Visual Studio Extensibility Development: Extending Visual Studio IDE for Productivity, Quality, Tooling, Analysis, and Artificial Intelligence 2nd Edition Rishabh Verma
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Preface
In 1789 Thomas Paine, then in London, wrote to his friend, the first President of the United States: ‘I am going over to France—A Share in two revolutions is living to some purpose.’1 Paine lived an extraordinary life in an extraordinary era that still grips the attention of many readers. What were that era’s meanings and lessons? Readers have often turned for authoritative answers to Paine’s texts. But their evolving afterlives in later decades had the consequence that Paine became one of those canonical figures who have often been less studied than celebrated. More than many other authors in the current canon of the history of political thought, the ‘usable Paine’ obscured the ‘historic Paine’. He was too often taken for granted; Paine became public property. This allowed assumptions about the meanings of his texts to be linked with inherited preconceptions about the societies in which he lived and wrote. When the causes of the American and French Revolutions or the threat of revolution in Britain were made to seem self-evident, myth-making was not far away. A reconsideration of the ‘age of revolution’ is overdue, and historians have begun to explore just such a revision.
In that polemical and rhetorical age, Paine was a highly effective polemical and rhetorical author. This book is, necessarily, a study of polemic and rhetoric rather than of the detached writing of an author in his library. Its subject is argument, both then and now, but argument that led to slaughter and destruction on both sides of the Atlantic in ways that Paine did not intend. Explaining these outcomes is not easy. The task of historians of political thought is not to pronounce that ‘Paine was right’ or ‘Paine was wrong’; rather, to discover why he wrote as he did, what his meanings were, and how he was received. That is, to take him seriously as a contributor to extended arguments in a period populated by principled and mutually antagonistic political actors for whom the outcomes were often unhappy. It was once observed that all political careers end in failure. But this is a truism that applies equally to careers in such fields as political theory, philosophy, and economics; Utopia would otherwise have arrived. The historian of political thought makes no such judgement. This book does not argue that Paine was ‘a failure’; he did not ‘fail’ to write this, or ‘fail’ to think that. Historians seek, instead, to understand what Paine did and did not write and think, and why: for them he succeeded, but in relation to his goals and those of his contemporaries.
Paine’s authorial intentions are hard, and often impossible, to reconstruct in the absence of an extensive cache of his manuscripts; he can scarcely be assessed as if he were another Thomas Hobbes or John Locke, both Oxford or Cambridge dons by vocation though excluded from their universities for political reasons, both leaving extensive paper trails. Consequently what Paine thought could not easily be distinguished from what he wrote, either by his contemporaries or by later scholars.
1 Paine to Washington, 6 Oct. 1789: Washington, Papers, iv. 196–7.
Instead, this book is chiefly about texts as public acts. It gives much attention to Paine’s writings, but also to the texts of other activists, both pro- and antirevolutionaries. It argues that contexts must be given due weight if these texts are to be understood. That, indeed, is why it could not be a short book: contexts are, necessarily, larger than texts.
By this method, the book arrives at a different view both of Paine’s political and social thought and of the intellectual history of the ‘age of revolution’, an age in which religion is here reinstated as a leading political preoccupation. It gives central attention to such themes as radicalism, reform, republicanism, revolution, and rights: alliteration should not distract us from the momentous present-day significance of these issues, and to these must be added others including slavery, democracy, and poverty. This study derives from my reservations over many years about assumptions that the long eighteenth century was the ‘birthplace’ of ‘the modern’: these doubts have led me in turn to a fascination with the man himself. Paine is compelling because he poses a series of historical problems of the greatest presentday importance. Others must join me in a renewed attention to their solution if this foundational era and its consequences are to be better understood. Some readers of Paine still see themselves as Guardians of the Sacred Flame; I see the role of the historian as being to investigate, to question, and to challenge.
I hope that readers will share my willingness to test new explanations of this most remarkable of English revolutionaries. In my writing on another extraordinary figure of that age, Edmund Burke, I sought to avoid hagiography by removing successive layers of later varnish to reveal the eighteenth-century portrait beneath; not to judge Burke as a hero or a villain, nor to claim his obvious relevance to present-day politics, but to understand him as an historical character.2 Here I pay the same compliment to Thomas Paine. In both cases, removing accretions of later misinterpretation allows a better understanding of their thought and an appreciation that neither’s writings give privileged or shorthand access to the complex and still controversial ‘age of revolution’ in which they found themselves. Indeed it frees us to examine the age of revolution afresh at a time when the destabilization of states needs urgently to be better understood.
