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Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography (Books That Changed the World)

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This pint size book provides some interesting commentary on the writings of Thomas Paine. Although it is also a mini biography, it is foremost a tale of the verbal battle between Paine and Edmund Burke who wrote a criticism of the French revolution entitled "Reflections on the Revolution in France."

Paine always spoke his mind. His fiery remarks helped spark the American revolution, and later, in France, he so freely vented his opinions on what the French should be doing that he was thrown into prison, and narrowly escaped execution. Paine was vastly irritated by Burke (who deplored the French revolution), and was prompted to do a 19th century version of flaming.

Thomas Paine wasn't the only one irked by Englishman Burke. Jefferson wrote about him to a friend of his discussing the "rottenness of his (Burke's) mind." How else should a new American feel about Burke's glorification of the aristocracy and scruffy put-down of the rights of citizens. It is both informative, and entertaining to read about this famous debate between Burke and Paine.

I feel obliged to add John Barrell wrote a very negative review of this book in the London Review of Books. He accuses Hitchens of historical inaccuracy and even plagiarism. Nevertheless I enjoyed the book. It is quite accessible to the average reader, and I highly recommend it.

Finally I can't help but remark on what seems to be an ego trip on Hitchen's part. On the front and back cover of the book is a picture of a man. Thomas Paine's picture? No, Christopher Hitchen's picture. Again, on the front cover, we find Mr. Hitchen's name in significantly larger type than the name of Thomas Paine. I guess when you have a book on the best seller list (God Is Not Great) you get a little puffed up.

Christopher Hitchens, whose previous publications include Why Orwell Matters; Thomas Jefferson: Author of America; and the international best seller God Is Not Great, has been called "a Tom Paine for our troubled times" (The Independent, London).

In Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, Hitchens has penned an enlightening account of the life and work of Thomas Paine (1737-1809).

"Thomas Paine's Rights of Man," he writes, "is both a trumpet of inspiration and a carefully wrought blueprint for a more rational and decent ordering of society, both domestically and on the international scene."

Paine, "the firebrand of the Revolution," helped foment the American Revolution through his powerful and, for the times, incendiary, writings, most notably his first great work, Common Sense (published in 1776; its working title had been Plain Truth).

Hitchens calls this earlier work "the largest achievement in the history of pamphleteering. . . . Of Common Sense it can be said, without any risk of cliche, that it was a catalyst that altered the course of history."

Later works by Paine include The Crisis (sometimes referred to as The American Crisis), The Age of Reason, and Rights of Man. It is Hitchens' commentary on the last-mentioned work which constitutes the lion's share of the present volume.

Hitchens asserts that Paine's Rights of Man was "not just a paean to human liberty. It was partly a short-term polemic, directed in particular at Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France."

Edmund Burke, who had earlier supported the American Revolution, "seemed to be mutating from Whiggery through Toryism and into a full-blown reactionary." Believing the biblical claim that "the powers that be are ordained of God," he endorsed the "divine right of kings."

Paine, agreeing with views such as those championed by John Locke in The Social Contract, denied "the divine right of kings" and asserted that human rights are founded not on a contract between a king (or any other autocratic ruler) and the people, but on a contract between various peoples, and that governments are instituted by human beings for the mutual good of all its citizens.

Hitchens also discusses other thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, and Karl Marx, vis-a-vis the origin, nature, scope, and limitations of political power.

Hitchens, a notorious freethinker, writes, "It is absolutely certain that no deity had anything to do with the process [the formation of government], just as it is certain that merely human authorities have always sought to cloak themselves in supernatural or superhuman claims." Although the latter part of this sentence is correct, one must be skeptical of all such claims to "absolute certainty."

Such hubris was the undoing of the French Revolution, in which Paine had such hopes for the extension of democracy throughout the world, and in which he was so disappointed because of the reign of terror led by Maximilien Robespierre. He was further disappointed when Napoleon Bonaparte, whom he had originally seen as a great liberator, arrogated to himself the title and dictatorial powers of First Consul and became "the grave-digger of the [French] Revolution."

Sobered by his arrest and incarceration in a French prison, Paine wrote, "He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his own enemy from repression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."

