Rights of Man

Paine's reply to Burke's Reflections, published in two parts in 1791 and 1792 and read very widely in Britain and America. Part One defends the French Revolution and attacks Burke point by point. No generation can bind those that follow, so the settlement of 1688 cannot oblige the living. Every person is born with equal natural rights and enters society to secure them, keeping the rights an individual can exercise alone and pooling the rest. A constitution is something a people makes before there is a government, and Britain, lacking a written one, has none in that sense. Part Two sets out the case for representative government, mocks hereditary rule as no more sensible than a hereditary mathematician, and proposes concrete reforms paid for by cutting war and court spending: support for poor families and their children's schooling, pensions for the elderly, and a progressive tax on large estates. The British government prosecuted Paine for seditious libel, and critics called his principles abstract and dangerous.

It is the most popular defence of natural rights and democratic republicanism in English, and its proposals for public welfare were far ahead of their time.