Readers should note two basic aims of this study. Previous writers on Paine were sometimes drawn to produce either denunciations or, later, eulogies. Paine was from an early date the subject of deliberately denigratory biographies.3 Not until
2 Burke, Reflections, ed. Clark, introduction.
3 [George Chalmers], The Life of Thomas Pain, The Author of Rights of Men. With a Defence of his Writings. By Francis Oldys, A.M. of the University of Pennsylvania (London: Stockdale, 1791); James Cheetham, The Life of Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense, The Crisis, Rights of Man, &c. &c. &c. (New York: Southwick and Pelsue, 1809). Some alleged evidence presented in these hostile works may deserve consideration, but caution is necessary. For the increasing assessment in the late eighteenth century of many public figures (not just Paine) in respect of their private lives, see Corinna Wagner, ‘Loyalist Propaganda and the Scandalous Life of Tom Paine: “Hypocritical Monster!”’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (2005), 97–115.
the late nineteenth century did academic opinion turn in his favour,4 but since then his depiction has often been as normatively positive as it once was hostile. This study is a work neither of celebration nor of demonization. It seeks to explain him historically; it invites renewed attention to its remarkable subject in that nonpartisan spirit. When this book expresses a professional historiographical scepticism towards the interpretation of themes like republicanism, rights, revolution, and religion, that scepticism is not a normative response to any individual. Secondly, this account of Paine necessarily relates to my earlier work, and this relation calls for an explanation. My English Society 1660–1832 might be misunderstood as arguing in general terms for the residual survival of an ‘old’ world into a ‘new’. This study makes clear that my intention is to argue for a reinterpretation of that ‘new’ world itself. The radical and revolutionary tradition in America, France, and Britain is a subject of great and lasting intellectual importance; it must now be thought about in radical and even revolutionary ways. In the present age of religious wars, Paine has a renewed significance.
callaly castle northumberland
4
The first favourable biography was Thomas Clio Rickman, The Life of Thomas Paine (London: Rickman, 1819), but the key work of scholarship was Moncure Daniel Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine (2 vols., New York, 1892).
Acknowledgements
The extensive aims of this book, outlined in the Introduction, mean that it draws with gratitude on the work of several generations of scholars whose many achievements are set out in detail in the footnotes. Where others have anticipated the ideas presented here, my wish is to honour them by specific references. Historiography is often a collaborative enterprise; by acknowledging intellectual debts one can also appreciate how scholarship itself has developed over time, and this helps historians to see beyond their immediate commitments. If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of orthodoxies. Other historians have sought to contextualize Paine as a figure of the eighteenth century, which is my purpose also; it is older assumptions about the content of that context that I question here.
In a work that nevertheless differs from some historians in points of method and interpretation, it would have been distracting and discourteous to have listed every disagreement. I do so here only where it was necessary to situate my argument, usually with respect to lastingly influential interpretations (for example, of classics like those of R. R. Palmer and E. P. Thompson, historians for whom I have a high regard); I normally prefer to present primary evidence to support my own vision. Where I have written in general terms of ‘conventional interpretations’ of Paine, I ask only that these remarks be read as self-criticisms of misinterpretations that I myself once entertained.
For the convenience of readers, references to Paine’s writings are here given to the most readily available collected version, Philip Foner’s two-volume edition of 1945. Despite its merits, it had its shortcomings; I have noted ‘text corrected’ where I have conformed to the originals, and I argue for the de-attribution of texts and passages that Foner (and many others) accepted as Paine’s. A new edition, undertaken to the latest standards, would be valuable; none was available at the time of writing. Similarly, a project to identify Paine’s prose by computer modelling, and so to attribute to him material published anonymously, has not yet been completed. Both may contribute to knowledge.
‘Every work of this kind is by its nature deficient, and I should feel little solicitude about the sentence, were it to be pronounced only by the skilful and the learned.’51Scholarship on the ‘age of revolution’ will continue to develop. To its future success this book is intended as a small contribution.
5 ‘Preface’, in The Plays of William Shakespeare … To which are added Notes by Sam[uel] Johnson (8 vols., London: J. and R. Tonson et al., 1765), i. lxxii.
PART II. TEXTS
7.
