Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine was born on 29 January 1737 in Thetford, Norfolk, the son of a Quaker staymaker. He worked as a staymaker, teacher and excise officer, and was dismissed from the excise after writing a pamphlet for higher pay for officers. In 1774 he emigrated to Philadelphia with a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin. Common Sense, published in January 1776, made the case for American independence and became the most widely read pamphlet of the American Revolution; his American Crisis papers followed during the war.

Returning to Europe, he answered Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France with Rights of Man (Part One 1791, Part Two 1792), sold in cheap editions in unprecedented numbers. Prosecuted for seditious libel in Britain, he fled to France, was elected to the National Convention in 1792, opposed the execution of Louis XVI, and was arrested in December 1793. He spent about eleven months in the Luxembourg prison and was released after Robespierre's fall. He wrote The Age of Reason, a deist attack on revealed religion, and Agrarian Justice. He returned to the United States in 1802 and died in New York in 1809, largely shunned for his religious views.

• Against hereditary rule. Common Sense argued that monarchy and hereditary succession have no basis in reason or scripture, and that a continent should not be governed by an island. Society is produced by our wants and is a blessing; government is produced by our wickedness and is at best a necessary evil.
• Constitutions belong to the people. In Part Two of Rights of Man (1792, ch. 4, 'Of Constitutions') Paine insisted that 'a constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government', and that government without a constitution is power without right. He favoured written constitutions adopted by conventions and open to revision.
• Each generation governs itself. Against Burke's appeal to inherited institutions, Paine argued that no generation has the right to bind its successors, condemning 'the vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave'.
• Representative democracy. Simple democracy was impossible in large states; the solution was 'representation ingrafted upon democracy', which could extend popular government over any territory.
• Social provision. Part Two of Rights of Man proposed replacing the poor rates with grants to poor families for children's schooling, pensions for the elderly and other payments funded by reducing the costs of monarchy and war.
• Agrarian justice. Written in 1795–96 and published in 1797, Agrarian Justice argued that cultivated land yields value that partly belongs to everyone, because the earth in its natural state was 'the common property of the human race'. Every landholder therefore owes the community a ground-rent. A national fund, financed by a duty on inherited property, would pay every person £15 on reaching twenty-one, as compensation for the loss of their natural inheritance, and an annual pension in old age — as a right, not as charity.

Paine's theory of constitution-making — that the people, acting through an extraordinary body, create and can revise the framework of government — is a foundation of modern constituent-power doctrine and of the practice of constitutional conventions and referendums.

Agrarian Justice is now widely cited as an early proposal for a universal, unconditional payment funded by a share of common wealth. Advocates of basic income, of 'stakeholder grants' (Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott's The Stakeholder Society, 1999) and of sovereign wealth fund dividends such as Alaska's Permanent Fund Dividend refer to Paine's argument that natural resources and land rents belong in part to all citizens. His idea links to Georgist land-value taxation and to recent proposals for 'citizens' dividends' from data, carbon or AI-generated rents.

• Burke and the conservatives. Burke argued that abstract rights and present-generation sovereignty ignore the accumulated wisdom embodied in institutions and invite violent experiment; the course of the French Revolution was taken by many as confirmation.
• Optimism about reason. Critics found Paine's assumption that a rational, simple constitution would secure peace and prosperity naïve about faction, conflict and the difficulty of designing institutions from first principles.
• Fiscal realism. His schemes relied on savings from abolishing monarchy and reducing war; later scholars question whether the sums would have covered the promised payments.
• Property. Paine defended private property while arguing that landowners owe compensation to the propertyless — a middle position attacked from the left as too modest and from the right as confiscatory.

• Common Sense (1776) — Project Gutenberg
• Rights of Man (1791–1792) — Project Gutenberg
• The Age of Reason (1794–1807)
• Agrarian Justice (1797)
• Overview: Mark Philp, 'Thomas Paine', Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy