Rights of Man

By Thomas Paine and Derek Matravers

With an Introduction by Derek Matravers.

Rights of Man is a classic statement of the belief in humanity's potential to change the world for the better. Published as a reply to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, it differs from that great work in every relevant respect. Where Burke uses the language of the governing classes, Paine writes with the vigour of a self-taught mast-maker and exciseman. With passionate and rapier wit, Paine challenges Burke's assertion that society cannot be judged by rational standards and found wanting.

Rights of Man contains a fully-costed budget, advocating measures such as free education, old age pensions, welfare benefits and child allowance over 100 years before these things were introduced in Britain. It remains a compelling manifesto for social change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
• Release date: Feb 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781848704930

Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine (1736-1809) was an English born American activist, philosopher, and author. Before moving to America, Paine worked as a stay maker, but would often get fired for his questionable business practices. Out of a job, separated from his wife, and falling into debt, Paine decided to move to America for a fresh start. There, he not only made a fresh start for himself, but helped pave the way for others, too. Paine was credited to be a major inspiration for the American Revolution. His series of pamphlets affected American politics by voicing concerns that were not yet intellectually considered by early American society.

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Thomas Paine

Rights of Man

with an Introduction

by Derek Matravers

WORDSWORTH CLASSICS

OF WORLD LITERATURE

Rights of Man first published

by Wordsworth Editions Limited in 1996

Published as an ePublication 2013

ISBN 978 1 84870 493 0

Introduction © Derek Matravers 1996

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Contents

Note on the Text

Introduction

Further Reading

Part One

Preface to the English Edition

Rights of Man

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens by the National Assembly of France

Observations on the Declaration of Rights

Miscellaneous Chapter

Conclusion

Part Two: Combining Principle and Practice

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1. Of Society and Civilisation

Chapter 2. Of the Origin of the Present Old Governments

Chapter 3. Of the Old and New Systems of Government

Chapter 4. Of Constitutions

Chapter 5. Ways and Means of Improving the Conditions of Europe, interspersed with Miscellaneous Observations

Appendix

Note on the Text

The text reprinted here is that of the Everyman edition, first published in 1915. A few spellings have been modernised, and there has been a slight reduction in the use of italics and initial capital letters.

Introduction

Thomas Paine is still regarded with some suspicion, even hostility, in Britain. He fought against his country for the independence of America and would have fought with France if they had taken his advice and gone to war with Britain after the Revolution. He also wrote the Rights of Man, which not only attacks but – more unforgivably still – ridicules the pomposity which has always been part of political life.

Paine was a disinterested idealist, that most troublesome of all character-types. He devoted all his energies together with most of the money he earned from his writing to the cause that dominated his life: the pursuit of social justice. For part of the time he was able to work in tandem with the formidable radical forces that were present in the late eighteenth century. His pamphlet, Common Sense, advocated American independence and resistance to Britain. Following publication of the Rights of Man, he was fêted in France and elected a member of the National Convention. However, he refused to temper his attitudes to fit the prevailing mood – even if this was a mood he helped to generate. His opposition to the execution of Louis XVI resulted in imprisonment and almost in a walk to the guillotine. In America (where he died in 1809) he was unfairly reviled as an atheist. Denied citizenship of the republic he had helped to found, he was turned away from the polling-booth when he went to vote.

Paine was born in 1737 in Thetford, Norfolk, to a Quaker family who owned a small farm. The story he tells in the Rights of Man about going to sea in a privateer is true, and he also worked as a mast-maker and exciseman. After being dismissed from the last of these posts partly as a result of agitating for an increase in excisemen’s pay, he sailed to America in 1774. Certainly Paine’s vigorous prose style, and perhaps his belief that healthy individuals can shrug off the weight of inherited ways of doing things and change the world for the better, can be traced to the time he spent in the muscular environment of this young country.

The clamour of the American colonies for independence had been supported by the more radical members of the English Parliament, including one Edmund Burke. By 1790 Paine was back in London, and it was with surprise and considerable annoyance that he heard that Burke had attacked the principles of the French Revolution in the House of Commons. Paine had spent time in France and had seen what was happening in the Revolution as a continuation of events in America: an outdated, fustian and ultimately preposterous system of government was being superseded by one grounded in rationality and clear moral principle. Within four days of the appearance of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, Paine sat down in his room in Islington and started to compose his reply. The first part of the Rights of Man went on sale three months later. Despite repeated attempts at sabotaging the project, the second part followed within a year.