Paine, a deist who rejected the orthodox God of theism, was a fervent supporter of democracy, meritocracy, and human rights against the encroachments of hereditary privilege and arbitrary rule ("no taxation without representation"), a staunch supporter of the separation of church and state, and an outspoken opponent of slavery.

"I have always considered monarchy to be a silly, contemptible thing," wrote Paine. "I compare it to something kept behind a curtain, about which there is a great deal of bustle and fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity, but when, by any accident, the curtain happens to open, and the company see what it is, they burst into laughter."

Paine's critique of organized religion, as expressed in his provocative work The Age of Reason, an attack on the authority of Scripture, had its roots in a strong aversion to his mother's Anglican orthodoxy, A sardonic Hitchens gleefully writes, "Freethinking has good reason to be grateful to Mrs. Paine."

Paine, as is true of everyone, was a child of his time. Living and writing more than half a century before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) and ignorant of Kant's devastating critique of "the argument from design," Paine was unable to envision an alternative to deism. Although he stood on tiptoes, and was prescient in many areas of his thought, he was unable to envision key scientific and philosophical developments.

"On 8 June 1809," writes Hitchens, Thomas Paine died. On 12 February of the same year, Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln had been born. These two emancipators of humanity--Darwin the greatest--were in different ways to complete and round out the arguments that Paine had helped to begin."

An inveterate foe of hereditary and entrenched power, Paine is one of our founding fathers who helped plant and nourish "the tree of liberty." Hitchens argues that his Rights of Man, a work that greatly influenced Thomas Jefferson and other framers of the Declaration of Independence, is the philosophical cornerstone of the United States of America.

In the concluding sentence of this work, Hitchens writes: "In a time when both rights and reason are under several kinds of open and covert attack, the life and writing of Thomas Paine will always be part of the arsenal on which we shall need to depend."

Christopher Hitchens is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and visiting professor in liberal studies at The New School in New York. His books include Why Orwell Matters; Thomas Jefferson: Author of America; and the international best seller God Is Not Great.

Also recommended: Craig Nelson's Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations.

Christopher Hitchen's book on Thomas Paine and his "Rights of Man" is an eloquent, yet easy and enjoyable read.

Hitchens is a masterful essayist, who produces his typically smooth, flowing and cogent prose. His scholarship on Paine is derivative, to be sure, resting on the scholarship of others. Don't mistake Hitchens for a professional historian.

And Hitchens is not terribly good, as generaly matter, about documenting where his ideas and facts come from.

Still, this book is book is an important one, because it not only treats Paine's life and ideas ably and with utmost respect, but also because it disseminates Paine's ideas to a far larger audience than scholarly texts ordinarily reach.

Hitchens should be commended for this wonderful little book.

Eric Alan Isaacson

...and he doesn't here. Aside from the erudition which always seems to flow from ol' Chris's pen, his subject in this instance is something of an 18th-century soul mate. Maybe this little examination of humanist Paine will go some ways toward raising the general awareness of the man and of his works-- long overdue, like some bit of acknowledgement in D.C.

Hitchens is best known now for the "God" book, but those who find him disagreeable on that count shouldn't necessarily pass up this gem if they are interested in America's revolutionary beginnings.

Thomas Paine was probably the primary rabble-rouser for the American Revolutionary War. He was an unlikely pamphleteer, having just come to the colonies from an undistinguished life in England.

In Common Sense he lambasted the idea of royal privilege (let alone rule) and proclaimed The Law Is King! That statement alone shows his relevance for today, as debate over the proper extent of executive power rages.

Paine got a raw deal from history, probably because he was a deist and explicitly rejected (in The Age of Reason) formal religion of any kind.

The best reason to read this book is if you want to understand Paine's role in the American Revolution without picking up a textbook-size tome. You also get a quickly drawn but insightful portrait of the man generally.

Christopher Hitchens brings an important person and his contribution to freedoms that most of us in the Western World take for granted, into sharper focus.

Although I would have liked Paine's original documents inserted somewhere into this small book, just to help with the scene setting, this is a minor quibble about a very useful book.

There couldn't have been a better matchup for a volume in a series called Books that Changed the World than Christopher Hitchens and Thomas Paine. (None of the other pairs so far announced is nearly as good, and, though I have not read it, Karen Armstrong to write about the Bible strikes me as ill-chosen.)

