Impact: Rights of Man

The Most Radical Man in the Room

Thomas Paine was born in 1737 in Thetford, England, the son of a Quaker corset-maker. He failed at nearly everything he tried — corset-making, tax collection, tobacco dealing, a first marriage that ended with his wife's death, a second that ended in separation. He was thirty-seven years old, broke, and living in London when Benjamin Franklin met him and suggested, with characteristic understatement, that he might find America interesting.

He arrived in Philadelphia in 1774 with a letter of introduction from Franklin and immediately became the most electrifying political writer in the colonies. Common Sense, published in January 1776, sold 100,000 copies in three months and did more than any other single document to push American colonists toward declaring independence. Washington had it read aloud to his troops. Paine then wrote the Crisis pamphlets during the war itself — 'These are the times that try men's souls' is his — while serving as a soldier.

By the time he wrote Rights of Man in 1791, Paine had personally witnessed two revolutions. He wasn't theorizing from an armchair. He knew what it looked like when a people decided their government had forfeited its claim on them, and he had helped articulate why they were right to think so.

Burke Throws Down the Gauntlet

Rights of Man was written as a direct rebuttal. Edmund Burke — the great conservative philosopher, the man who had actually sympathized with the American Revolution — published Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790, and it was a savage attack on everything the French revolutionaries claimed to stand for. Burke argued that society was a compact between the dead, the living, and the unborn; that inherited institutions carried wisdom no living generation could fully comprehend; that abstract rights were dangerous fictions compared to the concrete liberties accumulated through history.

Paine found this infuriating. Burke, he felt, was defending a system that kept the many in poverty and degradation so the few could inherit privilege they had done nothing to earn. The famous opening salvo of Rights of Man mocks Burke for pitying 'the plumage' — the aristocracy — while forgetting 'the dying bird' — the people. It is one of the most devastating lines in the history of political argument, and Paine knew it.

What followed was one of the great pamphlet wars in English history. Mary Wollstonecraft had already replied to Burke; others would follow. But Paine's response was the one that caught fire, partly because of its rhetorical force and partly because it went much further than mere rebuttal. He wasn't just defending France. He was arguing that monarchy and hereditary government were illegitimate everywhere, including Britain.

What the Book Actually Argues

The core of Rights of Man is straightforward enough to state but was genuinely explosive to publish in 1791: rights are not granted by governments. They are inherent in every human being by virtue of being human. Governments are created to protect those rights, and when they fail to do so — or worse, when they systematically violate them to serve a hereditary ruling class — they have no legitimate claim to obedience.

But Paine goes further than political theory. Part Two, published in 1792, includes what amounts to an early welfare state proposal: progressive taxation on large estates, child benefits, old-age pensions, public funding for education. This wasn't decoration. Paine understood that formal political rights meant nothing to someone who was starving, and he was among the first major political thinkers to insist that material welfare was part of what a just government owed its citizens.

Perhaps the most striking move in the book comes in the passage reproduced above, where Paine argues that society is not the product of government — government is, at best, a minor supplement to the social order that human beings naturally create for themselves. 'Society performs for itself almost everything which is ascribed to government,' he writes, and he means it as a radical claim: the elaborate machinery of kings, aristocrats, and established churches is largely parasitic, extracting wealth and imposing order that would have existed without them. The more civilized a society becomes, he argues, the less government it needs. This is not anarchism exactly, but it is a position that most governments of his era found threatening enough to prosecute.

A Sensation, Then an Outlaw's Text

Part One sold rapidly and relatively openly in Britain — it was priced for a middle-class readership. Part Two was the problem. Paine and his publisher deliberately priced the cheap edition at threepence, specifically to reach working people. The government noticed. William Pitt's administration launched a prosecution for seditious libel and organized loyalist mobs to burn Paine in effigy across England. Paine crossed to France days ahead of his arrest.

He was convicted in absentia in December 1792. Possession of Rights of Man became grounds for prosecution. Radical societies that had been distributing it were broken up. The book went underground, passed hand to hand, read aloud in taverns and workshops to those who couldn't read. The crackdown was, in a sense, a measure of how seriously the government took it: this was not a book they thought could be safely ignored.

In America, the reception was warmer but also complicated. Paine had been a hero of the Revolution, but by the 1790s American politics had fractured along Federalist and Republican lines, and Rights of Man — which Paine had dedicated to George Washington, who later distanced himself from it — became a partisan document. Jefferson's supporters loved it. Hamilton's didn't.

The Long Exile and the Strange Afterlife

Paine's end was not heroic. He spent years in France, where he narrowly escaped the guillotine during the Terror — he was imprisoned for ten months and reportedly survived only because the chalk mark on his cell door indicating he was to be executed was accidentally placed on the inside of the door, which stood open when the guards passed. He returned to America in 1802, but his reputation had been destroyed by the publication of The Age of Reason, his attack on organized religion. The man who had helped argue America into existence died in 1809 with almost no one present. Six mourners attended his funeral.

Ten years later, the English journalist and radical William Cobbett dug up Paine's bones and shipped them to England, intending to give him a grand reburial. The reburial never happened. The bones disappeared and have never been found.

Yet Rights of Man survived all of this. The Chartist movement in Britain in the 1830s and 1840s — the first mass working-class political movement in history — drew heavily on Paine. So did abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic. So, in complicated ways, did the suffragists. The argument that rights are universal and inherent, not granted by tradition or hierarchy, turned out to be one of the most durable and dangerous ideas in modern history.

Why It Still Matters

There is a version of Rights of Man that has become so foundational to liberal democratic thought that it can seem obvious — of course governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed, of course hereditary monarchy is absurd, of course all people are born with equal rights. The Declaration of Independence says so. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says so. Every liberal democracy in the world is formally organized around these principles.

But Paine's argument was not made in a world where these things were obvious. It was made in a world where the vast majority of people were governed by hereditary monarchs and aristocracies that claimed divine sanction, where the idea that a corset-maker's son had the same natural rights as a duke was considered not just wrong but dangerous. The obviousness of Paine's conclusions is itself his achievement. He helped make them obvious.

And not everything he argued has been absorbed so completely that it feels settled. His insistence that political equality without material security is hollow — that a government which leaves its citizens in preventable poverty has failed in its basic function — remains contested. His skepticism about the tendency of governments to accumulate power and expense beyond anything their citizens actually need sounds less dated than one might hope. The passage where he notes that 'the more perfect civilisation is, the less occasion has it for government' still has the power to provoke. Rights of Man is not a relic. It is an argument still in progress.

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