PART III. DIVERGENCES AND LEGACIES
8. Conclusion: The Age of Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the Dynamics of
Illustrations
Frontispiece and cover: Portrait bust of Thomas Paine by John Wesley Jarvis, 1809 (New York Historical Society) ii
1. Title page of the first edition of Common Sense (American Philosophical Society) 147
Abbreviations
Adams, Diary and Autobiography Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield (4 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1961)
Adams, Works
Aldridge, Man of Reason
Aldridge, American Ideology
BL Add MSS
The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author, ed. Charles F. Adams (10 vols., Boston, 1850–6)
Alfred Owen Aldridge, Man of Reason: The Life of Thomas Paine (London, 1960)
Alfred Owen Aldridge, Thomas Paine’s American Ideology (Newark, Del., 1984)
British Library, Additional Manuscripts
Burke, Reflections, ed. Clark Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. C. D. Clark (1790; Stanford, Calif., 2001)
Cheetham, Life
Claeys, Paine
Clark, English Society
Clark, Language of Liberty
Conway, Life
Conway (ed.), Writings
CW
EHR
Franklin, Papers
James Cheetham, The Life of Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense, The Crisis, Rights of Man, &c. &c. &c. (New York: Southwick and Pelsue, 1809)
Gregory Claeys, Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought (London, 1989)
J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Regime (2nd edn, Cambridge, 2000)
J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty 1660–1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the AngloAmerican World (Cambridge, 1994)
Moncure Daniel Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine (1892; ed. Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner, London, 1909)
Moncure Daniel Conway (ed.), The Writings of Thomas Paine (4 vols., New York, 1894–6)
Philip Foner (ed.), The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (2 vols., New York, 1945)
English Historical Review
The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree et al. (New Haven, 1959–)
HJ Historical Journal
Jefferson, Papers
Jefferson, Writings
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd et al. (Princeton, 1950–)
Albert Ellery Bergh (ed.), The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (20 vols., Washington, 1907)
Keane, Paine
Lounissi, Paine
ODNB
John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (London, 1995)
Carine Lounissi, La Pensée politique de Thomas Paine en contexte: Théorie et pratique (Paris, 2012)
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online)
P&P Past & Present
PMHB Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
Rush, Autobiography The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush, ed. George W. Corner (Princeton, 1948)
Rush, Letters Letters of Benjamin Rush, ed. L. H. Butterfield (2 vols., Princeton, 1951)
Thale (ed.), LCS Papers Mary Thale (ed.), Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society 1792–1799 (Cambridge, 1983)
Washington, Papers The Papers of George Washington. Presidential Series, ed. W. W. Abbot and Dorothy Twohig (Charlottesville, Va, 1987–)
WMQ William and Mary Quarterly
Introduction The Age of Paine?
Thomas Paine has plausibly been presented as England’s greatest revolutionary, a pioneer of democracy, and the greatest champion of a natural rights discourse that triumphed in 1776 and 1789 with permanent implications thereafter. He had an astonishing career, even for his era. It was meteoric in personal terms, for he rose from humble origins to consort with some of the most famous of his contemporaries. By his own genius, he became a best-selling political author, reaching large numbers of readers with a striking message. That message had an undoubted impact, and Paine cannot be ignored. His writings bear on many of the values and practices that are internationally affirmed, and challenged, in the present day.
In his lifetime, he was once (although only once) even held to characterize his age: as John Adams wrote (although only in a private letter), ‘I know not whether any Man in the World has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine . . . Call it then the Age of Paine.’1 Yet this retrospect from 1805 was not all it seems: what appears to be a ringing endorsement was an extrapolation of Adams’s personal aversion for Paine, which dated back to 1776, and of Adams’s detestation of the French Revolution, with which he now associated his bête noire: his hostility prompted an overstatement. Paine’s role was considerable, but not necessarily all that his enemies claimed it to be. Are progressive ideologies framed, and favoured practical outcomes secured, chiefly by remarkable individuals? This heroic theory is one with which states conventionally labelled democracies now grapple as the old certainties seem to weaken.
This book explores a range of arguments that reinterpret the currently prevalent estimates of Paine, but do not deny his importance. It argues that Paine had his undoubted impact by being a figure of the eighteenth century, not by anticipating and explaining what is conventionally seen as modernity: he was so influential in his day precisely because he was not original, but because he brilliantly mobilized anglophone political languages already widely familiar.2 This too was why he was so controversial, since he often appropriated shared languages of politics to which defenders of the existing order in Britain and North America also subscribed.