The principal thesis put forward by Burke was that the fabric of society is something which takes time to build and time to change. It is not our reason that governs our behaviour as citizens, but our habits. Acquiring the habits that make society possible is a long, hit-and-miss process. We cannot, at some time, decide to inspect these habits for incoherences and peculiarities and renegotiate them to make them answerable to some ideal of reason. So revolutionary overthrow of the established order, Burke concluded, is unjustified. His support of the American revolution rested in the fact that the colony had no prior established order.

Paine took quite the opposite view. Perhaps because of his background, he was keenly sensitive to the condition of the poor and underprivileged. He believed society could be run more sensibly so as to eliminate these misfortunes and thus, for him, the differing histories of America and France made no difference. Revolution in both countries was justified in the name of establishing a more rational order. Frequently, in the Rights of Man, he is driven to exasperation as he endeavours to focus on the grounds anyone could have for opposing this. How could anyone with a clear head and in good conscience oppose the idea of running the country in a way that would enable more of the people to live satisfactory lives?

Paine’s pamphlets advocate a programme; indeed, they encouraged the radicals to think of themselves not merely as a discussion group but as political activists. Burke had – in Paine’s eyes – betrayed that radical cause. This was keenly felt, and Paine occasionally attacks the man as much as the arguments. In particular, Paine draws attention to the fact that Burke was a pensioner: he had accepted a pension from the establishment he was supposed to be opposing. Paine was a born pamphleteer; he loved argument and was able to employ all the resources of his new style to devastating effect. He finishes arguments with such sharp, pithy phrases that it is difficult to see how anyone could have the temerity to reply. A memorable example follows his accusation that Burke tugs the heart-strings with stories of the suffering gentry, rather than the plight of the people: ‘He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.’ The public loved it, and in two years the Rights of Man sold well over a hundred thousand copies (the population was then ten million). These days he would probably have started his political life as a speech writer and, having succeeded at that, moved on to become a commanding Commons speaker and natural television performer.

The impassioned argument of the Rights of Man rests on three important themes. First, there is the attack on Burke’s central thesis: the appeal to precedent. As noted above, Burke argued that civil society was the product of evolution and defied rational improvement or analysis. According to Paine, Burke claims that the English nation renounced the right to negotiate the conditions of the civil society (which is what Paine and the radicals sought to do) in the parliament following the glorious revolution of 1688. Paine points out that there are no grounds to suppose that a contract entered into by one generation binds succeeding generations. His attack exhibits a further instance of his skill with a sharp phrase: ‘The parliament of 1688 might as well have passed an act to have authorized themselves to live for ever, as to make their authority live forever.’ A further argument uncovers a problem for any position which appeals to the established order. Even if it is conceded that every state is justified by a legitimate move from the preceding state, there is still the question of what justifies the initial state. As Paine says, 1688 is an arbitrary stopping point. If we go back far enough, it seems the basis for the authority to which Burke appeals is war, pillage and – worse – a foreigner, William the Conqueror. Is this, Paine asks, the foundation of Burke’s claims?

The short answer is that it is not. Burke was not attempting to provide a rational account of the legitimacy of government authority, so it is not surprising that the account Paine claims to discern does not stand up. The failure to find their intended target does nothing to undermine the cogency of Paine’s arguments, however. His attack on precedent remains an objection to other attempts – those of Locke and, in our own day, Robert Nozick – which do seek to ground legitimacy in this way.

The second important theme is Paine’s positive account of the legitimacy of the authority of government. As we have seen, Burke and Paine were divided on the sort of account required. Whilst Burke thought legitimacy emerged from continuity, Paine attempted to ground it in reason. It is on this that his reputation as a political philosopher rests. Legitimacy is a matter of people’s rights, he claims, and all enquiries into the matters of rights have revolved on one thing: ‘the unity of man; by which I mean that men are all of one degree, and consequently that all men are born equal, and with equal natural rights . . . ’ This view gains credence in the lack of a basis in reality for the authorities against which Paine was tilting. He draws on the language of Hume’s empiricism to make the point in his usual pithy style: ‘Through all the vocabulary of Adam there is not such an animal as a Duke or Count; neither can we connect any certain idea with the words.’

What are these natural rights that we all possess in equal measure? They are ‘those which appertain to man in right of his existence. Of this kind are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness, which are not injurious to the natural rights of others.’ What is the argument for the existence of such rights? Burke’s view was that rights relevant to politics, along with obligations and duties, do not exist prior to the civil society but emerge from within it. This point is obviously crucial. If Paine can establish that each individual possesses some determinate set of natural rights prior to civil society, the legitimacy of society can be discussed, and illegitimate societies reformed, in accordance with these rights. If there are no such rights, then the grounds of legitimacy must be internal to the society, and so it cannot be assessed or reformed according to some independent measure.

