The Thomas Paine Reader (Penguin Classics) [Paperback]

Thomas Paine (Author), Michael Foot (Contributor), Isaac Kramnick (Contributor)

Book Description

Series: Penguin Classics | Publication Date: December 1, 1987

This major collection demonstrates the extent to which Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was an inspiration to the Americans in their struggle for independence, a passionate supporter of the French Revolution and perhaps the outstanding English radical writer of his age. It contains all of Paine's major works including "The Rights of Man", his groundbreaking defence of the revolutionary cause in France, "Common Sense", which won thousands over to the side of the American rebels, and the first part of "The Age of Reason" (Part One), a ferocious attack on Christianity. The shorter pieces - on capital punishment, social reform and the abolition of slavery - also confirm the great versatility and power of this master of democratic prose.

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About the Author

Thomas Paine was born in 1737, and emigrated to America in 1774 at the persuasion of Benjamin Franklin. In 1776 he published the influential Common Sense, which established his reputation as a revolutionary thinker and as political theorist for the American Revolution. In 1787 Paine returned to Europe and became involved in Revolutionary politics. He was imprisoned in France and nearly executed. In 1802 he returned to America where he lived in poverty until his death in 1809. Michael Foot was born in 1913 and read PPE at Oxford. He was Editor of hte Evening Standard and of Tribune. He was elected to Parliament as a Labour MP in 1945 and became Labour Party leader in 1980, until his resignation in 1983. He retired from parliament in 1992. Isaac Kramnick was born in 1938 and educated at Harvard. He is currently Professor of Government at Cornell University. He has edited Godwin, Madison and Thomas Paine for Penguin Classics.

Product Details

• Paperback: 544 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics (December 1, 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140444963
• ISBN-13: 978-0140444964
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #705,184 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Every generation and age must be as free to act for itself, November 28, 2008

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Michael A Neulander "Political Philosophy" (VA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Thomas Paine Reader (Hardcover)

This was required reading for a graduate course in the history of the French Revolution. For Thomas Paine, the eighteenth century was the Age of Enlightenment because for the first time humankind was throwing off the millstones of religious dogmatism and political despotism. Paine essentially believed that the rights of man encompassed, "...all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also all those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness, which are not injurious to the natural rights of others" (Paine, 68).

Paine's Rights of Man was an eloquent yet blistering rebuttal to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. Paine got right to the crux of the disagreement he had with Burke when he admonished him for his argument that governmental enactments of previous generations had the force and authority to bind citizens for all time. An example that Burke used was the English Parliament of 1688, which he praised as a model of the type of reform French citizens should emulate. Paine's answer was swift and cutting "Radical Enlightenment" reason. "Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies" (41-42). Paine also took Burke to task for his narrow understanding of French socio-political and economic problems leading up to 1789. Unlike Burke, Paine understood that the French Revolution, unlike the others that took place in Europe, was not just a revolt against the king. "Between the monarchy, the parliament, and the church, there was a rivalship of despotism, besides the feudal despotism operating locally, and the ministerial despotism operating everywhere" (48). Thus, what Paine witnessed, Alexis de Tocqueville and Georges Lefebvre observed, agreed with, and commented on, in their history's years later. The institutions that Burke defended in his Reflections, such as the nobility, Church, and monarchial rule, all became "fodder" for Paine's "grist mill" in his defense of France's new constitution.

Paine abhorred the institution of nobility and supported its dissolution for several reasons.
"Because the idea of hereditary legislation is as inconsistent...and absurd as an hereditary mathematician....Because it is continuing the uncivilized principle of governments founded in conquest, and the base idea of man having property over man, and governing him by personal right" (83). No friend to tradition, Paine took Burke to task for defending the notion of, "...hereditary rights, and hereditary succession, and that a Nation has not a right to form a Government for itself" (Paine, 116). Paine defended the French constitution's eradication of tithes to the Catholic Church and it "...hath abolished or renounced Toleration, and Intolerance also, hath established UNIVERSAL RIGHT OF CONSCIENCE" (85). Finally, Paine unleashed a most scathing attack against Burke's suggestion that France should reform its absolutist monarchy into a benign form of constitutional monarchy similar to what Britain enjoyed. "All hereditary government is in its nature tyranny" (172). "It occasionally puts children over men, and the conceits of nonage over wisdom and experience. In short, we cannot conceive a more ridiculous figure of government, than hereditary succession" (173).

Thus, Paine's Radical Enlightenment polemic, which sold more than 200,000 copies throughout Europe, was his reasoned and articulate project towards developing a better world. Consequently, there is no doubt that Paine, whose Radical Enlightenment pen proved to be "mightier than the sword" of despotism both in the American and French Revolutions, understood the importance of the nurturing relationship that Enlightenment philosophes had on the French Revolution. "But all those writings and many others had their weight; and by the different manner in which they treated the subject of government...by their moral maxims and systems of economy, readers of every class met with something to their taste" (Paine, 94).

Recommended reading for anyone interested in political philosophy, enlightenment history, and the French Revolution.