By John Keane 

Are dictatorships more bellicose than democracies? Is democracy therefore a way of reducing the incidence of war, or eliminating it altogether? 

These questions are today so topical that it is forgotten just how recent and unusual they are. Until quite recently, war had been regarded by those who studied it as a sad necessity. Although there had been a long string of laments for the destructiveness of war, discourses on the nature of war, and even a category of books, such as Homer’s Iliad and Tacitus’s Germania, that inspired wars, war was treated as human fate. The roots of war in the fabric of social and political life, and the possibility of avoiding it, not just postponing it to a more opportune moment, remained obscure. War was considered as natural as thunder and lightning, an inevitable part of the lottery of human life on earth, a sticky web that the gods had spun to trap men and women into periodically experiencing the dubious joy of victory mixed with pain and defeat. 

During the eighteenth century, a revolution erupted in the western understanding of war. War began to be studied by writers who distinguished between the causes and pretexts of war. They regarded war as a thoroughly human affair for which there are thoroughly human remedies and, most radically, some of them proposed that a global fight for democratic institutions is the best antidote to war. Thomas Paine’s, Rights of Man, was the first great, shocking exploration of this latter idea. 

Others before Paine had certainly suggested the connection between democracy and war. But Paine examined this link with a degree of fire and intellectual energy unknown to his predecessors. The originality and thunderous impact of Rights of Man, as well as its massive sales it is the biggest selling political book ever published in the English language – mark it off as the masterpiece of English political thinking. Rights of Man has lost none of its relevance as the centuries change. It still unsettles our times, in part because Paine was a grand master of sparkling, diamond hard prose. He had genius in his fingers. He was the first modern democrat to hammer out a colloquial style avoiding purple passages, sentences without meaning and general humbug. War and democracy were for him too serious a matter to be entrusted to armies and governments. The fight for democracy and against war required a new style of writing, a fresh syntax of politics which could be spoken and understood by the most humble citizens. ‘As it is my design to make those that can scarcely read understand,’ Paine once wrote, ‘I shall therefore avoid every literary ornament and put it in language as plain as the alphabet.’ That remark was perhaps overdrawn, but Rights of Man undoubtedly bubbles with directness, clarity and force. It assumed knowledge of no authority but the Bible. It side-stepped Latin and French phrases (or provided simultaneous translations in the rare passages where they were employed). It deployed imagery from the daily life of commoners and reduced pompous language designed to impress cultivated readers. Paine designed Rights of Man to appeal to individuals like himself – a mass public audience of artisans, working people and lesser professionals – and wrote it in a tone full of impish confidence, jovial ferocity and disrespect for bellicose power accountable only to itself. 

Paine drafted the book during the winter months of 1790-91. He had returned to his native England from America three years earlier to visit his aging mother in Thetford, to mourn the recent death of his father and to publicise his plans for the world’s first single span, wrought iron bridge. Even before Rights of Man Paine had won an international reputation as a citizen extraordinary. His arrival in England had understandably attracted intense excitement, alarm and loathing. Paine had burst onto the stage of international public life as an authentic commoner. His manners were rough and ungracious. He was a burping misfit and farting rebel in an age cut by knife-sharp divisions of courtly respectability, wealth and power. In his early years in England he had been employed as a corset-maker, ship’s hand, exciseman and teacher. He later displayed brilliance as an inventor and self-educated scientist, and during the American Revolution he had excelled as a soldier, diplomat and provocative pamphleteer. 