Although he usually writes as though the existence of natural rights is self-evident, Paine has two arguments to bolster his position. The first is that equality is a natural state. The onus of proof is on anyone who wants to move from this state to show that such a move is justified. Hence, any civil right (which perhaps may involve inequality) must be justified in terms of a prior natural right. However, this argument is doubly flawed. First, the sense in which equality is a natural state is unclear: people differ in size, character and intelligence. The claim that we are equal in some other as yet unspecified respect is mere assertion, albeit an assertion made by social contract theorists from Hobbes to the present day. Second, Paine ignores the possibility that the rights acquired in a society might not be reducible to natural rights. That a person would have had certain rights in the natural state may have no bearing on the actual rights he has in the civil state.

The second of Paine’s arguments is pragmatic; a republican form of government, founded on the rights of man, would take as its aim the flourishing of its members. The people elected to run the administration would be elected on the basis of their competence for the task, and were society not to flourish, they could simply be turned out of office. An hereditary monarch, however, is in place merely in virtue of an accident of birth and cannot be removed. The result, as Paine delights in illustrating, tends to be inefficient and idiotic. ‘We see that nature acts as if she disowned and sported with the hereditary system; that the mental characteristics of successors, in all countries, are below the average of human understanding; that one is a tyrant, another an idiot, a third insane, and some all three put together, it is impossible to attach confidence to it . . . It requires some talents to be a common mechanic; but to be a kin, requires only the animal figure of a man – a sort of breathing automaton.’

For Burke, of course, political science is not grounded in reason but deduced from the wayward and possibly irrational way societies actually work. He would have thought it inappropriate to measure government against some external, rationalistic standard. The spirit of this debate hovers over much of twentieth-century politics. The attempts in Russia and elsewhere to impose a rationalistic model on ancient societies have generally ended in disaster. Are there, as Paine claims, external standards of assessment which we can impose on real, living communities without putting an end to the way those communities understand themselves? If on the other hand Burke is right and history is what legitimates a society, what are we to do about historically successful but immoral and inegalitarian societies? Perhaps this is why the argument between Paine and Burke is so compelling: each of their positions is plausible, but neither wholly convinces.

The third and final theme to which I would like to draw attention is the budget proposed at the end of the second part. Paine claims that the Prime Minister at the time, William Pitt, managed to see some of his ideas prior to publication and incorporate them into his own budget. Whatever the truth of this allegation, Pitt certainly did not adopt all of Paine’s plans. Paine proposes and carefully costs many policies not introduced into Britain until the Liberal government of the first decade of the twentieth century: old age pensions, free education, welfare benefits to the poor, child allowance and so on. This reinforces the point made earlier: Paine was not interested in airy talk about possible future utopias; the Rights of Man is a document whose aim was to convince the poor and the middle classes that a great opportunity for improvement in their lives was actually within their grasp.

Such is the power of Paine’s rhetoric that readers of the Rights of Man who do not know Burke’s work may be forgiven for concluding that the Reflections must be a pitiable tissue of absurdities and lies. Paine marshals arguments to show that Burke’s contentions have no basis in reason, and, furthermore, that they have consequences no one could possibly believe. There is some truth in the claim that, in this, Paine (perhaps deliberately) missed the point. The position Burke was advocating was more descriptive than deductive, and hence not open to this kind of refutation.

Does this mean that Paine’s reply is a failure? Certainly not. Quite apart from the brilliance of the epigrams and the satisfying unity of revolutionary content with revolutionary style, the Rights of Man is a passionate expression of a political view founded on faith in human nature. Only the morally moribund could fail to feel its force.

Derek Matravers

The Open University

Suggestions for Further Reading

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Penguin

R. R. Fennessy, Burke, Paine and the Rights of Man: A Difference of Political Opinion, The Hague, 1963

Michael Foot, ‘The Greatest Exile’, in his Debts of Honour, Picador, 1981

Mark Philp, Paine, Oxford University Press, 1990

Part One

To

George Washington

President of the United

States of America

Sir – I present you a small Treatise in defence of those Principles of Freedom which your exemplary Virtue hath so eminently contributed to establish. That the Rights of Man may become as universal as your Benevolence can wish, and that you may enjoy the Happiness of seeing the New World regenerate the Old, is the prayer of

Sir,

Your much obliged, and

Obedient humble Servant,

Thomas Paine

Preface to the

English Edition

From the part Mr Burke took in the American Revolution, it was natural that I should consider him a friend to mankind; and as our acquaintance commenced on that ground, it would have been more agreeable to me to have had cause to continue in that opinion than to change it.

