Thomas Paine · Politics
When Edmund Burke condemned the French Revolution, Paine answered with the great modern defense of natural rights, popular sovereignty, and the right of every generation to govern itself.
In 1790 the great Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke published Reflections on the Revolution in France, a passionate denunciation of the upheaval across the Channel. Burke warned that the French had torn up the accumulated wisdom of centuries - the inherited institutions, customs, and reverence that hold a society together - in the name of abstract ‘rights of man’ that existed only on paper. Sweep away tradition in pursuit of theory, he prophesied, and you will reap not liberty but chaos, and finally a military despot. (The rise of Napoleon would make the prophecy look uncanny.)
Paine, who had thrown himself into the French cause as he had the American, was outraged. He had known and respected Burke, who had sympathized with the American Revolution. To see him now defend hereditary privilege and mock the French for asserting universal rights struck Paine as a betrayal. He answered in 1791 and 1792 with Rights of Man, a two-part book that became one of the best-selling and most prosecuted works of its age - and the clearest statement of the democratic creed against which Burke’s conservatism still defines itself.
The philosophical heart of Rights of Man is Paine’s answer to the conservative reverence for inherited authority. Burke leaned on a 1688 declaration in which Parliament had supposedly bound the English people and their descendants ‘forever’ to submit to the Crown. Paine found the claim not merely false but absurd. ‘There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the end of time.’ Every generation is competent to its own affairs; the vanity of governing beyond the grave is the worst of all tyrannies, for it is rule without consent by those who cannot even be answered.
From this single principle a great deal follows. Constitutions are not sacred relics but living instruments that a people may revise. Hereditary monarchy and aristocracy are not venerable inheritances but the imposition of dead generations’ arrangements upon living ones who never agreed to them. The very legitimacy of government must be continually re-grounded in the consent of those alive now. Where Burke saw society as a partnership across the generations - between the dead, the living, and the unborn - Paine saw a danger: that the ‘partnership’ was a polite name for letting the privileges of the past strangle the freedom of the present.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Paine answered Burke by insisting rights belong to living individuals, not to inherited tradition. Restate Paine’s claim that ‘the living, and not the dead’ hold political authority.
Leads to Edmund Burke.
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