Get started

WorkThomas Paine

Rights of Man

Begun as a reply to Burke, the book grew a second part, with a plan for pensions and schooling, that got Paine convicted of sedition.

by Thomas Paine315 passages held

  • English, the original language, and your language
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work See it in context
First published
(aged 54)
Original language
English

Report a rights issue

Overview

In December 1792 soldiers of the 2nd Dragoon Guards paraded dummies of Thomas Paine through towns in south-west England and burned them before cheering crowds. The book behind the bonfires had begun as a reply. In November 1790 Edmund Burke, the Whig politician, published Reflections on the Revolution in France, itself an answer to a sermon by the dissenting minister Richard Price. Burke argued that the French were wrecking in months what generations of experience had built, and that the English Parliament of 1688 had bound the nation to its line of kings for all time. Part I of Paine's reply appeared in March 1791, from a second publisher after the first, Joseph Johnson, withdrew it. No generation, it answered, can bind the next: rights belong to living people by nature, not by charters granted from above, and a constitution is made by a people before it has a government, not handed down by a government afterwards. Part II, published in February 1792 and dedicated to Lafayette, went further. It set out a costed plan to cut the expense of the court and spend the savings on the poor, with £4 a year towards the schooling of each child under fourteen, pensions from the age of fifty, and a progressive tax on large estates. In May 1792 George III issued a proclamation against seditious writings, prompted largely by the book's popularity, and a prosecution of Part II for seditious libel followed. By then Paine had left for France to sit in the National Convention. He was tried in his absence at the Guildhall in London on 18 December 1792, and although Thomas Erskine, a leading advocate of the day, defended him on the ground of a free press, the jury found him guilty.

Key concepts

What does "no generation can bind the next" rule out?

It rules out any settlement that claims authority over people not yet born. Burke held that Parliament in 1688 had bound the English nation to its line of kings for all time. Paine replies that the makers of that settlement could decide for themselves and no further: the right to govern a generation belongs to that generation, so a law's hold on the living rests on their consent, not on its age.

Why must a constitution come before a government, in Rights of Man?

Because the constitution is what creates the government and sets its limits. A people makes it first, as the act by which it decides how it will be governed; the government exists afterwards, under it. A government that hands down a constitution has reversed the order, and whatever it granted it can take back, which is why Paine refuses to call such an arrangement a constitution at all.

What are natural rights, as Rights of Man uses the term?

Rights a person has by being alive, not by permission. Paine places them in nature and in living people rather than in charters granted from above, which reverses Burke's picture of liberties as an inheritance passed down by law. A charter, on Paine's reading, does not create a right; at best it recognises one already there, and at worst it poses as the right's source so that it can limit it.

Why does Part II turn a book about rights into a budget?

Because a right to be governed for one's own good means little if government spends mainly on itself. Part II sets out a costed plan: cut the expense of the court and use the savings for the poor, with £4 a year towards schooling each child under fourteen, pensions from fifty, and a progressive tax on large estates. The figures carry the argument, showing that poverty follows from choices a government makes.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

No Generation Can Bind the Next

Can the people of one age commit their descendants to a line of kings, or to anything at all? Against Burke, Paine answers that only the living have authority over their own time.

Burke held that the English Parliament of 1688 had bound the nation to its line of kings for all time, and that the French were wrecking in months what generations of experience had built. Paine's reply rests on one principle: no generation can bind the next. Those who made a settlement had authority over their own lives, not over people not yet born, and a right exercised on behalf of the dead is no right at all. Hereditary government becomes, on this view, not an inheritance but a standing claim that nobody alive ever granted.

  • intergenerational justice
  • hereditary government
  • hereditary monarchy
  • monarchy
  • aristocracy
  • despotism
  • political legitimacy
  • revolution

Enter a dialogue

Rights Held by Nature, Not Granted by Charter

Where do rights come from, and who has the authority to make a constitution? From nature, Paine answers, and from a people before it has any government, never from above.

