Was Thomas Paine One of the Greatest American Thinkers?

One of today’s most distinguished polemicists assesses his Revolutionary-era predecessor.

In 1791 Thomas Paine published a slim volume dedicated to George Washington: “a small Treatise in defence of those Principles of Freedom which your exemplary Virtue hath so eminently contributed to establish.” Modern readers know Paine best for his pamphleteering during the Revolutionary War and his authorship of Common Sense. According to Christopher Hitchens’s new book, that later work, Rights of Man, deserves the even higher renown.

Hitchens’s Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (158 pages, $19.95) is part of an Atlantic Monthly Press series, “Books That Changed the World.” In it the journalist and cultural critic—best known at present for his recent book God Is Not Great—argues persuasively that Paine deserves to be ranked among the great intellects of the last quarter of a millennium.

Paine, born in England to a corset-maker and his wife, developed revolutionary instincts at an early age. His father subscribed to the Quaker faith, which many Britons treated as marginal and contemptible. The role of the outsider was thus familiar and sympathetic to him even as a boy. As Hitchens tells it, he also developed a contrarian streak, as he grew to resent the overbearing religious instruction of his Anglican mother. Moving to London and seeking employment on the high seas, he came into contact with radical workmen and urban literati, including the American diplomat Benjamin Franklin. It was through his unlikely meeting with Franklin, at the end of a long personal journey toward rebellion, that he ended up traveling to North America. When his outspoken advocacy for customs workers lost him a job with England’s Excise Board, Paine headed across the Atlantic with a letter of introduction from Franklin in hand.

Hitchens offers a narrative of Paine’s life but spends relatively little time on his role in the American Revolution. However, he does argue that “while a rebellion over colonial grievance was almost certainly inevitable, a ‘war of independence’ was not” and calls Paine’s Common Sense the “catalyst” that moved discontented colonials toward a total break with the Crown.

Beyond his treatment of Common Sense and his sketches of Paine’s longer-term relationships with a few of the Founding Fathers, Hitchens seems conspicuously uninterested in Paine’s activities in the infant American republic. Where his focus turns for most of his narrative is to Paine’s activities as a kind of roaming, stateless rebel. From England, where he risked his life antagonizing the monarchy, to Robespierre’s war-torn France, where he served in a revolutionary assembly and again endangered himself, Paine was an anti-authoritarian troublemaker of the highest effectiveness. It was partly in defense of the revolution against Louis XVI that he published Rights of Man. In an impassioned endorsement of antimonarchical principles, he attacked his onetime friend the British statesman Edmund Burke for his criticism of France’s revolutionaries. In a passage that Hitchens revels in quoting, Paine assailed Burke’s assumptions about the permanence and important of tradition: “Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated.” The understated tone of those words almost conceals their staggering radicalism. Paine didn’t just reject the personal rule of kings; he discarded any custom or convention that he felt hindered the common good.

It is in detailing his rejection of Hobbesian social contract theory—the idea that men are essentially granted their rights by their government—that Hitchens’s portrait of Paine is most compelling. Paine’s assertion that certain rights are truly, to use a familiar word, inalienable put him at odds with other forward-thinking men of his time. Hitchens excoriates John Adams for his endorsement of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which ran contrary to Paine’s civil libertarianism. And Adams’s longtime rival Thomas Jefferson took heat from Paine for his toleration, as President, of slavery. Hitchens thus presents Paine as a thinker whose mind outran the revolution he helped create. It is a convincing portrayal.

Those familiar with Hitchens’s work may recognize an old strain in this new composition. As he has done with other figures, most notably George Orwell, he assesses Thomas Paine in a way that makes him sound a little bit like Christopher Hitchens. In the context of Hitchens’s current disagreement with much of the left over the war in Iraq, it’s obvious what he’s driving at when he quotes Paine writing, with contempt, of a metaphorical Tory who would rather have peace in his time than in that of his children. When he declares that Paine “always hoped that [the United States] would be a superpower for liberty and democracy,” he employs the vocabulary of The Weekly Standard and The New Republic rather than that of Common Sense. And he cannot be oblivious of the implications of dedicating an examination of Rights of Man (with its dedication to George Washington) to Jalal Talabani, the “first elected president of the Republic of Iraq; sworn foe of fascism and theocracy; leader of a national revolution and a people’s army.”

But in at least one instance, Hitchens’s personal sympathies help highlight a less celebrated aspect of Paine’s ideology—his secularism. For Hitchens, the proud atheist, the full measure of Paine’s accomplishment is that his reason not only demolished the defenders of human tyranny but also arrived at a concept of human freedom that didn’t require the existence of a benevolent deity. “My own mind is my own church,” Paine once wrote. Yet it is his enduring faith in the idea of human rights that makes that mind so well worth remembering.

—Alexander Burns, an undergraduate at Harvard College, is a frequent contributor to AmericanHeritage.com and is editor-in-chief of The Harvard Political Review.