In 1772 an excise officer in Lewes, a market town in Sussex, wrote a pamphlet for Parliament arguing that his colleagues were paid so little that poverty pushed honest men into taking bribes. The petition it supported was rejected, and in 1774 the excise service dismissed its author, Thomas Paine, then thirty-seven: a former staymaker who had left school in his early teens and had no patron and no money. Benjamin Franklin, who was in London lobbying for the colonies, gave him a letter of introduction, and on 30 November 1774 Paine landed in Philadelphia, ill with a fever caught on the voyage.
Everything he wrote after that puts one question to whatever power he found in front of him: who gave it the right? His answer, first given in Common Sense in January 1776 and never withdrawn, was that nobody inherits authority over anybody else. A people that chooses a good king, he argued, has no right to hand its grandchildren to that king's descendants. Turned on Parliament, the same test said that no generation can bind the next. Turned on the churches, it said that a revelation is only hearsay for everyone except the person who first received it. Turned on land, it said that the earth once belonged to everyone, so whoever holds a piece of it owes the rest a rent.
Few of these principles were original to Paine. He often echoes John Locke, the English philosopher of natural rights, though he claimed never to have read him. His contribution was to put the principles before a mass audience. Common Sense told colonists who were still petitioning the king that the time for petitions was over. It sold somewhere between 75,000 and 120,000 copies — the figure is argued over — in colonies of about two and a half million people, and it was often read aloud.
In Rights of Man he carried the argument home to Britain. The book answered Edmund Burke, the Whig politician who had defended inherited institutions against the French Revolution, and its Part II, published in 1792, added a costed plan: spend less on government, and use the savings to pay pensions from the age of fifty and to school poor children. In December 1792 a London jury convicted Paine of seditious libel in his absence. By then France had made him an honorary citizen, and he sat in the National Convention in Paris.
In Paris he applied the same principles to the Revolution itself. In January 1793 he asked the Convention to spare Louis XVI, banish him to America and abolish the death penalty, and the plea earned him the enmity of the Jacobins. When the Convention expelled its foreign members in December, Paine was arrested as a foreigner and spent ten months in the Luxembourg prison. He was freed after James Monroe, the new American minister in Paris, claimed him as a citizen of the United States.
Back in his seat in 1795, he argued that the vote belongs to every man, whether or not he owns property; no one rose to speak for him. Two years later Agrarian Justice proposed a national fund paying every person £15 at twenty-one and £10 a year after fifty, as a right and not as charity. His welfare proposals probably did little to shape the modern welfare state, but advocates of a basic income now trace their idea back to this pamphlet.
The Age of Reason did more than anything else to wreck his standing in America. He wrote it to defend belief in one God against every church that claimed to speak for him. Paine returned to America in 1802 to find former allies turned against him, and in 1806 an election inspector at New Rochelle refused his vote on the ground that he was not an American. He died in Greenwich Village on 8 June 1809. The Quakers refused him a place in their burial ground, and he was buried on his farm at New Rochelle with only a handful of mourners present.