Selected Writings of Thomas Paine ed. by Ian Shapiro and Jane Calvert (review)

Although an update of Philip Foner’s 1945 two-volume The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine is still sorely needed, this Ian Shapiro and Jane Calvert edition of Thomas Paine’s writings is one of the most comprehensive, accessible compilations available today, and I imagine it will be of great value in college classrooms. From Common Sense (1776) to Of the Term “Liberty of the Press” (1806), from both parts of Rights of Man (1791–92) to Agrarian Justice (1797), and from Reasons for Wishing to Preserve the Life of Louis Capet (1793) to both parts of The Age of Reason (1794–95), classic Paine texts appear in their entirety in this attractive, sturdy paperback. Some instructors still might prefer the only other comparably comprehensive modern, scholarly edition of Paine’s works, Eric Foner’s 1995 Library of America hardcover version, because it contains an array of Paine’s letters—a striking omission in the Shapiro and Calvert edition—and more selections from the Crisis pamphlets (1776–83). But epistolary significance is not what Paine is generally known for, making Shapiro and Calvert’s exclusive focus on published texts justifiable. In addition, unlike the Library of America text, the Shapiro and Calvert compilation contains Dissertations on Government, the Affairs of the Bank, and Paper Money (1786) and Letter to George Washington, President of the United States of America (1796), two important documents for understanding Paine’s intellectual and political evolution.

Further, each of the three, short scholarly essays at the back of the book provides insights worthy of discussion. J. C. D. Clark perceptively identifies an anti-Williamite, anti-Hanoverian strain in Paine’s attack on monarchy. Hence, despite scholars’ preoccupation with Common Sense’s significance for the coming of the Declaration of Independence, that pamphlet could not have been written—or perhaps even conceived—if its author had not been brought up in and socialized to England’s political culture. Jane Calvert underscores Paine’s contributions to the persecution of Quakers professing neutrality during the American Revolutionary War. Keen to eliminate dissent, Paine knowingly distorted the beliefs of Friends, equated them with “Jesuits,” and urged fellow Pennsylvania radicals to disenfranchise, fine, or subject to test acts purported Quaker Loyalists. Eileen Hunt Botting investigates Paine’s relation to eighteenth-century feminism, finding that Paine’s early writings—especially Common Sense—generally failed to address women’s issues, and when they did, they casually reinforced gender stereotypes and the inequality of the sexes. Yet with Rights of Man, Part the Second and Agrarian Justice, Botting notes, Paine developed a modestly feminist agenda by adding female pronouns in certain places, proposing a cash payment to new mothers no matter whether they were single or married, and suggesting a payment of fifteen pounds to all twenty-one-year-olds—female and male—as a means of compensating them for the loss of their natural, God-given property inheritance—namely, “the earth, in its natural, uncultivated state” (555).

Strengths notwithstanding, this text contains certain quirks, if not flaws. For one, the limited scope of the three essays at the back and the absence of a select bibliography of Paine scholarship means that students will not be referred to terrific recent work by, among others, literary scholars Robert Ferguson and Edward Larkin and historians Sophia Rosenfeld and Seth Cotlar. (See Ferguson, “The Commonalities of Common Sense,” William and Mary Quarterly 57 [2000], 465–504; Larkin, Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution [New York, 2005]; Rosenfeld, Common Sense: A Political History [Boston, 2011]; Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic [Charlottesville, 2011].) In addition, Ian Shapiro’s introduction repeatedly and ahistorically suggests what Paine, who died in 1809, “would have” thought or done in relation to Tocqueville, Lincoln, and the Civil War (xxiii–xxiv). Finally, Clark’s determination to diminish Paine’s significance causes him to overargue his case and make needless errors. Clark’s...