Tom Paine S America

Tom Paine’s America explores the vibrant, transatlantic traffic in people, ideas, and texts that profoundly shaped American political debate in the 1790s. In 1789, when the Federal Constitution was ratified, "democracy" was a controversial term that very few Americans used to describe their new political system. That changed when the French Revolution—and the wave of democratic radicalism that it touched off around the Atlantic World—inspired a growing number of Americans to imagine and advocate for a wide range of political and social reforms that they proudly called "democratic." One of the figureheads of this new international movement was Tom Paine, the author of Common Sense. Although Paine spent the 1790s in Europe, his increasingly radical political writings from that decade were wildly popular in America. A cohort of democratic printers, newspaper editors, and booksellers stoked the fires of American politics by importing a flood of information and ideas from revolutionary Europe. Inspired by what they were learning from their contemporaries around the world, the evolving democratic opposition in America pushed their fellow citizens to consider a wide range of radical ideas regarding racial equality, economic justice, cosmopolitan conceptions of citizenship, and the construction of more literally democratic polities. In Europe such ideas quickly fell victim to a counter-Revolutionary backlash that defined Painite democracy as dangerous Jacobinism, and the story was much the same in America’s late 1790s. The Democratic Party that won the national election of 1800 was, ironically, the beneficiary of this backlash; for they were able to position themselves as the advocates of a more moderate, safe vision of democracy that differentiated itself from the supposedly aristocratic Federalists to their right and the dangerously democratic Painite Jacobins to their left.

Addressed to the Inhabitants of America, on the Following Interesting Subjects, viz.: I. Of the Origin and Design of Government in General, with Concise Remarks on the English Constitution. II. Of Monarchy and Hereditary Succession. III. Thoughts on the Present State of American Affairs. IV. Of the Present Ability of America, with some Miscellaneous Reflections

A “brief but potent” appreciation of one of the most influential and revolutionary works of political thought “mixing biography, criticism and philosophy” (Los Angeles Times). Christopher Hitchens, the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of God Is Not Great, has been called a Tom Paine for our times. In this addition to the Books that Changed the World Series, Hitchens vividly introduces Paine and his Declaration of the Rights of Man, the world’s foremost defense of democracy. An outraged response to Edmund Burke’s attack on the French Revolution, Paine’s immortal text is a passionate defense of man’s inalienable rights, and the key to his reputation. Ever since the day of its publication in 1791, Declaration of the Rights of Man has been celebrated, criticized, maligned, suppressed, and co-opted. But in Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, Hitchens marvels at its forethought and revels in its contentiousness. Famous as a polemicist and provocative commentator, Hitchens himself is a political descendant of the great pamphleteer. Here, he demonstrates how Paine’s book became the philosophical cornerstone of the United States of America, and how “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.” Enlivened by Hitchens’s extraordinary prose, this “elegant and useful primer . . . ought still to engage us all” (The Guardian). “Paine, as Hitchens notes in this lucid and fast-moving appreciation, has no proper memorial anywhere; this slender book makes a good start.” —Kirkus Reviews

This book explores Thomas Paine's French decade, from the publication of the first part of Rights of Man in the spring of 1791 to his return trip to the United States in the fall of 1802. It examines Paine's multifarious activities during this period as a thinker, writer, member of the French Convention, lobbyist, adviser to French governments, officious diplomat and propagandist. Using previously neglected sources and archival material, Carine Lounissi demonstrates both how his republicanism was challenged, bolstered and altered by this French experience, and how his positions at key moments of the history of the French experiment forced major participants in the Revolution to defend or question the kind of regime or of republic they wished to set up. As a member of the Lafayette circle when writing the manuscript of Rights of Man, of the Girondin constellation in the Convention, one of the few democrats who defended universal suffrage after Thermidor, and as a member of the Constitutional Circle which promoted a kind of republic which did not match his ideas, Paine baffled his contemporaries and still puzzles the present-day scholar. This book intends to offer a new perspective on Paine, and on how this major agent of revolutions contributed to the debate on the French Revolution both in France and outside France.

THOMAS PAINE, in his Will, speaks of this work as The American Crisis, remembering perhaps that a number of political pamphlets had appeared in London, 1775-1776, under general title of "The Crisis." By the blunder of an early English publisher of Paine's writings, one essay in the London "Crisis" was attributed to Paine, and the error has continued to cause confusion. This publisher was D. I. Eaton, who printed as the first number of Paine's "Crisis" an essay taken from the London publication. But his prefatory note says: "Since the printing of this book, the publisher is informed that No. 1, or first Crisis in this publication, is not one of the thirteen which Paine wrote, but a letter previous to them." Unfortunately this correction is sufficiently equivocal to leave on some minds the notion that Paine did write the letter in question, albeit not as a number of his "Crisis "; especially as Eaton's editor unwarrantably appended the signature "C. S.," suggesting "Common Sense." There are, however, no such letters in the London essay, which is signed "Casca." It was published August, 1775, in the form of a letter to General Gage, in answer to his Proclamation concerning the affair at Lexington. It was certainly not written by Paine. It apologizes for the Americans for having, on April 19, at Lexington, made "an attack upon the King's troops from behind walls and lurking holes." The writer asks: "Have not the Americans been driven to this frenzy? Is it not common for an enemy to take every advantage?" Paine, who was in America when the affair occurred at Lexington, would have promptly denounced Gage's story as a falsehood, but the facts known to every one in America were as yet not before the London writer. The English "Crisis" bears evidence throughout of having been written in London. It derived nothing from Paine, and he derived nothing from it, unless its title, and this is too obvious for its origin to require discussion. I have no doubt, however, that the title was suggested by the English publication, because Paine has followed its scheme in introducing a "Crisis Extraordinary." His work consists of thirteen numbers, and, in addition to these, a "Crisis Extraordinary" and a "Supernumerary Crisis." In some modern collections all of these have been serially numbered, and a brief newspaper article added, making sixteen numbers. But Paine, in his Will, speaks of the number as thirteen, wishing perhaps, in his characteristic way, to adhere to the number of the American Colonies, as he did in the thirteen ribs of his iron bridge. His enumeration is therefore followed in the present volume, and the numbers printed successively, although other writings intervened.

The writings of Thomas Paine helped shape the American nation and left their imprint on democratic thought all over the world. This two-volume set represents an attempt to make these writings available to both the general reader and the student. Every effort has been made to include all of Paine's writings available at present, and to present them in a manner that would make clear their historical background. Emphasis has been placed throughout on presenting Paine's writings in their essential clarity, and for this purpose efforts have been made, without in any sense distorting Paine's meaning, to modernize the spelling, capitalization and punctuation wherever it was necessary to make the meaning clear to a present day reader. --Publisher description.

Includes the complete texts of Common Sense; Rights of Man, Part the Second; The Age of Reason (part one); Four Letters on Interesting Subjects, published anonymously and just discovered to be Paine’s work; and Letter to the Abbé Raynal, Paine’s first examination of world events; as well as selections from The American Crises In 1776, America was a hotbed of enlightenment and revolution. Thomas Paine not only spurred his fellow Americans to action but soon came to symbolize the spirit of the Revolution. His elegantly persuasive pieces spoke to the hearts and minds of those fighting for freedom. He was later outlawed in Britain, jailed in France, and finally labeled an atheist upon his return to America.