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Thinkers

Thomas Paine

Enlightenment · North America · 1737 to 1809

English-born writer who argued for natural rights, for government by consent, and against hereditary rule, in the American and French revolutions.

What it is

Thomas Paine (1737 to 1809) was an English-born pamphleteer and revolutionary who became an American Founding Father. His Common Sense (1776) was a central text behind the call for American independence from Britain. His Rights of Man (1791 and 1792), a reply to Edmund Burke, was the most widely read pamphlet in the British reform movement of the 1790s. He was also active in the French Revolution.

He was born in Norfolk to a Quaker father and an Anglican mother, left school at twelve and was apprenticed to his father's craft of staymaking. He was less a systematic philosopher than a controversialist and polemicist, but he settled on a number of basic principles that have lasted, about rights, government and the duties of society.

The main ideas

  • Society and government. Society, he wrote, is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness. The first promotes happiness by joining our affections, the second only restrains our vices.
  • Rights. In the first part of Rights of Man he set out a fully worked account of rights, written in answer to Burke.
  • Commerce and peace. He grew confident that commerce could unite the interests of nations and make the European system of war obsolete.
  • A turn to welfare. In the second part of Rights of Man and in Agrarian Justice, written after his release from prison, he argued for provision against poverty.
  • Light on institutions. He wrote very little about the detail of constitutions and legislatures, concentrating on principles.
  • Plain writing. He wrote to provoke and to persuade a wide audience, and what he wrote invariably caused controversy.

What it looks like in practice

Think of a rule that exists only because some people were afraid of others, and then of a service that exists because neighbours simply needed each other. Paine would say that the first belongs to government, a necessary restraint, and the second to society, a gain in happiness, and that confusing them leads people to expect too much of rulers. This is an illustration of his line of questioning, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • Common Sense (1776) argued for American independence.
  • The American Crisis (1776 to 1783) is a series of pamphlets from the revolutionary war.
  • Rights of Man (1791 and 1792) defends natural rights and reform, in two parts.
  • Agrarian Justice (1795 to 1796) proposes provision against poverty, written after his release from prison.

Questions and criticism

  • Is he a philosopher? One needs a capacious idea of philosophy to count him as one, since he was a pamphleteer and polemicist.
  • Few institutions. He gave little detail about how a government should be built.
  • A turn to welfare on the fly. The move to welfare in the second part of Rights of Man is described as ad hoc, and it is fair to ask how it fits his earlier principles.

Close neighbours

Edmund Burke is the thinker his Rights of Man answers, and the page on Burke shows the other side of that argument.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

  • John Locke · He took up Locke's view that government rests on consent and protects natural rights.

Reacted against

  • Edmund Burke · His book The Rights of Man was written in reply to Burke's attack on the French Revolution.

Other Enlightenment thinkers

Sources we used

  • Thomas Paine · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, read on 29 October 2026
  • Thomas Paine · Wikipedia, read on 29 October 2026
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