"Contributing fundamentally to the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the struggles for British workers in the Industrial Revolution, Thomas Paine was one of the most remarkable political writers of the modern world and the greatest radical of a radical age. Yet this son of an English artisan did not become a radical until his arrival in America in late 1774 at the age of thirty-seven. Struck by America's startling contradictions, magnificent possibilities, and wonderful energies, and moved by the spirit and determination of its people to resist British authority, he dedicated himself to the American course, and through his pamphlet Common Sense and the American Crisis papers, he emboldened Americans to turn their colonial rebellion into a revolutionary war, defined the new nation in a democratically expansive and progressive fashion, and articulated an American identity charged with exceptional purpose and promise. ...
A workingman before an intellectual and author, he developed his revolutionary beliefs and ideas not simply from scholarly study (thought he read voraciously) but all the more from experience - experience that convinced him that the so-called lower orders, not just the high-born and propertied, had the capacity both to comprehend the world and to govern it. And addressing his arguments to those who traditionally had been excluded from political debate and deliberation, he helped to transform the very idea of politics and the political nation. ...
America's struggle had turned Paine into an inveterate champion of liberty, equality, and democracy and after the war he went on to apply his revolutionary pen to struggles in Britain and France. In Rights of Man he defended the French Revolution of 1789 against conservative attack, challenged Britain's monarchical and aristocratic polity and social order, and outlined a series of public welfare initiatives to address the material inequalities that made life oppressive for working people and the poor. In The Age of Reason he criticized organized religion, the claims of biblical scripture, and the power of churches and clerics. And in Agrarian Justice he proposed a democratic system of addressing poverty that would entail taxing the landed rich to provide grants or "stakes" for young people and pensions for the elderly. ...
Contrary to the ambitions of the governing elites, as well as the presumptions of historians and biographers, Paine remained a powerful presence in American political and intellectual life. Recognizing the persistent and developing contradictions between the nation's ideals and reality, diverse Americans - native-born and immigrant - struggled to defend, extend, and deepen freedom, equality, and democracy. Rebels, reformers, and critics such as Frances Wright, William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ernestine Rose, Susan B. Anthony, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Abraham, Lincoln, Albert Parsons, Mark Twain, Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs, Alfred Bingham, Franklin Roosevelt, A.J. Muse, Saul Alinsky, C.. Wright Mills, and innumerable others right down to the present generation rediscovered Paine's career and work and drew ideas, inspiration, and encouragement from this...
Historically, we have turned to our revolutionary past at times of national crisis and upheaval, when the very purpose and promise of the nation were at risk or in doubt. Facing wars, depressions, and other travails and traumas, we have sought consolation, guidance, inspiration and validation. Some of us have wanted to converse with the Founders and others to argue or do battle with them. As one historian has noted: "The Founders have come to symbolize more than just their own accomplishments and beliefs, what did (they) really stand for? This is another way of asking. What is America? What does it mean to be an American?"...
from the introduction to Thomas Paine and the Promise of America by Harvey J. Kaye