Thomas Paine's "Neglected" Pamphlet: Agrarian Justice

As political interest in basic income (a government-guaranteed minimum income) has grown in recent years, so has interest in Thomas Paine's pamphlet Agrarian Justice. In what is often considered his last major work, Paine laid out a vision and a rationale for a state-managed trust fund that would provide a measure of social security to the elderly, as well as providing seed capital to young people starting out in life. Because the revenue would come from a tax on natural resources (land), Paine's vision bears a family resemblance to the most celebrated example of a basic income variant in action in our own day: the Alaska Permanent Fund, which pays dividends to all Alaska residents out of invested oil revenue. This class of basic income variants is particularly attractive from a policy standpoint, because the source of funding is baked right in (a tax on the use of natural resources) and because there is a clear ethical justification for the redistribution: it is a means by which those who privatize a common resource compensate the community for the loss of the resource.

It is an odd fact that throughout the lengthy and well-publicized debates in the 1970s that led to the creation of the Alaska Permanent Fund, no one gave a thought to Thomas Paine and his pamphlet. No one was reprinting Agrarian Justice in Juneau, or reading it into the Alaska House and Senate journals, or editorializing about it in Anchorage or Washington, DC, or (as far as we can tell) even reading it privately for inspiration. It was not until around the 1990s that Paine's pamphlet was cited in the basic income literature, and not until well into the current century that it became established as a canonical text for the movement.¹

Those who are familiar with Paine's corpus will not be surprised that Agrarian Justice languished in obscurity while its principles were being put into action. In the twentieth century this pamphlet had a reputation as a neglected work, even among Paine scholars. Jamie L. Bronstein, for example, described it as "little studied," and Gregory Claeys called it "the most neglected of Paine's chief works … even major studies of Paine have paid it little heed." But as it is now in the limelight thanks to basic income, it is time to give the pamphlet its due. This article presents the first complete account of the pamphlet's composition, publication, and initial reception. We clear up common misconceptions and bring to light facts that have been buried in the archives. Most important, we seek to shed light on the question: why such neglect? Why should this pamphlet from the author of Common Sense and The Rights of Man not have sparked vigorous conversation and political action?²

For the pamphlet's neglect did not begin in the twentieth century. It is widely understood that the pamphlet's impact on contemporary intellectual life in the waning years of the eighteenth century was negligible. To be concrete: as the exceptions that prove the rule, instances of confirmed or apparent influence on the creative activity of the first generation of readers, however slight, can be counted on the fingers of one hand:³

• • Fellow English radical Thomas Spence responded to it at length in his near-contemporary pamphlet The Rights of Infants, criticizing Paine's proposal as a half-measure.⁴

• • It may have been Paine's criticism of the bishop of Llandaff in the preface to Agrarian Justice that inspired the English poet William Blake to sketch his own critique of the bishop's book.⁵

• • William Cobbett, Paine's nemesis-turned-apostle, rehearses an argument reminiscent of Agrarian Justice in his 1829 Poor Man's Friend.⁶

• • Agrarian Justice may have (inadvertently) turned English radical John Bone's interests in the direction of the collectivist schemes of Robert Owen, according to Claeys.⁷

• • The pamphlet may have influenced Charles Hall's 1805 book The Effects of Civilization upon the People in European States.⁸

Future research may turn up additional examples, but this is unlikely...