Living dangerously on the reputation attracted by all these achievements, and angered by Edmund Burke’s recent vicious attack on the French Revolution, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Paine lodged at the Angel Inn in Islington in early November of 1790. He no doubt had wanted to write in peace and quiet. Islington village, tucked away from the bustle and filth of central London, seemed to offer that, although Hogarth’s painting of the inn, with its clutter of barking dogs and whinnying horses, laughing children and drunken gentlemen, suggests that Paine’s residence there was anything but tranquil. In an age of rootlessness, Paine had a high regard for anniversaries. He began writing on or around the 4th of November, the anniversary of the Glorious Revolution, whose pompous centenary celebrations three years before had convinced him that England remained in the grip of despotism. From under his hotel room window, Paine would have heard the chants of the ragged-trousered street children, with their ‘Please to remember, the fifth of November’. Peering through his window, he would have seen the effigies of Guy Fawkes, which within two years his own effigy was to replace. 

Working feverishly, often at night by flickering candlelight, Paine crafted over 50,000 words in less than three months. The pace of his quill matched the utter seriousness of his subject. Rights of Man portrayed the world of the late eighteenth century as a bleak house of des tism. With the notable exception of America and France, Paine complained, the world is bullied by irresponsible, unaccountable power. Unelected despotic governments encourage mutual suspicion and fear among citizens, who are consequently. away from themselves and from each other. The public exercise of reason is treated as treasonable. Citizens are thought of as ignorant and submissive, as mere dumb animals. Their liberties, properties and lives are put up for grabs. They are subjected to the whims and designs of the governing class which, being driven by private greed, corruption and the will to survive, tries everything under the sun to exploit its citizens. Since the power of this class is unchecked by public criticism, the age of despotism is stuffed full of bellicose epithets. It is a reckless and miserable age of war, an Augean stable of secrecy, dissembling, plots, gun-running, armies and showers of blood. War, wrote Pain, is ‘the art of conquering at home’, and this is the greatest of its tragedies: the reign of war is self-perpetuating and the accession of democracy is inevitably postponed. Despotic governments make war in order to better extract public support and reap taxation harvests from their populations; in turn, constant wars between these governments force them to arm themselves to the teeth, and this increases their ability to govern and, hence, their lust for power over their citizens. 

Paine refused to see this weeping mass of despotism and war as inevitable. He was convinced that the boil of despotism would burst. He sensed, correctly, that war is the greatest of all agents of change in modern times, that it wipes out banalities, speeds up all processes and, above all, brings realities to the surface. The remaining question for him was whether the approaching democratic revolutions in modern government could be made through ‘reason and accommodation’ rather than blind ‘convulsions’. Pointing to the example of the American Revolution, Paine stressed the need for peacefully resisting despotic government and democratizing its power. He proposed the seemingly naive but entirely original idea that if citizens in sufficient numbers keep their nerve, stand erect and claim their dignity, then military power loses its authority, its force becoming ineffective, even laughable. Paine saw that military governments cannot rest on the tips of their bayonets. He also argued that citizens in democratic republics are unlikely to want to go to war, since they have too much to lose. When the rulers of a state act as if they own the state and its citizens it is the simplest thing in the world to declare war on other states; by contrast, when citizens themselves are required to decide whether or not war is to be declared and then pay for it personally with their money and their lives, it is only natural that they think twice and recoil from war. 

This reasoning explains why Paine rejected the old monarchic doctrine of Charles Stuart and others that all the people had to with laws was to obey them. In prophetic lines which remain pertinent today, he warned of the necessity ‘at all times to watch against the attempted encroachment of power, and to prevent its running to excess.’ And he insisted, in language much more radical than any previous or subsequent English political writer, that government is legitimate only when it is based on the active consent of the governed. Citizens, wrote Paine, are never to be confounded with their governments. All individuals, male and female, black and white, are born with equal natural rights. These rights (to free speech, public assembly and religious worship, for example) predispose citizens of all countries to act freely and peacefully and to respect each other as equals. Rights are the Archimedean point, the ‘fixed and steady principle’ for measuring the legitimacy of governments and the comfort and happiness of citizens. Natural rights, by definition, cannot be relinquished, transferred or divided up, and here Paine savages Burke and other monarchists of his day – no generation can deny them to their heirs. Every generation must be free to act for itself. The presumption that it can govern from beyond the grave is despotic, a ridiculous relic from the time when kings and queens assumed their immortality by disposing of their crowns and their subjects by will upon their death-beds. ‘The idea of hereditary legislators’, wrote Paine mockingly, ‘is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges, or hereditary juries and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; and as absurd as an hereditary poet-laureate.’ The dead and the unborn have no authority. In politics tradition counts for nothing. Only the living can exercise rights to freedom and equality. States are therefore democratic, he argued, only when they are based on the active consent of naturally free and equal citizens, and when their consent is expressed continuously through parliamentary representative mechanisms that are protected by a written constitution. Government without a written constitution is nonsense. 

