LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
Restless democrat
MIKE MARQUSEE
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Two centuries since his death, Thomas Paine is being hailed by as many as once disclaimed him.
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“This interment was a scene to affect and to wound any sensible heart. Contemplating who it was, what man it was, that we were committing to an obscure grave on an open and disregarded bit of land, I could not help but feel most acutely.”
The occasion for this lament was the sparsely attended funeral of Thomas Paine, who died 200 years ago, in June 1809, at the age of 72, and was buried on the small farm he owned in what was then the rural hamlet of New Rochelle, twenty miles north of New York City.
Not long before, New Rochelle’s bigwigs had barred Paine from voting, claiming he was not a U.S. citizen. Paine, who had virtually invented the idea of U.S. citizenship, was furious. But this was not the end of his indignities. When he sought a place to be buried, even the Quakers would not oblige him. Hence the muted funeral of the man who had inspired and guided revolutions in north America and France, and equally important, the revolution that did not happen, in Britain.
Despite his extraordinary career, Paine was a late starter. When he left England in 1774, at the age of 37, he could boast six years of formal education, teenage service in a sea-going privateer, stints as a corset-maker, excise (tax) officer, tobacconist and school teacher. Having been sacked from his post in the excise for a second time, Paine separated from his second wife, sold up and sailed for North America.
Controversies galore
There he found a cause, a constituency and the talent to link one with the other. Fourteen months after his arrival in the New World he published “Common Sense”, the pamphlet which galvanised opposition to British rule in North America. Here he called for immediate separation from Britain and, crucially, the establishment in the former colonies of a democratic republic.
After the victory of the American Revolution, Paine hoped to devote himself to his scientific and mechanical interests, notably his innovative design of a single arch bridge. But political controversy waylaid him. Edmund Burke published his conservative classic, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in which he upheld the divine right of kings and the order established by custom. Paine responded with the First Part of Rights of Man, published in March 1791. Declaring “my country is the world and my religion is to do good,” he mounted a comprehensive defence of the French Revolution and its founding ideas. Against Burke’s devotion to precedent, Paine offered a central statement of purpose: “I am contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed away, and controlled and contracted for, by the manuscript-assumed authority of the dead.”
In Part Two of Rights of Man, published six months later, Paine went further. Arguing that “only partial advantages can flow from partial reforms,” he laid out the case for dismantling the British state and replacing it with a democratic republic. In the final chapter, he broached new and even more dangerous territory: the intrusion of democracy into the economic realm. He set forth proposals for what we would now call old age pensions, child and maternity benefits, state-funded primary education, employment for the casual poor — all funded by redistributive, steeply progressive taxation.
Rights of Man was an immediate best-seller, reaching in its first two years perhaps 10-20 per cent of the English reading public and becoming the most widely and hotly debated text of the age. In the eyes of the British establishment, Paine became pubic enemy number one. His pamphlets were banned; those who distributed them were prosecuted. A government-subsidised smear campaign branded him a drunkard and libertine. The burning of Paine’s effigy became the central rite of the “Church and King” mobs that rampaged through English towns and cities.
Paine himself fled to France, where he was elected a deputy to the National Convention. His biographers portray his decade in France as a tragic tale but, for me, Paine emerges from this historical maelstrom with astonishing credit. While he supported the trial and conviction of the former King, Paine opposed the sentence of execution, for reasons both tactical (the alliance with the U.S.) and principled: his opposition to the death penalty, which he viewed as a barbarous legacy of “monarchical” cruelty.
Under the Jacobin “Terror”, Paine was imprisoned; he narrowly escaped execution, but his health was permanently impaired. On his release, he again bit the hand that fed him when he opposed moves by the new rulers, the Directory, to restrict the franchise. He was ambivalent towards Napoleon but happy to give him advice on making war against the English enemy. Paine remained viscerally hostile to the British Empire and consistent in his belief that the American and French revolutions, whatever their disfigurements, had to be defended.
Attack on religion
As if he hadn’t alienated enough people, in 1795 Paine published The Age of Reason, an assault on state religions (“set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolise power and profit”), the Bible (“a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalise mankind”) and Christianity. While praising Jesus as a “virtuous reformer and revolutionist”, Paine damned the religion practised in his name: “A man is preached instead of God; an execution is an object for gratitude; the preachers ... preach a humdrum sermon on the merits of the execution; then praise Jesus Christ for being executed, and condemn the Jews for doing it.”
When Paine returned to the U.S. in 1802, he received a cool welcome. He was now the infamous author of The Age of Reason, an infidel with whom even old allies like his friend in the White House, Thomas Jefferson, were reluctant to associate. A younger acquaintance facetiously suggested that Paine could redeem himself and resolve all his financial worries at a stroke by publishing a “recantation”. The author of The Age of Reason replied, “Tom Paine never told a lie.”
In the two centuries since his obscure burial, Paine has been claimed by as many as once disclaimed him. Liberals, Marxists, anarchists, right wing libertarians, American exceptionalists, neo-liberals (a passage in Rights of Man reads like a hymn to globalisation). Even New Rochelle finally got around to awarding Paine posthumous citizenship — in 1945.
Recently “New Atheists” such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have staked a claim. Dawkins simply omits the fact that Paine was not an atheist but a deist: The Age of Reason includes a paean to the prime mover. Hitchens takes a different route, dismissing Paine’s deism as an ill-considered halfway house to full-blooded atheism. What both miss is that Paine’s deism was wedded to an assault on the hierarchies and powers of his day, which cannot be said of their atheism.
Paine’s ideas were not static. He was, above all, a participant. His writings were interventions. He changed his mind. He contradicted himself.
Whatever else he may have been, however, he was and remained a committed “revolutionary”. He sought not just to ameliorate but to overturn the existing order. His restless egalitarian spirit could not be contained. “Change of ministers amounts to nothing. One goes out, another comes in, and still the same measures, vices, and extravagance are pursued. It signifies not who is minister. The defect lies in the system. The foundation and the superstructure of the government is bad.”
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