Thomas Paine: Common Sense, Democracy, and American Identity

Thomas Paine is a kind of forgotten Founding Father of the American nation. He was one of the most radical voices advocating separation from England during the pre-Revolutionary War era. However, because his views were so radically democratic — even anarchic in some ways — Paine was later shunned by more moderate Americans such as Madison and Jefferson after the war for independence had been won. Still, it is important to remember the views of Thomas Paine, as expressed in his seminal tract Common Sense and in his later work The Age of Reason, when considering the issues of representational democracy that are still debated in American public discourse today.

Unlike some of the better-known patriot voices, Paine deliberately used plain language to persuade his audience to adopt the cause of American independence. He did not merely argue for rejecting British rule because of unfair taxation, nor did he simply contend that Britain was unjust because it denied Americans a voice in Parliament. Rather, he stressed that America should never concede to any form of British dominion because America ought to be democratic, while Britain's government was aristocratic and unjust — built upon the principles of hereditary monarchy. Paine is thus America's first truly distinctive philosopher and constructor of what it means to be an American outside of the British colonial realm.

Many of Paine's sentiments do not seem radical today, but they were certainly radical in his own time, when many pro-American patriots still wished to retain some tenuous relationship with the Mother Country, and others who desired independence nonetheless feared the so-called tyranny of the majority. "I challenge the warmest advocate for reconciliation, to show, a single advantage that this continent can reap, by being connected with Great Britain," he wrote in Chapter 4 of Common Sense. Democracy was, for Paine, both the most reasonable and the most just form of governance.

In the third chapter of Common Sense, Paine wrote: "But there is another and greater distinction for which no truly natural or religious reason can be assigned, and that is, the distinction of men into KINGS and SUBJECTS. Male and female are the distinctions of nature, good and bad the distinctions of heaven; but how a race of men came into the world so exalted above the rest, and distinguished like some new species, is worth enquiring into, and whether they are the means of happiness or of misery to mankind." Kingship, Paine argued, was an unnatural elevation of certain individuals based purely on the accident of birth.

Furthermore, some of Paine's arguments are jarring and unsettling even today in their anarchism. In the second chapter of Common Sense, Paine wrote: "Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices."

Paine's philosophy was also unusually critical, compared with the framers of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, in its uncompromising embrace of a non-theologically based state order — a state grounded in the concept of reason. The value of reason over religious ideation was a popular concept during the Enlightenment among certain European philosophers, but a controversial one at the popular level. Nonetheless, Paine was unafraid to advocate the idea that religious belief should always be subordinate to political doctrines justifiable through logic.