s Rights of Man, has recently been touted as “the Tom Paine of our troubled times,” and Paine has even been cited as a precursor to the Internet; an article entitled “The Age of Paine” echoed John Adams’s famous and marvelously eloquent deprecation of Paine The Political Philosophy of Thomas Paine 2 in an 1805 letter to his friend, the physician Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse .9 Adams wrote that he was deeply oVended that the era he had tried to shape was now called the Age of Reason because a wretched book by Paine (that “disastrous meteor”) carried that name. Adams told Waterhouse: I am willing you should call this the Age of Frivolity as you do, and would not object if you had named it the Age of Folly, Vice, Frenzy, Brutality, Daemons, Buonaparte, Tom Paine, or the Age of the Burning...