Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography [Paperback]

This pint size book provides some interesting commentary on the writings of Thomas Paine. Although it is also a mini biography, it is foremost a tale of the verbal battle between Paine and Edmund Burke who wrote a criticism of the French revolution entitled "Reflections on the Revolution in France."

Paine always spoke his mind. His fiery remarks helped spark the American revolution, and later, in France, he so freely vented his opinions on what the French should be doing that he was thrown into prison, and narrowly escaped execution. Paine was vastly irritated by Burke (who deplored the French revolution), and was prompted to do a 19th century version of flaming.

Thomas Paine wasn't the only one irked by Englishman Burke. Jefferson wrote about him to a friend of his discussing the "rottenness of his (Burke's) mind." How else should a new American feel about Burke's glorification of the aristocracy and scruffy put-down of the rights of citizens. It is both informative, and entertaining to read about this famous debate between Burke and Paine.

I feel obliged to add John Barrell wrote a very negative review of this book in the London Review of Books. He accuses Hitchens of historical inaccuracy and even plagiarism. Nevertheless I enjoyed the book. It is quite accessible to the average reader, and I highly recommend it.

Finally I can't help but remark on what seems to be an ego trip on Hitchen's part. On the front and back cover of the book is a picture of a man. Thomas Paine's picture? No, Christopher Hitchen's picture. Again, on the front cover, we find Mr. Hitchen's name in significantly larger type than the name of Thomas Paine. I guess when you have a book on the best seller list (God Is Not Great) you get a little puffed up.

Christopher Hitchens, whose previous publications include Why Orwell Matters; Thomas Jefferson: Author of America; and the international best seller God Is Not Great, has been called "a Tom Paine for our troubled times" (The Independent, London).

In Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, Hitchens has penned an enlightening account of the life and work of Thomas Paine (1737-1809).

"Thomas Paine's Rights of Man," he writes, "is both a trumpet of inspiration and a carefully wrought blueprint for a more rational and decent ordering of society, both domestically and on the international scene."

Paine, "the firebrand of the Revolution," helped foment the American Revolution through his powerful and, for the times, incendiary, writings, most notably his first great work, Common Sense (published in 1776; its working title had been Plain Truth).

Hitchens calls this earlier work "the largest achievement in the history of pamphleteering. . . . Of Common Sense it can be said, without any risk of cliche, that it was a catalyst that altered the course of history."

Later works by Paine include The Crisis (sometimes referred to as The American Crisis), The Age of Reason, and Rights of Man. It is Hitchens' commentary on the last-mentioned work which constitutes the lion's share of the present volume.

Hitchens asserts that Paine's Rights of Man was "not just a paean to human liberty. It was partly a short-term polemic, directed in particular at Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France."

Edmund Burke, who had earlier supported the American Revolution, "seemed to be mutating from Whiggery through Toryism and into a full-blown reactionary." Believing the biblical claim that "the powers that be are ordained of God," he endorsed the "divine right of kings."

Paine, agreeing with views such as those championed by John Locke in The Social Contract, denied "the divine right of kings" and asserted that human rights are founded not on a contract between a king (or any other autocratic ruler) and the people, but on a contract between various peoples, and that governments are instituted by human beings for the mutual good of all its citizens.

Hitchens also discusses other thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, and Karl Marx, vis-a-vis the origin, nature, scope, and limitations of political power.

Hitchens, a notorious freethinker, writes, "It is absolutely certain that no deity had anything to do with the process [the formation of government], just as it is certain that merely human authorities have always sought to cloak themselves in supernatural or superhuman claims." Although the latter part of this sentence is correct, one must be skeptical of all such claims to "absolute certainty."

Such hubris was the undoing of the French Revolution, in which Paine had such hopes for the extension of democracy throughout the world, and in which he was so disappointed because of the reign of terror led by Maximilien Robespierre. He was further disappointed when Napoleon Bonaparte, whom he had originally seen as a great liberator, arrogated to himself the title and dictatorial powers of First Consul and became "the grave-digger of the [French] Revolution."

Sobered by his arrest and incarceration in a French prison, Paine wrote, "He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his own enemy from repression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."

Paine, a deist who rejected the orthodox God of theism, was a fervent supporter of democracy, meritocracy, and human rights against the encroachments of hereditary privilege and arbitrary rule ("no taxation without representation"), a staunch supporter of the separation of church and state, and an outspoken opponent of slavery.

"I have always considered monarchy to be a silly, contemptible thing," wrote Paine. "I compare it to something kept behind a curtain, about which there is a great deal of bustle and fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity, but when, by any accident, the curtain happens to open, and the company see what it is, they burst into laughter."

Paine's critique of organized religion, as expressed in his provocative work The Age of Reason, an attack on the authority of Scripture, had its roots in a strong aversion to his mother's Anglican orthodoxy, A sardonic Hitchens gleefully writes, "Freethinking has good reason to be grateful to Mrs. Paine."

Paine, as is true of everyone, was a child of his time. Living and writing more than half a century before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) and ignorant of Kant's devastating critique of "the argument from design," Paine was unable to envision an alternative to deism. Although he stood on tiptoes, and was prescient in many areas of his thought, he was unable to envision key scientific and philosophical developments.

"On 8 June 1809," writes Hitchens, Thomas Paine died. On 12 February of the same year, Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln had been born. These two emancipators of humanity--Darwin the greatest--were in different ways to complete and round out the arguments that Paine had helped to begin."

An inveterate foe of hereditary and entrenched power, Paine is one of our founding fathers who helped plant and nourish "the tree of liberty." Hitchens argues that his Rights of Man, a work that greatly influenced Thomas Jefferson and other framers of the Declaration of Independence, is the philosophical cornerstone of the United States of America.

In the concluding sentence of this work, Hitchens writes: "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."

Christopher Hitchens is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and visiting professor in liberal studies at The New School in New York. His books include Why Orwell Matters; Thomas Jefferson: Author of America; and the international best seller God Is Not Great.

Also recommended: Craig Nelson's Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations.

Christopher Hitchen's book on Thomas Paine and his "Rights of Man" is an eloquent, yet easy and enjoyable read.

Hitchens is a masterful essayist, who produces his typically smooth, flowing and cogent prose. His scholarship on Paine is derivative, to be sure, resting on the scholarship of others. Don't mistake Hitchens for a professional historian.

And Hitchens is not terribly good, as generaly matter, about documenting where his ideas and facts come from.

Still, this book is book is an important one, because it not only treats Paine's life and ideas ably and with utmost respect, but also because it disseminates Paine's ideas to a far larger audience than scholarly texts ordinarily reach.

Hitchens should be commended for this wonderful little book.

Eric Alan Isaacson

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