Jr. Jack Fruchtman - ˜Theœ Political Philosophy of Thomas Paine

The Political Philosophy
of Thomas Paine

THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF THE AMERICAN FOUNDERS

Garrett Ward Sheldon, Series Editor

Garrett Ward Sheldon, The Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson

Garrett Ward Sheldon, The Political Philosophy of James Madison

Lorraine Smith Pangle, The Political Philosophy of Benjamin Franklin

Jeffry H. Morrison, The Political Philosophy of George Washington

Jack Fruchtman Jr., The Political Philosophy of Thomas Paine

JACK FRUCHTMAN JR.

2009 The Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2009

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fruchtman, Jack.

The political philosophy of Thomas Paine / Jack Fruchtman.

p. cm. (The political philosophy of the American founders)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8018-9284-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8018-9284-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Paine, Thomas, 17371809. 2. Political science History18th century. I. Title.

JC177.A4F73 2009

320.512092dc22

2008043995

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

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FOR
J. G. A. Pocock

This book, in many ways, had its origins in a conference in the spring of 2002 organized by J. G. A. Pocock, entitled History, Theory, and the Subject of Rights, Opposition, Dissent, and Revolutionary Sympathies: Origins of the British Left, 17701800, held at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at the University of California, Los Angeles. I am especially grateful to John Pocock, of the Johns Hopkins University, for inviting me to participate in the conference. Thirty-four years ago, I had the good fortune, privilege, and opportunity to study under him at Hopkins. Since those days, he has been most generous with his time and concern. His magnificent work is an inspiration and a model to any scholar who encounters it, and his guidance and wisdom continue to be personally and professionally vital to me.

I also appreciate the insightful comments concerning my presentation at the conference expressed by James E. Bradley, of the Fuller Seminary, and Gregory Claeys, of the University of London. I thank those who remarked on my presentations at various meetings of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and especially the East-Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. H. George Hahn, my colleague at Towson University, and I have long discussed Paine and other eighteenth-century figures, and his insights are always incisive. A sabbatical leave approved by my department chair, James C. Roberts, and the dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Towson University, Terry A. Cooney, allowed me to complete the manuscript. I appreciate the support and assistance of Henry Y. K. Tom, at the Johns Hopkins University Press, and Garrett Ward Sheldon, of the University of Virginia, in encouraging me to undertake this project, as well as the observations of an anonymous reader, who helped me reshape earlier ideas about Paine. I am indebted to Michael Johnston and Barbara B. Lamb, who read the manuscript with keen eyes, and for that I thank them. Finally, JoAnn Fruchtman as always offered crucial advice, encouragement, and support, and my devotion to her remains beyond words alone.

The Political Philosophy
of Thomas Paine

AMERICANS WITH a historical sensibility have long been ambivalent about the leading figures of their founding period. On the one hand, they often grow impatient with the unfulfilled promise of the ideals presented in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. These documents failed to resolve the problem of slavery, they neglected the rights of women, and they dismissed Native Americans rights to their lands as increasing numbers of Americans moved westward.

The Founders Chic phenomenon has included Thomas Paine, an Englishman by birth, an American by choice and necessity. More than any eighteenth-century political writer and activist, Paine defies easy categorization. A liberal and a radical with at times conservative economic views, Paines contradictions make him appear to be a believing and nonbelieving Quaker, who was no pacifist. Later in life, he became a deist, holding that Gods creation was all we need to know about Him, except when we detect a tincture of theism in his writings; at times, he reveals his belief in Gods controlling hand in history and, as we will see, he even suggested that he himself possessed a divinely appointed role.

Adams wrote that he was deeply offended that the era he had tried to shape was now called the Age of Reason because a wretched book by Paine (that disastrous meteor) carried that name. Adams told Waterhouse:

I am willing you should call this the Age of Frivolity as you do, and would not object if you had named it the Age of Folly, Vice, Frenzy, Brutality, Daemons, Buonaparte, Tom Paine, or the Age of the Burning Brand from the Bottomless Pitt, or anything but the Age of Reason. I know not whether any Man in the World had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine. There can be no severer Satyr on the Age. For such a mongrel between Pigg and Puppy, begotten by a wild Boar on a Bitch Wolf, never before in any Age of the World was suffered by the Poltroonery of mankind, to run through such a Career of Mischief. Call it then the Age of Paine. He deserves it much more, than the Courtezan who was consecrated the Goddess in the Temple at Paris, and whose name, Tom has given the Age. The real intellectual faculty has nothing to do with the Age the Strumpet or Tom.

As Adams dismissed Paine two centuries ago, some contemporary scholars and writers have claimed he is overrated. Works by Pauline Maier, Joseph Ellis, and David McCullough, for example, reveal their authors preference for Adams or Washington or Hamilton to Paine or even Jefferson. Still, the fluctuations seesawing between Federalist and Republican, between Hamilton and Jefferson or Paine, constantly shift as studies come to focus on specific aspects of the life and thought of Jefferson and Madison, Franklin and the others, including of course Paine.

As an inherently fascinating iconoclastic writer and thinker, Paine was consistently convinced that he was always right and that anyone who opposed him was patently wrong and badly uninformed. As un homme engag, he was so thoroughly consumed by the political and social transformations he witnessed that he was not particularly systematic in his assessment of politics and society. His work often appears disjointed, even rambling, amounting to a stream of observations on political events or statements by others, most notably after 1790 those by Edmund Burke, which he interpreted to his own advantage, often disregarding the original speakers intentions.