Tom Paine’s Two Radicalisms
And their consequences—for his era and ours
by Myron Magnet
On November 30, 1774, a 37-year-old Englishman—an ex-privateer, ex–corset stay maker, ex–tax collector (fired twice for dereliction of duty), and ex-husband (also twice over)—arrived in Philadelphia with a letter of recommendation from Benjamin Franklin in his pocket. The old philosopher’s praise was understandably restrained. This “ingenious worthy young man,” Franklin wrote, would make a useful “clerk, or assistant tutor in a school, or assistant surveyor.” Four months later, however, the shots that rang out at Lexington and Concord galvanized the newcomer’s hitherto aimless life into focus and purpose. “When the country into which I had just set foot was set on fire about my ears, it was time to stir,” he recalled. “It was time for every man to stir.” And so, adding a final “e” to soften the surname he was born with, he began to write under the byline “Thomas Paine.”
He found he had a literary gift that almost instantly turned him into one of history’s greatest revolutionary propagandists—not just of one major revolution, as it happened, but of two. But as his thought developed—and except for the Norfolk grammar-school education that ended when he was 13, he was self-taught—his radicalism, so lucid and solidly grounded during the American Revolution, lost sight of the darker realities of human nature. As a result, when he and his close, like-minded friends, the Marquis de Lafayette and United States ambassador to France Thomas Jefferson, plotted reform together in Paris in the fateful final years of the 1780s, they disastrously misread the French Revolution as it gathered and burst forth. While Jefferson luckily went home to America with his illusions intact, Paine and Lafayette both ended up wasted with illness in pestilential prisons, and Paine escaped the guillotine by the most capricious of chances.
Paine’s career is as instructive as it is dramatic, and not only because it sheds brilliant light on why the American Revolution succeeded in creating so free and prosperous a nation, while the French Revolution unleashed years of anarchy, dictatorship, and world war that ended with the Bourbon monarchy right back on its throne, after millions of useless deaths. For Paine’s writings also proved prophetic of radicalisms yet to come and of the suffering that they would wreak on millions yet unborn.
Though Paine did start his American life as a tutor, as Franklin had suggested, he soon signed on as editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine. Almost as quickly, he quit. Benjamin Rush, the colonies’ foremost physician, had mentioned to him that no one had yet laid out the case for American independence from Britain, a case that urgently needed trumpeting. “I saw an opportunity in which I thought I could do some good,” Paine recalled, “and I followed exactly what my heart dictated.” By November 1775, he was at work on a pamphlet that Rush suggested he callCommon Sense.
Nothing in Paine’s journalistic stint so far gave any hint of the genius he had for such a task—nor did he ever dream he had such “talents . . . buried in me”—but he found his unique voice almost at once, a voice cocksure and authoritative. “Some people can be reasoned into sense, and others must be shocked into it,” he said later of his technique. “Say a bold thing that will stagger them, and they will begin to think.”
A striking aphorism about the birth of government set the tone of the work, a classic from its first appearance in January 1776. “Government, like dress, is the badge of our lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise,” he wrote, tersely merging the biblical story of Eden with conventional social-contract theory. “For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest.”
But he quickly moved from political theory to a much harsher, historical account of the birth of civil authority. The social-contract myth of how kingship entered the world out of mankind’s mutual-protection pact is too kind, he contended. The first king probably was “nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage manners . . . obtained him the title of chief among plunderers” and who “overawed the quiet and defenseless to purchase their safety by frequent contributions.” As a matter of historical fact, wasn’t William the Conqueror merely a “French bastard landing with an armed banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives”? That’s a “very paltry, rascally” origin for a monarchy that pretends to exist by divine right but in fact deserves reverence from nobody—and certainly not from Americans. “In free countries, the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”
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