Thomas Paine

Coming in at seven pages, Francis Canavan, S.J.’s essay on Thomas Paine is the shortest essay in History of Political Philosophy and has a difficult task ahead, as he must demonstrate Paine’s importance in the development of political philosophy as opposed to being a mere radical. Despite this, Canavan admits that Paine, as a pamphleteer is more of a propagandist than a thinker and tends to see the world in terms of black and white. And indeed, for Paine the past was an age where humans were in perpetual ignorance while the present is seen as ushering in a new era of reason.

Despite Paine’s distain for the past, he still shares one important element of his thought with the Ancient and Medieval philosophers, natural law. Still, he comes up with a different conception of it as while natural law is still seen as being known by reason, Paine also thinks that once the process of people coming to know the natural law is complete, a new conception of humanity, free from ignorance can rise to power. Government should be founded on these new principles and should be greatly limited. Here the state/ society distinction is even further developed as society is still seen as a natural good, but now the government is seen as the cause, not the solution to social disorder.

Rights play an important role in Paine’s thought as the right to pursue one’s own interest as well as security are seen as two highly important concepts. Further developing his ideas on “rights”, Paine identifies two kinds of rights. There two kinds of rights are as follows: 1) Natural rights, which are seen as belonging to people by their nature and 2) Civil rights, which are seen as belonging to people because they are members of society.

Paine sees civil society as coming about due to the natural human ability to reason, an idea that places Paine firmly in the social contract theory. What this means for the actual functioning of government is that all legitimate power must be rooted in popular sovereignty. The fact that this has rarely been the actual case is for Paine the reason why the history of government has been a history of tyranny. In particular, Paine is critical of monarchial and aristocratic forms of government due to the hereditary nature of their power and thinks that only representative government could respect people’s natural sovereignty. Indeed, in Paine’s ideal, representative government should be a place of radical equality, going as far as to place the executive in a purely administrative role as anything else would give one person too much power.

Because people would act in their best interest and everyone’s interest would be represented, representative government would end tyranny as no person would vote to put themselves in tyranny. Paine further hoped that representative government could end both war and poverty and wished to use the money saved from the lack of civil and military extravagance to help build a welfare state, a task Paine plans to do through progressive taxation. This is important as it shows that despite his strongly anti-state rhetoric, Paine still recognizes that the government has positive duties to perform.