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.
No comments:
Post a Comment