Tom Paine, perhaps more than any other man of his age, gave to working people the hope that the new industrial age of the late eighteenth century need not be accompanied by exploitation, poverty and political repression, but on the contrary, prosperity and freedom could and indeed should flourish side by side.
Rights of man
In 1775 his pamphlet Common Sense set out the case of the colonists in America and provided intellectual ammunition in the American war of Independence.
In 1791 and 1792 appeared The Rights of Man, in two parts. This was a response to Edmund Burke’s counter-revolutionary Reflections on the Revolution in France. Paine ridicules Burke’s insistence that a modern government should be constrained by laws passed centuries earlier to maintain vested interests. He calls for voting rights for all men over the age of twenty one, and he also points out that society can operate perfectly well without a centralised government of the few over the many:
The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act: a general association takes place, and common interest produces common security.
How often is the natural propensity to society disturbed or destroyed by the operations of government! When the latter, instead of being ingrafted on the principles of the former, assumes to exist for itself, and acts by partialities of favour and oppression, it becomes the cause of the mischiefs it ought to prevent.
The Rights of Man was a bestseller, bought in instalments in cheap editions by working class radicals through ‘corresponding societies’.
But soon both the Rights of Man and the corresponding societies were outlawed, and Paine was charged with seditious libel. With help from friends including William Blake Paine escaped and fled to France. There he became a member of the Convention, but, falling into disfavour with the increasingly despotic revolutionaries, Paine was imprisoned and only narrowly escaped the guillotine. He made his way to the United States and, in 1797, wrote the most famous pamphlet of land reform: Agrarian Justice.
Agrarian justice
Paine’s proposals were that all landowners should pay ‘to the community a ground-rent’ to be accumulated in a national fund.From this fund every person reaching the age of twenty one would receive a bounty of ‘Fifteen Pounds Sterling to enable him, or her, to begin in the World.’
He also called for a universal old age pension: all persons aged fifty or above would receive an annuity of £10 ‘to enable them to live in Old Age without Wretchedness, and go decently out of the world.’
Spence’s criticism
Paine’s proposals did not allow for local community ownership or control.The state, through the national fund, would provide for all. Early on, Paine’s contemporary Thomas Spence saw a great danger in this: in his pamphlet Rights of Infants in 1797 Spence accused Paine of promoting ‘the sneaking unmanly spirit of conscious dependence’:
Under the system of Agrarian Justice, the people will, as it were, sell their birthright for a mess of porridge, by accepting of a paltry consideration in lieu of their rights…
The people will become supine and careless in respect of public affairs, knowing the utmost they can receive of the public money.
This was the beginning of a debate which was to run through the chartist, socialist and co-operative movements. Would social reform be best accomplished through a national Parliament and a centralised state, or by means of largely autonomous local communities? Should all people play an active and determining role, or should authority and resources be controlled through a highly educated and professionalised elite? The debate remains as relevant and unresolved today as it was in the 1790s.
Sources
Tom Paine, The Rights of Man, two parts, 1791 and 1792.
Tom Paine, Agrarian Justice, 1797.
