Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine was an English-born political writer and activist who took part in both the American and French Revolutions. His pamphlet Common Sense (1776) made a plain-spoken case for American independence and was read across the colonies. In Rights of Man he answered Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution, defending popular sovereignty, natural rights and representative government, and proposing public welfare measures. His Age of Reason argued for deism against revealed religion, which damaged his reputation in later life. He died in New York in 1809.

Key ideas

• Each generation has the right to govern itself; no generation can bind its successors.
• Government draws its legitimacy from the people, and hereditary monarchy has no rational basis.
• Natural rights belong to every person and are the foundation of civil rights.
• Society should provide for the poor and the old through public measures such as pensions and an endowment funded from land.
• Reason and nature, not scripture or church, are the proper guides to belief in God.

Major works

• Rights of Man (1791–1792)
• Common Sense (1776)
• The Age of Reason (1794–1795)
• Agrarian Justice (1797)

In the Book corner

• Rights of Man 1791–92 · Beginner
  Paine's reply to Burke's Reflections, published in two parts in 1791 and 1792 and read very widely in Britain and America. Part…

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