Rights of Man

Paine's defense of the French Revolution and his answer to Burke, arguing that rights are universal, that each generation has the right to govern itself, and that no past can bind the living. He was tried in his absence for writing it. The book is the radical half of the great argument the age was having with itself, and Paine, as ever, took the side of the ordinary person against inherited authority.

The corset-maker's son who arrived in America at thirty-seven and within two years wrote the pamphlet that made a revolution thinkable to ordinary people. Common Sense sold in numbers no American text had reached, because Paine wrote the way people spoke, and aimed his plain prose straight at the idea that some men are born to rule others. He later defended the French Revolution in Rights of Man and was tried for it. He wrote as a citizen of the world before the phrase was common.