Tom Paine and Democratic Republicanism
Paine would be proud that Americans are critiquing the Constitution, writes Luke Pickrell
Thomas Paine was born in England in 1737. His father, a Quaker, instilled values of equality and opposition to social hierarchy. Paine’s exposure to class inequality in Britain developed in him an understanding of social ills and conflict. Through John Locke, he learned that natural rights trump divine rights, legitimacy comes from consent, and the people have a right — even a duty — to rebel against unlawful or oppressive authority.
Paine arrived in Colonial America in 1775, entering a society already shaped by Enlightenment thought and Evangelical Protestantism. As historian Harvey J. Kaye notes, these traditions “strove to remove barriers to sight and bring light out of darkness. Both rejected inherited wisdom as the basis of knowledge and encouraged the questioning of — if not resistance to — authority.” Yet, loyalty to a limited monarchy remained widespread. Despite growing frustration with King George III, most colonists still operated within the framework of “King, Constitution, and Mother Country.”
Into this world stepped Paine, who would go on to write some of the most influential political works in modern history. “The cause of America made me an author,” he reflected. According to Kaye, Paine “sensed that the time for revolutionary action had arrived.” He believed Americans’ stated allegiance to the crown no longer reflected their true convictions. In 1776, he published Common Sense, which sold the equivalent of 15 million copies today, making it proportionately the best-selling publication in U.S. history. Paine argued that “all government… is or ought to be, calculated for the general good and safety of the community.” Britain’s political structure, he claimed, was illegitimate because it prioritized the power of the monarch and aristocracy over the well-being of the people. Checks and balances were a sham, serving the few at the expense of the many. The state, Paine insisted, belonged to the people alone, and only they could determine what was just.
Common Sense radiated belief in universal human rights. Paine argued that inequality, not equality, was the aberration that needed explanation. The only reason inequality persisted was because of “force and fraud.”
Many colonists argued that the time wasn’t right to break with England. Critics spread fear and doubt and argued that Americans couldn’t sustain a republic: “All our property throughout the continent would be unhinged… the greatest confusion and the most violent convulsions would take place,” warned one naysayer. Paine had none of it. Foreshadowing Martin Luther King Jr.’s understanding that “‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never’” and that the time to act for democracy is always now, Paine argued that Americans were “ripe for revolution and republicanism.” Naysayers' fears were “only chimeras, empty and unreal fancies of excited minds.” Furthermore, “All men [are] republicans by nature and royalists only by fashion.”
Soon after the war began, Paine helped write the new Pennsylvania Constitution, temporarily creating the Union’s “sole unicameral and near democratic state.” He argued that the more complex the government, the greater the threat to democracy; no government could be too simple. America needed a plain and straightforward government; in other words, just a single house of representatives. “By integrating representation upon democracy,” wrote Paine years later in Rights of Man, “we arrive at a system of government capable of embracing and confederating all of the various interests and every extent of territory and population.” As Jonathan Israel notes, some radicals in Europe critiqued the Pennsylvania Constitution for failing to abolish slavery and end racial discrimination. The new Constitution also failed to safeguard the rights of Native Americans and did little to protect press freedom. Still, the document was groundbreaking because of its democratic structural provisions, such as a single legislative assembly.
After the war, tensions rose between democratic republicans like Paine and aristocratic republicans like James Madison and John Adams, who once called Paine a “poor, ignorant, malicious, short-sighted Crapulous Mass.” Paine favored a unicameral legislature, universal suffrage, and popular sovereignty. His opponents preferred a mixed constitution with checks and balances, a bicameral legislature, a strong executive, and an unelected judiciary. Adams outlined this vision in Thoughts on Government, a direct rebuttal to Common Sense. Ultimately, the 1787 Constitution enshrined aristocratic republicanism and a government designed to constrain majoritarian rule. The result was a republic, but not a democracy.
Paine left America and traveled to England, where he published Rights of Man in 1791 to defend the French Revolution against Edmund Burke and his conservative Reflections on the Revolution in France. According to Eric Foner and E.P. Thompson, the text became a fundamental tract for the English working class. In Rights of Man, Paine argued that the cause of political democracy was inseparable from the economic demands of the poor, and the solution to poverty was democratic government. Paine defended the rights of people to change their constitutions, writing, "I am contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed away, and controlled, and contracted for, by the manuscript-assumed authority of the dead." Democratic constitutions created prosperous societies: “When it shall be said in any country in the world, my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend because I am the friend of its happiness: when these things can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and its government.”
