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Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (Common Sense; The Crisis; Rights of Man; The Age of Reason)
By
Published: Jul 15, 2013
Category:
Non Fiction
Guest Butler Stephen Mo Hanan is an award-winning actor, singer and playwright. He has recently completed a memoir about his adventures, internal and otherwise. Lucky New Yorkers saw him star last year in “King Lear.
Among all the stirring sentences penned in the American Revolutionary era, “These are the times that try men’s souls” has never gone out of fashion.
If only the same could be said of its author, the occasionally (and lamentably) forgotten Thomas Paine. Fellow Quaker Benjamin Franklin spotted the potential of the 38-year old business and marital failure and shipped him from London to Philadelphia in late 1774. In the spring of ‘75 shots were exchanged in Massachusetts; the following winter, six months before the Declaration of Independence, Paine anonymously published “Common Sense,” the first visible call for the creation of an independent American republic. Containing not only a repudiation of British rule but a well thought-out scenario for elected representative government, it sold 150,000 copies throughout the colonies in under a year, shaping the debate as effectively as any document of the time. Paine did more than brilliantly talk the talk; he went further, donating all his profits to the war effort and serving under General Washington at Valley Forge.
It was that dismal winter that Paine accused of trying men’s souls. But to read Paine today — the succession of war pamphlets that gave heart and hope to a wavering public till victory came; “The Rights of Man” wedding the ideals of the French Revolution to our own; “The Age of Reason” anticipating modern censures of “the christian system” (Paine often preferred the lower-case “c”) — is to discover that his primary and lifelong concern was the well-being of the human soul. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
Not that he had truck with organized religion in any sense. Here in 1794 is a man who deserves to be reckoned a Founder (and who hobnobbed with all the others):
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
But he’s no atheist either. Paine is an unashamed proponent of what he calls Deism, and his reverence for the power he calls God places him clearly among the ancestors of today’s Spiritual Not Religious throng, as persuasive in prose as Walt Whitman is in poetry. A child of the Enlightenment no less than Voltaire, Paine rips Biblical legend and theology with a glee that Christopher Hitchens might have envied, but then goes on to affirm:
THE WORD OF GOD IS THE CREATION WE BEHOLD. The creation speaketh an universal language, independent of human speech or language…It is an ever existing original, which every [person] can read…It does not depend upon the will of man whether it shall be published or not; it publishes itself from one end of the earth to the other. It preaches to all nations and to all worlds…and reveals all that is necessary for man to know of God.
Call it pantheism (or blasphemy, in the view of Paine’s foes), but it lifted his vision of democracy to radical heights. Some of his originality derives from his knowledge, unique among the Founding writers, of what he called the “Indians of North America.” He knew them first-hand, having served in 1777 as Congressional delegate to a tribal convocation in Pennsylvania.
Twenty years later, living in France as a guest of the Revolution, Paine published one of his most concise and visionary pamphlets. “Agrarian Justice” invokes Native American culture “such as it is at this day” on its very first page:
Poverty… is a thing created by that which is called civilized life. It exists not in the natural state… The life of an Indian is a continual holiday, compared with the poor of Europe; it appears to be abject when compared to the rich. Paine goes on to contend that the earth “in its natural uncultivated state, was and ever would have continued to be THE COMMON PROPERTY OF THE HUMAN RACE.”
Privatization of formerly common land was still a raging issue in the England Paine had left behind him. “Agrarian Justice” concedes that once agriculture gives rise to ownership doctrines and social inequality, there’s no turning back.
Paine’s solution is levying a rental tax on all profits earned by “the landed monopoly” from cultivation and “improvements” to their property, and channeling the money into a public fund to support the dispossessed. The fund would disperse a one-time stipend to every man and woman upon attaining age 21, as well as an annual pension to everyone over fifty. An exercise not of charity but justice — and this was 140 years before the passage of Social Security!
