Philp Mark - The Rights of Man, Common Sense and other political writings

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

RIGHTS OF MAN, COMMON SENSE
AND OTHER POLITICAL WRITINGS

TOM PAINE was born in Norfolk in 1737. After rudimentary schooling he was apprenticed to his father, a staymaker, and later also tried his hand variously as a teacher, exciseman, and tobacconist. At the age of 37, in 1774, his various enterprises having failed, he emigrated to America. He quickly sided with the colonists in their controversy with Britain and in 1776 wrote two of the most powerful pamphlets of the Revolution, Common Sense and The American Crisis. After the Revolution, in 1787, he returned to Europe and was caught up in the opening stages of the French Revolution. His Rights of Man (17912), written as a defence of France against Edmund Burkes Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), was the most widely read pamphlet of the decade. Its success, coupled with the rise of a popular movement for political reform in Britain and Paines unrepentant Letter Addressed to the Addressers (1792) resulted in his being outlawed. A year later, as a deputy to the National Convention in France, he fell foul of the Jacobins and was imprisoned. He was released at the end of 1794 and went on to write Dissertation on the First Principles of Government (1795) and Agrarian Justice (1796), which develop still further his earlier arguments for an egalitarian yet liberal democratic order. Paine returned to America in 1802, to be vilified as an atheist by the Federation party (primarily because of his Age of Reason (1794), an attack on Christianity). He died in obscurity in 1809.

MARK PHILP is a Fellow and Tutor in Politics at Oriel College, Oxford. He is the author of Paine (1989) in the Oxford Past Masters Series, and Godwins Political Justice (1986). He is the general editor of the Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin (1992) and the Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin (1993). He has written widely on late eighteenth-century political ideas and movements and is the editor of The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (1991).

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

THOMAS PAINE

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
MARK PHILP

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Editorial matter Mark Philp 1995

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First published as a Worlds Classics paperback 1995
Reissued as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 1998

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Paine, Thomas, 17371809.
[Works. 1995]
Rights of man; Common sense; and other writings / Thomas Paine;
edited with an introduction by Mark Philp.
p. cm.(Oxford worlds classics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Political scienceEarly works to 1800. I. Philp, Mark.
II. Title. III. Series.
JC177.A3 1995 320dc20 947288

ISBN 0192835572

5 7 9 10 8 6 4

Printed in Great Britain by
Cox & Wyman Ltd.
Reading, Berkshire

MY thanks are owed to those who have helped me chase some of Paines more obscure references, especially Nigel Biggar, Selina Chen, David Eastwood, Martin Fitzpatrick, Simon Hornblower, Colin Lucas, Paul Langford, Leslie Mitchell, Sarah Turvey, and David Wootton.

This collection is for my children, Joe, Ruth, and Hannah. Their various contributions gave added resonance to Paines insistence that every age and generation must be free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. Given their ages, their sovereignty is still a long way off, although we already disagree about exactly how far. But when it comes, they could do a lot worse than to have Paines work to hand.

BETWEEN 1775 and 1815, from the beginning of the American Revolution to the end of the French, the meaning of the term revolution changed dramatically. In the mid-eighteenth century, revolution involved a change in government, and in a more specialized sense, a return to the basic principles of the constitution: it had no connotations of progressive and permanent change. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the lexicon of reformers and radicals the term had come to mean a process of rapid, fundamental, and progressive social and political change. Reform efforts were no longer directed by a backward-looking concern with an original constitution or uncorrupted state; instead, they became linked to a belief in the advancement of mankind from barbarism to civilization, based on the spread of enlightenment and the recognition of the inalienable rights of man.