I

Thomas Paine lived in a blaze of political glory and died in relative obscurity. His philosophy inspired two of the greatest revolutions in human history—the American Revolution and the French Revolution. In gratitude both the United States and France bestowed great honor as well as citizenship upon him. Yet his memory has been dimmed in the first nation, and all but forgotten in the second. If any man is entitled to be called the Father of American Independence, it is Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense stated the case for freedom from England's rule with a logic and a passion that roused the public opinion of the Colonies to a white heat. Just as essential in preserving the cause of independence was the series of pamphlets, The American Crisis, published to sustain the morale of Washington's army and the patriotic cause in the darkest days of the conflict. The first of them, written on a drumhead by the flickering light of a campfire during Washington's retreat before greatly superior forces, with its ringing opening sentence: "These are the times that try men's souls," galvanized the soldiers before whom it was read, at Washington's orders, into spirited and successful resistance and counterattack.

Paine's pamphlet Rights of Man brought him international fame—but in England, where his earlier works had been forgiven after the recognition of American sovereignty, only infamy. Written as a reply to Reflections on the Revolution in France, by Edmund Burke—whom Paine had regarded as "a friend of mankind" because of his defense of the American cause—it presented the severest indictment of hereditary monarchy and privilege that had ever been penned until that time. In consequence he was elected a deputy to the French National Convention. He was the chief, if not the sole author—Condorcet was a collaborator—of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which Burke vehemently attacked.

In virtue of his devotion to the provisions of that declaration, Paine opposed the incipient terrorist practices of the French revolutionists and courageously pleaded against the proposed execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. On Robespierre's orders he was arrested and jailed. Although some of his American friends intervened on his behalf, the French authorities refused to recognize his American citizenship or to release him. By a lucky chance he escaped the guillotine—his cell had been improperly marked. After Robespierre's downfall he was released and restored to his post in the Convention, but by this time he had become disillusioned by the fanaticism and extremism that had betrayed the rights of man he had so zealously defended against Burke's animadversions.

It was during the days immediately preceding his arrest, when Paine was convinced that he would be sacrificed on the bloody altars of the Jacobins, that he composed the first part of The Age of Reason. The action and its significance can be compared to Condorcet's composition of his great work on The Outlines of the Progress of the Human Spirit as he lay hiding from those who had come to execute him in the name of human progress. In a letter to Samuel Adams in 1803 Paine relates the dramatic circumstances under which he wrote the first part of The Age of Reason:

My friends were falling as fast as the guillotine could cut their heads off, and I every day expected the same fate…I appeared to myself to be on the death-bed, for death was on every side of me, and I had no time to lose.

By one of the greatest ironies in intellectual history, this work—which Paine in a dedicatory epistle put under the protection of "My Fellow Citizens of the United States of America" as he slipped the manuscript to a friend under the eyes of his captors and which he wrote to combat the atheism and infidelity of the French revolutionists—became the cause of his unpopularity in the only country he adopted as his own. Never was there so gross and inexcusable an act of historical ingratitude as that suffered by Thomas Paine at the hands of his former comrades-in-arms on the occasion of his second visit to America.

The irony was all the greater because Thomas Paine's Age of Reason expressed the religious faith of the great architects of the American Revolution—of philosopher-statesmen like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and others. It was an impassioned plea for Deism and the religion of reason, and a criticism of the literal reading of the Old and the New Testament, a criticism which grounded orthodoxy in primitive superstition and sublimated violence and lust. Paine was a man of naive but moving natural piety. He had already proclaimed in Rights of Man, while contending that religion was a private matter, that "every religion is good that teaches man to be good," but in his Age of Reason he made quite explicit his fervent belief in the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. Paine had underestimated the hold that institutional religion had on the belief and behavior of the American people even though religion was not a part of the legal establishment as it was in England. His experience in America was to teach him that religious intolerance does not disappear merely because religion is disestablished. Although he loved America, he did not understand her very well and overlooked the fact that for most of his countrymen religious tolerance at that time did not flow from conviction—as was the case for Jefferson and his circle—but from the plurality of religious sects, no one of which was strong enough to crush the others.

At any rate when Theodore Roosevelt, to his lasting discredit, referred to Thomas Paine, without having read him, as "a filthy little atheist," he was slandering someone whose belief in the traditional doctrines of the existence of a Supreme Power and the immortality of the Soul was much more unqualified than the belief of two thinkers who have been characterized as the leading Protestant theologians of the twentieth century—Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr.

Thomas Paine was a typical figure of the Enlightenment. He was not a profound thinker but a remarkable popularizer whose gift for bold and graphic expression made him a natural pamphleteer. It was the cause of American independence that drew him into politics and his pen onto paper. Although he firmly believed that the American colonists had right on their side, it was not merely as an American or in behalf of narrow American interests that he threw himself so completely into the struggle, but as a free man, a cosmopolitan citizen of the world, who was convinced that when he struck a blow for freedom in America he was doing so for England and France or wherever arbitrary authority ruled. "My principle is universal. My attachment is to all the world, and not to any particular part, and if what I advance is right—no matter where or who it comes from."

What was the source of his principle? Theoretically, it stemmed from his ambiguous doctrine of natural rights. Psychologically, it was rooted in the man himself—proud and sensitive, simple yet dignified—who turned aside a fortune by refusing to profit a penny from any of the pamphlets that he wrote. The excesses of his style flowed from a hatred "of cruel men and cruel measures." He was a compassionate and modest person, prepared to risk his life in action, who sought no compensation or rewards except the goodwill and good judgment of his fellowmen.

Of all his writings only his Rights of Man remains topical, and relevant to contemporary concerns. It is not a profound work. Paine answers Burke brilliantly and effectively but does not do justice to the subtleties of Burke's position. And although he properly defines human rights, he offers little by way of justification for them.

Insofar as Burke attacked the French Revolution on the grounds that it opposed the principle of hereditary succession, undermined the authority of the past, discarded hereditary rights, and scorned hereditary wisdom, Paine is on solid ground in revealing the insufficiency and arbitrariness of Burke's position. He emphasizes that every people has a right to govern itself and that it can set up any regime, republican or monarchical, to which it delegates power. Actually Burke admits that this is a right which the people of England and of other countries once had. But—and with this we reach the nub of the difference between Burke and Paine—for Burke, once this choice was made—as the English Parliament had made it in 1688—any further right to change was forsworn: "The English nation did, at the time of the Revolution, most solemnly renounce and abdicate it, for themselves, and for all their posterity, forever." Burke has no difficulty in citing the official documents of the past in which Parliament claims "to bind" the nation and its posterity to perpetual fealty.

Paine has no difficulty in showing that Burke confuses right by delegation with the right by assumption, "that of binding and controlling posterity to the end of time." He is most eloquent in repudiating the claim of authority based on anything but consent. This was the principle already expressed in the Declaration of Independence:

Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generation which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.

Both in his defense of government by consent and in his repudiation of the tyranny of the past, Paine invokes the rights of man. It is his discussion of the rights of man that gives Paine's work its perennial importance, for the implicit or explicit appeal to human rights underlies every large movement of human protest in history, and we can be confident that it will continue to be so in the future.

Paine's analysis of human rights was not undertaken as a theoretical exercise but delivered in the course of the polemical defense of a revolution in which he had great hope and whose excesses he was prepared to condemn as vigorously as most of its critics. We must therefore not look for precision in his language but sympathetically enter into the intent of his thought. His discussion may most fruitfully be considered under three heads: (1) What are human rights or natural rights? (2) What is their origin? (3) What is their objective justification?

Paine is at his best in identifying and defining human or natural rights. They are "those which appertain to man in right of his existence. Of this kind are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also all those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness, which are not injurious to the natural rights of others." This is obviously circular. What Paine clearly means is that a natural right is a moral claim to the exercise of certain human powers and to the enjoyment of certain goods. It is a claim against all men and governments. Civil rights are natural rights that appertain to man in virtue of his being a member of society. They are moral claims individuals recognize as necessary to safeguard and to implement more effectively their natural rights. "The rights of men in society are neither divisible nor transferable, nor annihilable, but are discardible only." Human beings can forgo asserting their rights. They may, in extreme cases, even voluntarily enslave themselves to others. But if they do, they do not extinguish their rights, which they or others may subsequently reclaim for them, and above all, they do not extinguish the natural rights of their posterity. "If the present generation, or any other, are disposed to be slaves, it does not lessen the right of the succeeding generation to be free: wrongs cannot have a legal descent."

From whence come these rights? Strictly speaking this is an illegitimate question which Paine should not have asked. For if rights are natural, coeval with the existence of man as such, they have no origin. Paine asks the question because he is following Burke, for whom rights are always special or partial, historical, and limited. Paine has no difficulty in exposing the arbitrariness and invalidity of the view that any human being or beings, whether a tyrant or a tyrannical corporation, has the authority to endow human beings with rights. Trace human rights back as far as you wish and you will discover that human beings already had them, or, if they were denied by a king or bishop, that they should have had them. No one can grant human rights to human beings, who already possess them once we classify them as men. History is irrelevant. If we undertake historical excursions, then we must go beyond antiquity to the beginning of man, "when man came from the hand of his Maker."

The natural rights of man according to Paine derive from the equality and unity of man, by which he means:

Copyright © Jack Fruchtman Jr., 2003.