Rights belong to living people by nature; a charter that claims to grant them has the order backwards, since whatever can be granted can also be withdrawn. The same reversal governs constitutions. A constitution is made by a people before it has a government, and the government is what the constitution brings into being, so no government can hand one down afterwards or remake it to suit itself. Power flows up from the governed, and every institution answers to them.

  • natural rights
  • liberty
  • popular sovereignty
  • constitutionalism
  • political authority
  • government
  • representative government
  • political representation
  • representation
  • republicanism
  • public opinion
  • political reform

Enter a dialogue

Taxes, Pensions and Schools: A Costed Plan for the Poor

What should a government do with the money it takes, and whom does it owe first? Part II answers in figures: cut what the court costs and spend the savings on the poor.

Part II, dedicated to Lafayette, turns the argument about rights into a budget. Paine set out a costed plan to cut the expense of the court and spend what was saved on the poor: £4 a year towards the schooling of each child under fourteen, pensions from the age of fifty, and a progressive tax on large estates. The plan treats poverty as something government produces by its choices, and taxation as something a nation can redirect. It was Part II that the Crown prosecuted, and a London jury found Paine guilty of seditious libel in his absence.

  • taxation
  • public finance
  • public expenditure
  • poverty
  • social welfare
  • political corruption
  • war
  • conquest
  • peace

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
315
distinct concepts
441
by passages held, corpus-wide
#237

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “constitutionalism” and “popular sovereignty”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 27 pairings. 84 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
constitutionalismpopular sovereignty9
revolutiontaxation9
political representationpopular sovereignty8
aristocracytaxation7
political legitimacypopular sovereignty7
monarchypopular sovereignty6
political legitimacyrevolution6
political legitimacytaxation6
monarchypolitical legitimacy5
constitutionalismpolitical legitimacy4
monarchytaxation4
aristocracypolitical representation3
monarchyrevolution3
political representationtaxation3
popular sovereigntyrevolution3
popular sovereigntytaxation3
aristocracypolitical legitimacy2
aristocracypopular sovereignty2
constitutionalismrevolution2
constitutionalismtaxation2
political legitimacypolitical representation2
political representationrevolution2
aristocracymonarchy1
aristocracyrevolution1
constitutionalismmonarchy1
constitutionalismpolitical representation1
monarchypolitical representation1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1776 Common Sense

    The book that made Paine's name, so much so that he signed the Crisis papers of the following years with its title.

     EN
  2. 1776 The American Crisis

    A serial rather than a book: papers issued one at a time between December 1776 and December 1783, whenever the war's news called for one, each under the title The Crisis.

     EN
  3. 1782 Letter Addressed to the Abbé Raynal on the Affairs of North-America (Letter to the Abbe Raynal)

    Ten months after the victory at Yorktown, with the war winding down, Paine set out to put the record of the Revolution straight for European readers.

     EN
  4. 1791 Rights of Man you are here EN
  5. 1793 Reasons for Wishing to Preserve the Life of Louis Capet (Reasons for Preserving the Life of Louis Capet)

    Second of the three speeches Paine gave in the Convention on the king's fate: the first, in November 1792, argued that Louis should be tried; the last pleaded for a reprieve.

     EN
  6. 1794 The Age of Reason

    Between the two stretches in which it was written, Paine spent ten months in a Paris prison; it is his one sustained book on religion, and the one that cost him most.

     EN
  7. 1795 Dissertation on First Principles of Government

    Here Paine's political principles are condensed into a few dozen pages, in his last attempt to shape a French constitution from inside the Convention.

     EN
  8. 1797 Agrarian Justice

    Published in answer to a bishop's sermon on rich and poor, it carries the welfare proposals of Rights of Man to a principle: that the landless are owed a share of the earth.

     EN
  9. 1797 The Existence of God

    Addressed to the Theophilanthropists, the Paris society whose creed matched Paine's own, it gives the positive side of the case that The Age of Reason made against revealed religion.

     EN
  10. 1807 Examination of the Prophecies

    A companion to The Age of Reason, giving the Gospels' use of prophecy the same close reading that its second part gave the authorship of the Bible.

     EN
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work

— or open another of their works