At the time Mr Burke made his violent speech last winter in the English Parliament against the French Revolution and the National Assembly, I was in Paris, and had written him but a short time before to inform him how prosperously matters were going on. Soon after this I saw his advertisement of the pamphlet he intended to publish. As the attack was to be made in a language but little studied, and less understood in France, and as everything suffers by translation, I promised some of the friends of the Revolution in that country that whenever Mr Burke’s pamphlet came forth I would answer it. This appeared to me the more necessary to be done when I saw the flagrant misrepresentations which Mr Burke’s pamphlet contains; and that while it is an outrageous abuse on the French Revolution and the principles of liberty, it is an imposition on the rest of the world.

I am the more astonished and disappointed at this conduct in Mr Burke, as (from the circumstance I am going to mention) I had formed other expectations.

I had seen enough of the miseries of war to wish it might never more have existence in the world, and that some other mode might be found out to settle the differences that should occasionally arise in the neighbourhood of nations. This certainly might be done if Courts were disposed to set honestly about it, or if countries were en-lightened enough not to be made the dupes of Courts. The people of America had been bred up in the same prejudices against France, which at that time characterised the people of England; but experience and an acquaintance with the French nation have most effectually shown to the Americans the falsehood of those prejudices; and I do not believe that a more cordial and confidential intercourse exists between any two countries than between America and France.

When I came to France, in the Spring of 1787, the Archbishop of Thoulouse was then Minister, and at that time highly esteemed. I became much acquainted with the private Secretary of that Minister, a man of an enlarged benevolent heart; and found that his sentiments and my own perfectly agreed with respect to the madness of war, and the wretched impolicy of two nations like England and France, continually worrying each other, to no other end than that of a mutual increase of burdens and taxes. That I might be assured I had not misunderstood him, nor he me, I put the substance of our opinions into writing and sent it to him; subjoining a request, that if I should see among the people of England any disposition to cultivate a better understanding between the two nations than had hitherto prevailed, how far I might be authorised to say that the same disposition prevailed on the part of France? He answered me by letter in the most unreserved manner, and that not for himself only, but for the Minister, with whose knowledge the letter was declared to be written.

I put this letter into the hands of Mr Burke almost three years ago; and left it with him, where it still remains; hoping, and at the same time naturally expecting, from the opinion I had conceived of him, that he would find some opportunity of making good use of it, for the purpose of removing those errors and prejudices which two neighbouring nations, from the want of knowing each other, had entertained to the injury of both.

When the French Revolution broke out, it certainly afforded to Mr Burke an opportunity of doing some good, had he been disposed to it; instead of which, no sooner did he see the old prejudices wearing away, than he immediately began sowing the seeds of a new inveteracy, as if he were afraid that England and France would cease to be enemies. That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of nations, is as shocking as it is true; but when those who are concerned in the government of a country make it their study to sow discord, and cultivate prejudices between nations, it becomes the more unpardonable.

With respect to a paragraph in this work alluding to Mr Burke’s having a pension, the report has been some time in circulation, at least two months; and as a person is often the last to hear what concerns him the most to know, I have mentioned it that Mr Burke may have an opportunity of contradicting the rumour, if he thinks proper.

Thomas Paine

Rights of Man

Among the incivilities by which nations or individuals provoke and irritate each other, Mr Burke’s pamphlet on the French Revolution is an extraordinary instance. Neither the people of France, nor the National Assembly, were troubling themselves about the affairs of England, or the English Parliament; and why Mr Burke should commence an unprovoked attack upon them, both in Parliament and in public, is a conduct that cannot be pardoned on the score of manners, nor justified on that of policy.

There is scarcely an epithet of abuse to be found in the English language, with which Mr Burke has not loaded the French nation and the National Assembly. Everything which rancour, prejudice, ignorance or knowledge could suggest, is poured forth in the copious fury of near four hundred pages. In the strain and on the plan Mr Burke was writing, he might have written on to as many thousands. When the tongue or the pen is let loose in a frenzy of passion, it is the man, and not the subject, that becomes exhausted.

