Rights of Man

Rights of Man is Thomas Paine’s two-part reply (1791, 1792) to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. It carries the natural-rights tradition out of philosophy and into mass democratic politics — the popular companion to the Declaration of Independence.

The Argument

Against Burke’s defense of inherited authority and the “wisdom of ages,” Paine grounds legitimacy in natural rights that belong to each living person:

“Natural rights are those which appertain to man in right of his existence. Of this kind are 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.”

— Thomas Paine, Rights of Man

From this base Paine builds his two signature claims:

• No generation can bind its successors. Burke’s appeal to a binding ancestral settlement is illegitimate, because rights inhere in the living: “Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it.” He calls “the vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave… the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.”
• Government is a delegated trust. Civil rights are natural rights “exchanged” for the security of society; legitimate government is not a hereditary possession but a constitution made by, and answerable to, the people, who may reform it.

Place in This Wiki

Rights of Man is the revolutionary downstream of Locke and the Declaration: the same natural-rights premises turned into a popular case against monarchy and inherited privilege. Paine is closer to the libertarian tradition than most of the lineage — radically anti-monarchical, suspicious of state power (his earlier Common Sense had cast even the best government as a necessary evil) — though Rights of Man Part II also proposes early welfare measures that later libertarians reject. The wiki uses him as the bridge from natural-rights theory to revolutionary practice, adjacent to Spooner’s later individualist radicalism.

See Also

• Thomas Paine - author reference
• Natural Law and Natural Order - the tradition this text radicalizes
• The Declaration of Independence - the founding creed Paine defends and extends
• Second Treatise of Government - the Lockean natural-rights theory upstream of Paine
• Lysander Spooner - later American individualist radicalization of natural rights

Sources

• Paine, Rights of Man (Full Text) - Part I (natural rights vs. Burke; no generation binds the next) and Part II (republican government as delegated trust); Project Gutenberg