1 John Adams to Benjamin Waterhouse, 29 Oct. 1805, in Statesman and Friend: Correspondence of John Adams with Benjamin Waterhouse 1784–1822, ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford (Boston, 1927), 31.
2 In this he might be compared with another self-professedly unoriginal figure whose influence was enormous: John Wesley. By contrast, original thinkers like Thomas Spence received much less attention in their own lifetimes.
The book offers reinterpretations of prevalent eighteenth-century discourses. It adds that the most influential activists and reformers tended to have their impact by focusing attention on narrow bands of the available spectrum of discourse rather than by assembling rainbow alliances (an assumption that present-day accounts of ‘the Enlightenment’ have promoted): reform did not sweep all before it, even in America and France. And it proposes a model of the development of anglophone revolutionary and reforming discourse into the nineteenth century: it was less the achievement of a few innovative pioneers or heroic martyrs, more the unplanned consequence of the competing contributions of large numbers of men and women in fast-changing settings. An implication is that securing favoured outcomes in public life is a harder and more complex task than the old historiography of heroic individual action and the clear instantiation of lasting ideologies implied.
This is not a conventional narrative biography of Paine, and does not attempt to supersede any such works; consequently, it does not examine every episode in Paine’s varied public career. In some sections, it is not primarily about Paine. It is a book about the ‘age of revolution’ in the North Atlantic world of the late eighteenth century, about the interpretation of political, social, and religious thought in that setting, and about the significance of that thought for explaining the development of the revolutionary tradition from Paine’s lifetime forwards.
This is a study in the history of political thought, but Paine never sought to be an academic theorist. Rather, he spoke mostly to the practicalities of his day. Analysis of his writings therefore engages with the recent debate on whether there are ‘perennial problems’ in political theory, problems that persist in similar terms over long time periods. This book contends that attempts to depict Paine as a perennial teacher (on matters like natural rights) often rest on insufficient knowledge of the historical contexts within which he operated. Instead, it seeks to recover what the local and specific significance of his thought was in his own time. Anachronism, the imposition of the values or categories of one age upon another, forbids us to use what has been called the historic present tense: ‘Paine says . .’ In the present, the achievement of good things in the political arena proves more difficult than it would be, were it a matter of the expression and application of general principles (like natural rights) to solve perennial problems.
Perspectives on many such political leaders have silently changed, in part because of scholarly logistics. Even a few decades ago, the primitive catalogues then available in most libraries made it laborious and difficult adequately to reconstruct the antecedent intellectual contexts of even major figures in the past. Instead, many schools of historiography were led implicitly to treat political activists as acting pragmatically in response to the needs and challenges of their own present. Such individuals could then be assumed to have been free agents, pioneers mapping out the course of politics and of theory in future decades, but themselves standing strangely out of time. More recently, the availability of computerized catalogues, and of databases like Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online, has wrought an unappreciated reversal. Today, these iconic figures can more easily be understood in relation to the events and ideas of their immediate pasts in all their richness and complexity. Metaphorically, they emerge as more the inheritors of old houses than the architects of new ones. Consequently, these figures’
subsequent impacts are revealed as less determinative. They had, indeed, significant legacies, but seldom unchanging, foundational, or definitional ones, for the recovery of the detail of political and social debate reveals the complexities of scenes that evolved rapidly away from those into which the ‘pioneers’ had been born. So it was with Paine. His writings had wide currency in his lifetime, but not as wide as the recent believers in his perennial significance suppose. Contextual studies of the world from which Paine emerged help explain his fame in his own day more than does the myth of any timeless, or proleptic, or transcultural influence. The answers presented here show Paine successfully deploying languages of politics that his English-speaking contemporaries had long employed, rather than his anticipating any modern, Utopian or cosmopolitan future, however conceived. Such new answers also help explain the only modest resonance of Paine’s writings in France after 1789 and in present-day politics, where a greater impact would have been expected had ‘perennial problems’ been clearly evident at all times.3 This was not a problem specific to any one author: if Paine’s Rights of Man had little impact in France, Sieyès’s Qu’est-ce-que le tiers-état? had little impact in Britain.
