“The 100 best nonfiction books: No 85 – Common Sense by Tom Paine (1776)”, The Observer

The American revolution was always a rhetorical as well as a political upheaval. The Founding Fathers transformed a mood of sullen opposition into a convulsion of revolutionary fury as much in print as on the field of battle. Thomas Jefferson’s catalyst for the conflict in the declaration of independence was a masterpiece of English prose.

If there was to be a storm, there first had to be a lightning strike. The necessary explosion was ignited by a little book, attributed to an anonymous “Englishman”, and published by Robert Bell from a print shop on Third Street, Philadelphia, on 9 January 1776. The book was Common Sense, the bestselling American pamphlet of the 18th century. In no time at all, there were more than 120,000 copies in circulation, some 25 editions in 1776 alone, and its ideas were the talk of the eastern seaboard. “Who is the author of Common Sense?” asked the Philadelphia Evening Post. “He deserves a statue in gold.”

Thomas Paine, unmasked as the author of this sensational broadside, is a key figure in the making of the Anglo-American tradition, a man of fierce libertarian language and mercenary political instincts. He made his name by out-Englishing the English: exaggerating the most distinctive traits and selling it as a basis for revolt. A down-on-his-luck emigrant, landing in Philadelphia with few prospects, he had written Common Sense (the title belonged to another revolutionary, Benjamin Rush) in a few hectic weeks.

Rarely has a single volume achieved such an instantaneous effect, possibly because it was published on the same day that George III pledged in parliament to put “a speedy end to these disorders” in the 13 colonies.

Common Sense is a model of popular journalistic brio, written to be understood by all readers, high and low. With breath-taking chutzpah, Paine singled out George as “the royal brute” responsible for all the ills of America. His attitude to monarchy in general is entertainingly severe:

“England, since the conquest, hath known some few good monarchs, but groaned beneath a much larger number of bad ones; yet no man in his senses can say that their claim under William the Conqueror is a very honourable one. A French bastard landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original.”

Nailing his colours, Paine then took the logical step of calling for war, and for independence. “Why is it that we hesitate?” he asked. “The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth… For God’s sake, let us come to a final separation… The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, ’tis time to part’… The birthday of a new world is at hand.” In a few well-turned phrases, and with an eye for vivid expression, Paine transformed a previously leaden debate into pure gold:

“I have heard it asserted by some, that as America hath flourished under her former connection with Great Britain, the same connection is necessary towards her future happiness, and will always have the same effect. Nothing can be more fallacious than this kind of argument. We may as well assert that because a child has thrived upon milk that it is never to have meat, or that the first 20 years of our lives is to become a precedent for the next 20… ”

Paine never let the facts get in the way of a passionate restatement of popular sentiment:

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand, and a race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom from the event of a few months.”

Having found his voice, Paine subsequently weighed in against slavery, in favour of the emancipation of women, and on behalf of many other progressive causes. In 1787, he returned to England, via revolutionary France, and proceeded to launch a fierce attack on Edmund Burke in The Rights of Man, for some his masterpiece.

Paine was part of a radical circle of free thinkers that included William Blake, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft (No 76 in this series). Among conservative Britons, he was regarded with fear and hatred. His books and effigy were regularly burned in public, and he lived a precarious life one jump ahead of the authorities. In the American spirit, Paine was always a master of the provisional.

Paine’s influential writings became a textbook for English radicalism, and widely admired on the left. His connections with both the French and the American revolutions gave him a unique position as a champion of Enlightenment politics, and his prose – more demotic and colloquial than Burke, whose “high-toned exclamation” he despised – survives as a bracing and exemplary blast of libertarian polemic.

A signature sentence

“Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseriea by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.”

Three to compare

Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Thomas Paine: Rights of Man (1791)

Thomas Paine: The Age of Reason (1793)

The Observer