Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) enters this wiki through Rights of Man, his 1791–92 defense of the natural-rights tradition against Edmund Burke.

Place in This Wiki

Paine was an English-born radical pamphleteer who became a central voice of both the American and French revolutions. His Common Sense (1776) made the popular case for American independence; his Rights of Man (1791–92) answered Burke and argued that rights are natural, that no generation can bind its successors, and that government is a delegated trust. The wiki uses him as the figure who turned the Lockean natural-rights theory of the Declaration of Independence into a popular revolutionary creed.

Paine is closer to the libertarian tradition than most of the canon — radically anti-monarchical and known for casting even the best government as a necessary evil (in Common Sense) — but not a doctrinaire one: Rights of Man Part II also sketches early redistributive welfare measures later libertarians reject. He is used here for the natural-rights radicalism, not as a complete political program.

See Also

• Rights of Man - the work present in this wiki
• Natural Law and Natural Order - the natural-rights tradition Paine defends against Burke
• John Locke - the source of the natural-rights theory Paine popularizes
• Declaration of Independence - the Lockean charter Paine turned into a mass creed
• Natural Law - The wiki’s natural-law hub: the classical lineage of reason-knowable justice above positive law, from Aristotle and Cicero through Aquinas, Grotius, Locke

Sources

• Paine, Rights of Man (Full Text) - the basis for this profile