On Rights of Man

If Common Sense made Paine the voice of the American Revolution, Rights of Man made him the most dangerous writer in Britain. Published in 1791 as a reply to Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution, it is Paine's fullest statement of the radical democratic faith, and it got him charged with sedition and driven into exile. Reading it is reading one half of the most important argument of the age, the argument over whether rights are inherited or innate.

Burke had defended tradition, inheritance, and the slow wisdom of established institutions, warning that the French were tearing down what generations had built and would reap chaos. Paine's answer is a frontal assault on the whole idea that the past should rule the present. Each generation, he argues, is as free as the one before it. No assembly of the dead has the right to bind the living, no ancient settlement can deprive people now alive of their natural rights. Government is not a sacred inheritance but a practical arrangement the living make and remake for themselves.

From this comes his core claim: rights are not granted by governments or charters or kings, and so cannot be rightfully taken away by them. They belong to people as people. Government exists only to secure these natural rights, and any government that does not rest on the consent of the governed is illegitimate, however old and venerable it may be. Where Burke saw wisdom in inheritance, Paine saw the dead hand of privilege.

What is striking, and often forgotten, is that Paine did not stop at abstract principle. The later part of Rights of Man sketches concrete proposals that sound startlingly modern: public education, relief for the poor, pensions for the elderly, support for families, funded by progressive taxation. He argued that a society serious about the rights of man owed its members not just liberty on paper but the practical conditions to exercise it. This made him a forerunner of arguments about the welfare of citizens that would not become mainstream for more than a century.

The book belongs in the library as the radical pole of the founding-era argument, the position against which more cautious thinkers defined themselves, and the one that pushed the meaning of rights furthest. Read it alongside Burke's Reflections, also in this collection, and you have the whole debate in two voices. The full text is public domain and freely available.