Paine harboured no illusions about the efficacy of written constitutions, despite their vital importance in controlling state power by specifying such matters as the duration of parliaments, the frequency of elections, freedom of the press, the powers of the judiciary, the conditions under which war can be declared and the prohibition of taxation without representation. Written statements do not by themselves secure the rights of citizens. That is why Paine argued, in wholly original and strikingly contemporary terms, that the distinction between civil society and the state is fundamental. He thought that democracy requires the state to govern civil society neither too much nor too little, and that while a more democratic order cannot be built without state power it also cannot be built through state power. The weakening of despotism and the strengthening of democracy involves limiting the scope and power of modern governments, as far as possible, in favour of citizens organizing themselves across national boundaries in households, markets, clubs, working places, churches and community organisations. Paine recognised, again with breathtaking insight, that the leap towards democracy is perilous. Despotisms have a nasty habit of ruling from their graves; their mischief is more easily begun than ended. Despotism divides citizens into rich and poor and accustoms them to living in toadish ways. Paine therefore concluded that democratic governments are obliged to protect and empower their citizens. The warfare states of his time would require conversion into democratic welfare states. Citizens would need to be provided with transfer payments which would be ‘not of the nature of a charity, but of a right’. Funded through general taxation, these welfare measures would be targeted on the elderly, the widowed, the poor and unemployed, disbanded soldiers and other specific groups of citizens disadvantaged by despotism. 

Paine completed Rights of Man on his fifty-fourth birthday, January 29th., 1791. He celebrated his release from weeks of knuckle-grinding writing in a downstairs lounge room of the Angel Inn, with several bottles of wine, followed by brandy, with his closest friend, Thomas Rickman, a bookseller. Well after midnight, Paine clambered upstairs, collapsed into bed, and snored his way through to noon. Shortly after waking he resumed his quill for the last time on the manuscript, sketching an elegant dedication to his friend George Washington. Paine had a habit of writing satirical dedications, but this one to Washington, alongside whom Paine had fought in the campaigns against the British, was decidedly reverent in tone: 

SIR, 

I present you a small treatise in defence of those principles of freedom which your exemplary virtue hath so eminently contributed to establish. That the Rights of Man may become as universal as your benevolence can wish, and that you may enjoy the happiness of seeing the New World regenerate the Old, is the prayer of 

Sir, 

Your much obliged, 

and Obedient humble servant, 

– THOMAS PAINE 

Next day Paine passed the manuscript to the well-known London publisher, Mr. J. Johnson, who set about printing it in time for the opening of Parliament and Washington’s birthday on 22nd. February. As the bound copies piled up in the printing shop, Johnson was visited repeatedly by government agents. Fearing the book police, and terrified by the prospect of arrest and bankruptcy, he decided to suppress the book on the very same day of its scheduled publication, and to destroy his entire stock. A few copies had already passed into private hands, and only several of these have survived. The British Library has a copy on its shelves, bound in burgundy leather and wedged ignominiously among an assortment of unrelated pamphlets by other authors. Two hundred years on, it is almost impossible to imagine the public fuss that was aroused when this small book appeared in another three-shilling edition three weeks later on March 13th., 1791. 