In 1795, Paine published Dissertations on the First Principles of Government. He explained, “The true and only true basis of representative government is equality of rights.” Universal and equal suffrage is the “primary right by which other rights are protected,” and to take away that right is to “reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case.”
Paine died in New York City in 1809. Well before the end of his life, he’d developed a potent critique of the unfettered accumulation of property. He argued that the principle of universal and equal rights overrode the particular claim to private property if the ownership and concentration of property resulted in the domination of the many by the few. Private property rights must be subordinated to the common good: “Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence, the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of society the enjoyment of the same rights.”
Paine’s democratic republicanism didn’t win out in the U.S. Unicameralism simply wasn’t popular. The idea of America as a democratic republic was an idea whose time had not yet come. “Mixed government and separation of powers,” writes Gordon Wood, “persuaded most post-revolutionary politically engaged, pamphlet and newspaper-reading Americans that their political and legal institutions approached perfection. With the Federal Constitution secured by late 1787, little more, many believed, was required. Hence, anti-democratic discourse in the press and legislatures remained broadly prevalent in the United States until well after 1800. Between 1775 and 1820, those dissatisfied had to combat a profoundly ingrained bias that America’s political order possessed a degree of perfection that only a fringe was prepared publicly to claim it had not achieved.”
But Paine’s democratic-republican ideas lingered. Thomas Skidmore, co-founder and leader of the Working Men's Party in New York in the late 1820s, was an admirer of Paine. Skidmore’s The Rights of Man to Property! — the title is no accident — extended Paine’s arguments around the subordination of property to universal rights outlined in The Rights of Man and Agrarian Justice. In The Rights of Man to Property!, Skidmore depicted a two-class society consisting of a propertied ruling class and a propertyless majority inevitably subjected to a sort of economic slavery that made true liberty impossible. He advocated for a constitutional convention to abolish debt, end the right of inheritance, and bring about an equal distribution of productive and personal property. Karl Marx read about Skidmore and the American Workingmen’s Parties in the summer of 1843.
Paine’s natural rights theory greatly influenced the English Chartists, England's most significant political movement in the 19th century. Marx and Engels came to appreciate democracy’s radical potential by observing the Chartists and engaging with their six demands. Paine’s natural rights theory and opposition to slavery also influenced the American abolitionist movement. Soon after arriving in America, Paine called slavery a “wicked practice” and argued in Rights of Man that “Man has no property in man.” When William Lloyd Garrison launched his newspaper, The Liberator, in 1831 in Boston, he placed a version of Paine’s words on its masthead: “Our Country Is the World — Our Countrymen Are Mankind” (In Rights of Man, Paine wrote: “The World is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion”).
Founded in 1901, the Socialist Party of America (SPA) made a great deal of Paine and his democratic republicanism. Harvey Kaye writes that during socialist Sunday schools, one teacher portrayed Paine, not the “aristocratic Washington,” as the “real father of our country.” In The Masses, a widely read socialist paper, one author placed Paine in dialogue with the likes of God, Satan, Voltaire, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mark Twain, and V.I. Lenin. The radical sociologist C. Wright Mills admired Paine, along with Tom Hayden, one-time president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and author in 1962 of the Port Huron Statement.
As John Dos Passos wrote, “In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present.” The life and work of Tom Paine, including his intransigent advocacy for universal rights and a unicameral legislature, will remain relevant as long as people continue to struggle to make the U.S. a democracy. Today, people struggling for democracy are beginning to set their eyes on the Constitution. Paine would be proud. Americans are again remembering that they have the power and duty to cast aside illegitimate political institutions and “begin the world over again.”
References
Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Random House, 1964).
Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic: 1876-87 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
Harvey Kaye, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006).
John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (New York: Little Brown & Co., 1995).
Jonathan Israel, The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775-1848 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).
Sean Monahan, “Reading Paine From the Left,” Jacobin, March 6, 2015, https://jacobin.com/2015/03/thomas-paine-american-revolution-common-sense/
You made a great argument for why Paine should be celebrated for the revolutionary he was and for the democracy this country needs.