Hitherto Mr Burke has been mistaken and disappointed in the opinions he had formed of the affairs of France; but such is the ingenuity of his hope, or the malignancy of his despair, that it furnishes him with new pretences to go on. There was a time when it was impossible to make Mr Burke believe there would be any Revolution in France. His opinion then was, that the French had neither spirit to undertake it nor fortitude to support it; and now that there is one, he seeks an escape by condemning it.

Not sufficiently content with abusing the National Assembly, a great part of his work is taken up with abusing Dr Price (one of the best-hearted men that lives) and the two societies in England known by the name of the Revolution Society and the Society for Constitutional Information.

Dr Price had preached a sermon on the 4th of November, 1789, being the anniversary of what is called in England the Revolution, which took place 1688. Mr Burke, speaking of this sermon, says, ‘The political Divine proceeds dogmatically to assert, that by the principles of the Revolution, the people of England have acquired three fundamental rights:

1. To choose their own governors.

2. To cashier them for misconduct.

3. To frame a government for ourselves.’

Dr Price does not say that the right to do these things exists in this or in that person, or in this or in that description of persons, but that it exists in the whole; that it is a right resident in the nation. Mr Burke, on the contrary, denies that such a right exists in the nation, either in whole or in part, or that it exists anywhere; and, what is still more strange and marvellous, he says, ‘that the people of England utterly disclaim such a right, and that they will resist the practical assertion of it with their lives and fortunes.’ That men should take up arms and spend their lives and fortunes, not to maintain their rights, but to maintain they have not rights, is an entirely new species of discovery, and suited to the paradoxical genius of Mr Burke.

The method which Mr Burke takes to prove that the people of England have no such rights, and that such rights do not now exist in the nation, either in whole or in part, or anywhere at all, is of the same marvellous and monstrous kind with what he has already said; for his arguments are that the persons, or the generation of persons, in whom they did exist, are dead, and with them the right is dead also. To prove this, he quotes a declaration made by Parliament about a hundred years ago, to William and Mary, in these words: ‘The Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, do, in the name of the people aforesaid [meaning the people of England then living], most humbly and faithfully submit themselves, their heirs and posterities, for EVER.’ He also quotes a clause of another act of Parliament made in the same reign, the terms of which, he says, ‘bind us [meaning the people of that day], our heirs and our posterity, to them, their heirs and posterity, to the end of time.’

Mr Burke conceives his point sufficiently established by producing those clauses, which he enforces by saying that they exclude the right of the nation for ever. And not yet content with making such declarations, repeated over and over again, he farther says, ‘that if the people of England possessed such a right before the Revolution [which he acknowledges to have been the case, not only in England, but throughout Europe, at an early period], yet that the English Nation did, at the time of the Revolution, most solemnly renounce and abdicate it, for themselves, and for all their posterity, for ever.’ As Mr Burke occasionally applies the poison drawn from his horrid principles (if it is not profanation to call them by the name of principles) not only to the English nation, but to the French Revolution and the National Assembly, and charges that august, illuminated and illuminating body of men with the epithet of usurpers, I shall, sans cérémonie, place another system of principles in opposition to his.

The English Parliament of 1688 did a certain thing, which, for themselves and their constituents, they had a right to do, and which it appeared right should be done: but, in addition to this right, which they possessed by delegation, they set up another right by assumption, that of binding and controlling posterity to the end of time. The case, therefore,

Reviews for Rights of Man

[jvioland_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The great propagandist of two revolutions, Paine told it like it is. An excellent rendition of the rights of the common man against oppression. Well worth and annual reading.

[marcusbastos-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Equality’s Utopia Thomas Paine’s words illuminated the world in which America was born and gave inspiration to the men and women that came from Europe to this new land. Its described some aspects of the political landscape of the time in England, France and America. The reading (listening) of these works shared light about the French Revolution and its implications. One also had a better understanding of the disputes involving Paine and Edmund Burke. Above all, these books presented Paine’s argument for equality in a world of established social hierarchies.

[jarratt_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'd heard about this document for years, and since it was a free download from the Kindle store, I thought I'd read it. Because I read for pleasure, I'm not much into working hard at reading. But because "Common Sense" was written in 1776, the language could be a little tough at times. In fact, I found myself reading most sentences several times, but was well rewarded with the work. This is a fascinating piece that every American should read.

[angelic55blonde · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a great book. It is a classic that everyone should read. Common Sense and the Rights of Man are part of American history and I don't know why anyone wouldn't want to read this. It does get a little dry at times or difficult to read because of when it was written but it's worth the read. I really liked it.