Rights of Man made Paine the greatest political figure of his generation. It refuted the myth that the English are incapable of writing or reading political philosophy, and it proved to be one of those rare books of great political insight and originality which outlive their time and place of birth. It is easy in retrospect to spot its flaws of argument, but its thesis that despotism breeds war just as war breeds despotism, remains compelling, and its defence of democracy as a remedy for war has been indirectly proved by the fact that in modern times no two democratic republics have ever declared war on each other. Rights of Man created a sensation. Its attempt to defend the French Revolution and to beard the British lion in its den sparked the fieriest ever public debate about political principles. It provoked nearly five hundred published replies. During the years 1791-93, Paine and ‘Paineites’ were constantly discussed in London newspapers for the most part unfavourably. No book ever sold like it. Several hundred thousand copies were distributed before the government of Pitt decided to suppress the book, the author and the agitation he exited. At first, according to his friend, Thomas Rickman, Paine tried hard to ignore the noise and to lead a quiet, uncluttered life. ‘Mr. Paine’s life in London was a quiet round of philosophical leisure and enjoyment. It was occupied in writing, in a small epistolary correspondence, in walking about with me to visit different friends, occasionally lounging at coffee-houses and public places, or being visited by a select few… At this time he read but little, took his nap after dinner, and played with my family at some game in the evening, as chess, dominoes, and drafts, but never at cards; in recitations, singing, music; or passed it in conversation. 

Rights of Man gradually shredded this routine. The Pitt government reacted hysterically. In the middle of 1792, after the publication of a sequel to the book, it issued a proclamation against ‘wicked’ and ‘seditious’ writings. Without saying so directly, the proclamation was in fact designed to suppress the book. Paine’s publishers and booksellers were harassed, arrested and condemned. Paine was executed and burned in effigy in hundreds of communities throughout Britain. Paine himself was detained on trumped-up debt charges. His daily life became ever more peppered with gossip, legal threats and government-sponsored meetings called to denounce Rights of Man. The constant threat of bailiffs, constables and gaolers and the hostility of local magistrates, squires, parsons and other members of the respectable classes convinced him that reform of British politics was for the time being impossible. His friend William Blake also convinced him that the reign of panic and terror would soon make him ‘a dead man’. Paine fled into permanent exile, to France for a while, and then to America. 

Paine never made money from Rights of Man, donating the royalties to various citizens’ causes. He spent his final years living alone in poverty in taverns, shops and other shabby rented rooms in Greenwich Village. His health worsened daily, and during his final months he was confined to bed. His political interests were kept alive by friends, who read newspapers to him each day. But his pen withdrew from public service and his figure quietly slipped below the horizon of public life. Paine died in the early hours of June 8th., 1809, and was buried the following day in New Rochelle. A handful of people attended – a Quaker watchmaker, a Frenchwoman and her two little boys, two blacks and six Irishmen. 

The author of Rights of Man suffered the condescension of posterity in many ways. He had known virtually every leading contemporary political figure in America, France and England, and yet not one of them publicly praised him after his death. An obituary in the leading New York newspaper described how ‘he lived long, done some good, and much harm. A few months later, James Cheetham’s biography appeared, reinforcing the politicians’ image of Paine as a hot-blooded leveller and drunken atheist. And one cold winter’s night in 1819, the famous English journalist, William Cobbett, travelled to New Rochelle, dug up Paine’s bones and shipped them in a crate to England where he tried, unsuccessfully, to raise money for a monument to ‘the common sense of a great man’. Cobbett kept the skeleton until his death in 1835, bequeathing it to his son. That son went into bankruptcy and the skeleton was seized along with his property, but the Lord Chancellor refused to consider it an asset. For several years the bones were kept by a day labourer. They then passed into the hands of a furniture dealer. Their whereabouts are today unknown. It was left to Paine’s successors to piece together his remains, to cultivate his appreciation of democracy, and to reconsider why he came to be so loved, but also so hated for voting against war and for democracy.