Thomas Paine -- a Man

Thomas Paine -- a man of candor, conviction, common sense

Thomas Paine is a kind of forgotten Founding Father of the American nation. He was one of the most radical voices advocating separation from England during the pre-Revolutionary War era. However, because his views were so radically democratic, even anarchic in some ways, Paine as a figure was later shunned by more moderate Americans such as Madison and Jefferson after the war for America's independence had been won. Still, it is important to remember the views of Thomas Paine, as expressed in his seminal tract Common Sense, and some of his most famous later tracts such as "From the Age of Reason," when considering the issues of representational democracy that are still debated in the public discourse of today's United States. Unlike some of the better-known patriot voices, Paine attempted to uses "plain" language to persuade his audience to adopt the cause of American independence. He did not merely advocate the rejection of the British government because it unfairly taxed the American populace, or for other purely economic reasons. Nor did he argue that Britain was unfair merely because it did not provide a voice in Parliament for American nationals. Rather, he stressed that America should never concede to any form of British dominion, because America should be democratic and Britain's form of government was aristocratic and unfair, because it was based upon the principles of a hereditary monarchy. Paine is thus America's first truly unique philosophy and constructor of what it means to be an American outside of the British colonial realm.

True, many of Paine's sentiments do not seem radical now. But they were certainly radical in Penn's day, when many of his pro-American patriots still wished to retain some tenuous state of relations with the Mother Country, and also those who wished for American independence, but feared the so-called tyranny of the majority. "I challenge the warmest advocate for reconciliation, to show, a single advantage that this continent can reap, by being connected with Great Britain," he wrote in Chapter 4 of Common Sense. Democracy was both the most reasonable as well as the most just and fair form of governance, argued Paine. In the third chapter of Common Sense, Paine wrote: "But there is another and greater distinction for which no truly natural or religious reason can be assigned, and that is, the distinction of men into KINGS and SUBJECTS. Male and female are the distinctions of nature, good and bad the distinctions of heaven; but how a race of men came into the world so exalted above the rest, and distinguished like some new species, is worth enquiring into, and whether they are the means of happiness or of misery to mankind." Kingship, Paine argued, was an unnatural valuation of certain individuals, purely by birth.

Furthermore, even some of his arguments are jarring and unsettling today in their anarchism. In the second chapter of Common Sense, Paine wrote: "Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness Positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices." Also, Paine's philosophy was also unusually critical, compared with the singers of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, in its uncompromising embrace of a non-theologically-based state order, a state based upon the concept of the author's beloved vale of reason. The value of reason vs. religious ideation was a popular concept during the Enlightenment amongst some European philosophers, but a controversial one on a mass level -- still, Paine was unafraid to advocate the idea of religious belief always being subordinate to political doctrines that could be justified through logic.

This is important to remember when issues of religion are debated today, in the contemporary public discourse. It is interesting to remember Paine's rhetoric, and reflect that some of his ideas in criticism of religion would make the author 'unelectable' to higher office even today, when some profession of faith is usually required and demanded of contemporary politicians. In fact, one could even argue that the critical stance towards religion taken by Thomas Paine in "The Age of Reason" might suggest that religious faith was incompatible with the Revolutionary fervor, the type of zealous purist of the democracy of the masses for which Paine earlier gained fame. Even the popular public Paine directed his persuasive attacks against Britain might counter that the Revolutionary spirit was harmonious with a devout religious faith, and that the nation had been founded to extract Americans from the tyranny of the Church of England and its monarchial beginnings and ostentation. This might be one reason that Paine, however, was more if not equally popular in France than he was in his native England, for his anti-religious ideas, as in France, atheism was more acceptable.