Two Englishmen famous for critical thinking, harking back to the ancient republican traditions of Levellers and Roundheads, drawn to America, sharp of tongue. It's a match made in, well, not heaven, but a good place.

Although subtitled "A Biography," it is more a review of Paine's place, and many innovations, in political thought. The biography is exciting enough. Paine, unlike his adversary Burke, was a freedom fighter, not just a talker; and (like Orwell, who gets the barest mention from Hitchens) one who learned firsthand that revolutions are not for sissies, and that revolutionary rhetoric is subject to power politics no less than the corruptions of the ancien regime.

Americans know Paine as author of "Common Sense," though we don't read it, and we are told about it as if it were not much more than a very effective recruiting speech, and Paine was merely a less sinister version of George Creel. He was, as Hitchens demonstrates, much more.

However, Hitchens as an Englishman (born) and antimonarchist is more interested in "The Rights of Man." "The great achievement of Paine," he says, "was to have introduced the discussion of human rights, and of their concomitant in democracy, to a large and often newly literate popular audience."

And to have stuck by his guns. Paine's ideas evolved through experience, but he never went off the rails the way so many of the American revolutionaries did. Also, he understood (in his late work, "The Age of Reason") that humans had to do it themselves. John Adams, for one, hated Paine for reading god and religion out of politics, and he had fallings out with more liberal revolutionaries like Jefferson, not to mention the French, who would have executed him but for an administrative mistake.

Paine was lucky in having such a Colonel Blimp as Burke as his primary intellectual opponent. Hitchens and Paine both give credit to Burke for his eloquence, but the man was a florid nitwit, and Hitchens and Paine both have great fun with his romantic nonsense. It is the sad case that 21st-century conservatives still admire Burke, just as Catholics still admire Augustine, but reading either leads any sane person to roll his eyes.

Hitchens straightens out the record: Paine was a deist, not an atheist.

I agree with much of what Hitchens says in his inflammatory journalism, but I don't like to read it. His wit is biting but cruel. It is true that the incumbent Archbishop of Canterbury does look remarkably like a sheep, and it is funny to read Hitchens call him a "sheep-faced prelate," but it distracts from the message. Williams is a fool not because he looks like a sheep but because he is a fool, and he would still be a fool if he looked like Olivier. Thankfully, Hitchens is on his better behavior in "Thomas Paine and the Rights of Man" (or his editors were curbing him), and there is none of his schoolyard heckling here.

That does not mean that Hitchens does not get his own in. In talking about Paine's views of supernatural beings, Hitchens says "at least he did not think that this creator was a lunatic or a sadist."

Hitchens' admiration for Paine is not uncritical, but it is strong. He notes that Paine's life overlapped, by a few months, those of Darwin and Lincoln (born the same day in 1809): "These two emancipators of humanity -- Darwin the greatest -- were in different ways to complete and round out the arguments that Paine had helped to begin."

He concludes: "In a time when both rights and reason are under several kinds of open and covert attack, the life and writings of Thomas Paine will always be part of the arsenal on which we shall need to depend."

Thinking of how this book was bought to provide insight and detail for my reading of Thomas Paine's Collected works, I must admit the first few pages only sent me into Paine at an even more furious pace. I should be reviewing this book before the collected works but as it ended up I only just finished it months after reading much of Paine's works. Save the Rights of Man until you read this, I found what I was looking for and more in the manner that only Hitchen's can express it.Great notes on why and towards whom the Rights of man is directed and how it remains relevant today. Will greatly enhance your reading experience even if it could easily have been twice as long.Hitchen's is a master who understands Paine and brings to light things the casual reader may miss. Remember read it first because if you have never REALLY read Paine once you start you will not be able to put him down.

Hitchens does a great job of highlighting the political genius of Thomas Paine. For 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'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." 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." 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." 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 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." 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." "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."

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."

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

Thomas Paine began a unique tradition for American writers. His unbalanced lifestyle existed in contrast to a brilliant mind but his abilities were limited to righteous inspirations. As Christopher Hitchens so intricately penned, Paine was a revolutionary in thought and deed but tried to reach beyond the power of his influence. This book delves into the chronography of his rise and the comparison between his works and those of Burke and Jefferson. As always Hitchens writing style evokes both historical clamor and his own revolutionary tilt towards greater aspirations. It's almost too deep to absorb in one take. You might have to read it twice.