Paine and Jefferson in the Age of Revolutions

Two Paths from Revolution: Jefferson, Paine, and the Radicalization of Enlightenment Thought

252 T homas jefferson and Thomas paine shared an enthusiasm for the revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Both, of course, were strong partisans of the american revolution; both were among the strongest non-french supporters of the french revolution . Both called for and welcomed future revolutions. no american citizens played a greater role in the french revolution than jefferson and paine. The former was much involved in the early stages of the revolution, consulting with the Lafayette circle and advising on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. paine was even more heavily engaged, serving in the french Convention, writing on behalf of the revolution, and debating the most pressing questions, including the fate of Louis XVi. Moreover, paine came within a hair of sharing the ultimate fate of a great number of the french revolutionaries—the guillotine.1 Both jefferson and paine had an effect on the french revolution, but i wish to explore the possible effect of the french revolution on them. a prima facie case can be made for such an effect, for we see in both of them a radicalization of their political thinking suggestively related to their engagements with the revolution. Their political thinking moved in rather different directions, however. jefferson’s most striking shift occurred in his political thinking proper, with his development of a theory of ward republicanism and his strenuous call for a participatory republicanism far beyond anything he had earlier favored, and beyond what any others of that generation of americans contemplated. paine’s shift came in the development of a new theory of Two Paths from Revolution Jefferson, Paine, and the Radicalization of Enlightenment Thought Y m i c H a e l Z U c k e rt 253 economic rights, a theory that has often been called (plausibly) a precursor to the theory of the welfare state.2 paine’s “welfarism” marked a distinct shift from his early, libertarian emphasis on the limited role of government and the dominance of negative rights. although the two men moved in somewhat different directions, we can discern a common concern with the problem of consent in modern philosophy in the evolution in the thought of both of them. tHe early Paine paine began his career with a position very like that of a modern libertarian. He put natural rights at the forefront of his political thinking (see the title of his chief book), he understood rights to be negative rights, and he believed that the task of government was limited to protecting citizens from violations of their rights. paine’s early position was thus rather like that of john Locke, but paine was more doctrinaire than Locke in limiting the legitimate scope of governmental action. accordingly, his position was more full-bodied in developing a theory to account for the positive achievements of civilization independent of government. one must appreciate, paine insisted, the difference between government and society. The former operates via coercion, the latter by voluntary action. as paine so incisively put it: “society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness.” society and the voluntary actions (such as market exchanges) undertaken to meet our wants supply all the positive things that contribute to human happiness. Government contributes to happiness only in a negative way, by preventing or punishing the evil that men would do that interferes with happiness. even more strongly than jefferson, paine pronounced government merely a “necessary evil.” He would certainly have agreed with Thoreau’s jeffersonian dictum that “that government is best which governs least.”3 Yet in his later works of the 1790s—roughly two decades after his early work—paine laid out a program that sounds like that of a modern welfare state: progressive taxation, property redistribution for the sake of greater equality in society, old-age pensions, and other proposals, some of which we shall discuss in more detail below.4 perhaps most striking is his insistence that those provisions should not be seen as charity or prudent policy, but as a matter of right.5 recognizing paine’s affirmation of these welfare provisions as a matter of right helps set us on track to understand the political philosophic significance of his late doctrine. The arguments that emerged in the nineteenth century in favor of the welfare state were actually quite different from two PatHs from revolUtion 254 micHael ZUckert those...