Politics
1737 to 1809, England and America
Common Sense, the Rights of Man, and the pamphleteer who set two revolutions alight.
Start learning Thomas →In January 1776 an obscure immigrant turned the colonists’ grumbling about taxes into a demand for total independence - and made the case for it in language a farmer could read aloud at the tavern.
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 the darkest winter of the Revolution, with Washington’s army melting away, Paine wrote thirteen wartime essays whose opening line - read aloud to freezing soldiers - helped turn defeat into victory.
Late in life Paine made a startling argument: because the earth was once the common property of all, those who profit from owning land owe the dispossessed a ground-rent - paid as a universal inheritance and pension as…
The pamphleteer who attacked kings turned last on the churches - defending belief in God by reason alone while subjecting scripture to fearless criticism, a book that made him a hero to freethinkers and an outcast to th…
More in Politics
John LockeThomas HobbesJean Jacques RousseauJohn Stuart MillNiccolo MachiavelliCiceroMahatma GandhiSun Tzuepoché — a humanities education that remembers you.