The Enlightenment, Democracy, and the American Revolution: Tom Paine's "Common Sense"

The reading this week is Tom Paine's Common Sense, which is available in many printed editions. Amongst the printed editions is one in the Cambridge texts ("Blue Books") series, edited by Bruce Kuklick; and another in Paine's Collected Writings in the series The Library of America. The Cambridge Texts version omits some passages that are included elsewhere.

Tom Paine (baptized as Thomas Pain) was born in Thetford (Norfolk, England) in 1737. His father was a Quaker and a corsetmaker. After attending a grammar school in Thetford, Paine himself became a corsetmaker, opening his own shop in 1759, but abandoning the business two years later to train as an exciseman. He became an excise officer, and set up a tobacco shop to supplement his income. In 1774 the shop failed and Paine, who had lobbied to get excisemen better pay, was dismissed from the excise service for being absent without leave. He sold off his goods to pay his debts. Paine had met Benjamin Franklin in London, and Franklin encouraged him to emigrate to America. He sailed there in October 1774. In Philadelphia he became a journalist, and early in 1776 he published Common Sense. It advocated independence for America, and attacked monarchy as unnatural and tyrannical. Tens of thousands of copies of Common Sense rapidly sold in the months after its publication. The pamphlet exercised a very great influence on the American Revolution.

Paine argues that we should build our political institutions on the basis of reason rather than history or tradition. He also places much emphasis on the duty of governments to enforce religious toleration. His religious tolerance and his secular and rationalistic approach to politics are characteristic of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Scholars debate the extent to which the Enlightenment marked a sharp break with what preceded it. How different is Paine from earlier writers such as Hobbes, Locke and the Levellers? How persuasive and consistent are the arguments of Common Sense? Paine tries to show that reason requires the Americans to separate from Britain and to become a republic, but he also argues that in the circumstances of 1776 independence is very much in the material interests of the colonists. Is there a tension here, and (if so) which element took priority in his thought - rights or interests? Paine advocates religious toleration, but he is very vague about exactly which religions the government has a duty to tolerate: at times, he seems to suggest that only Christian groups should be tolerated, and perhaps not even all of them. Also arguably rather vague are his suggestions for how the Americans should govern themselves after they have become independent from Britain. Is this vagueness a defect? Or is it a strength - given that it allowed people who differed on details to unite behind Paine's general principles? Or is it simply inevitable in a short pamphlet?

Further reading:

A short introduction to Paine is Mark Philp, Paine. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989 (J177.A4 P45x).
There is a useful bibliography of books and articles, but some of the Web links there seem not to work.
There is an enormous literature on the Enlightenment, including Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment (Viking/ Penguin 1991), and Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (Norton 1977).