Partly because perennialism is still asserted, a reinterpretation of Paine’s thought is especially necessary. That is a daunting task, for any adequate historical study of the subject demands attention to five vast areas: the American Revolution; the French Revolution; late eighteenth-century Britain, where Paine expected a revolution that did not occur; Ireland, where a revolution was indeed attempted in 1798; and the early United States, which did not witness the second American Revolution for which Paine called. Each of these scenes demands a lifetime’s study; to address them all in a single volume is an act of scholarly temerity. Such a task is unavoidable, and this study necessarily extends far beyond Paine’s writings to reconsider the great settings in which his writings had their chief engagement in his lifetime. It is therefore offered as a series of steps towards linked understandings of his ideas and the events in which he participated.
Because it is not a narrative biography but a study of Paine’s thought in the ‘age of revolution’, this book accords different coverage to different areas: most to America during its Revolution, where Paine had a role in events that demands to be explicated against his writings; some to Britain, where his writings had a wide and lasting reception; some to France, where (although he did not prominently shape the course of events or of subsequent political thought) many of his most famous works appeared in the context of France’s Revolution. Less space is given to the new American republic after 1802, in which Paine rightly found himself not at home, and less again to Ireland, which (despite its importance) supplied few explanatory contexts for Paine’s thought.
That thought is now problematic. Paine has long been associated with the assumption that the values he is supposed to have championed were self-evident,
3 Posthumous appeals to Paine are highly selective, as the omission in current debate of his preoccupation with the damaging level of national debt reveals. For this theme see especially Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, 2007).
but this assumption needs reconsideration.4 He chose the titles of his tracts brilliantly, but their contents did not always match their labels. Common Sense said nothing about why it was common sense that the Thirteen Colonies should pursue independence via world war and social revolution rather than via peaceful political negotiation and compromise, as Canada was to do. After American independence, Paine never wrote the systematic reflection he promised on the events of 1776–83. Similarly, Rights of Man had little to say about natural rights theory, although this was a long-standing tradition of European thought whose reactivation for religious reasons in the early 1770s had preceded revolution in America,5 and Paine never wrote an extended analysis of the part played by natural rights language in the French Revolution. He often used the term ‘rights’, but he hardly expounded it: rights had long become truisms, and did not belatedly emerge as inspirational neologisms. The Age of Reason, in turn, invoked ‘reason’ but did not define it, or establish why reason validated Deism rather than any other religion (or, indeed, rather than atheism). Instead of explaining his age, Paine’s works themselves demand historical explanations, and the answers often prove to be unexpected.
Many of Paine’s surviving papers were evidently lost in a fire in the early nineteenth century, and the absence of any substantial single archive of hitherto-unused Paine manuscripts means that much about his intellectual development often remains inaccessible; contextual studies are therefore even more necessary. It is a central contention of this book that Paine cannot be understood by neglecting his contexts and engaging only in close readings of his texts: close readings alone, often adopted in the past, have necessarily proved problematic. Instead, both approaches are pursued here. This is a textual and a contextual study; it is an intellectual history that calls for a critical analysis of texts, and also a social history of ideas which asserts that texts did not talk to other texts. It is about attempting to discern the meanings of authors from the study of their writings, but also about discovering what the intellectual equipment of their societies permitted those authors to mean. Such enquiries lead to another goal: analysing not only what was in Paine’s texts, but what was absent from them; considering at several points the significance of what Paine did not say, but contemporary discourse allowed him to say (for example, on slavery). Such analyses of absences are not normative judgements on Paine, but are integral to understanding his impact.
Where readers sometimes use classic texts as shorthand summaries of complex episodes, historians use the age to interpret the author, often by employing the forms of contextual interpretation and discourse analysis developed by historians of political thought since Peter Laslett; here and elsewhere I add to their approaches a greater attention to concepts as limiters and as enablers. During the era of twentieth-century modernism, its characteristic concepts were made to seem the selfevident building blocks of history; this assumption proves especially problematic when examined with respect to Paine’s lifetime. A concept, even a famous one, does not validate itself: to label the events of 1776–83 ‘the American Revolution’
4 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (London: Thomas Basset, 1690), 299–306, had sought to assert the reality of certain ‘Maxims’ as self-evident ‘Knowledge’, but only to defend his position against the belief in innate ideas; he did not apply the argument to rights.
5 Clark, Language of Liberty, 93–110 and passim
does not establish that ‘it’ was a single thing, or solely American, or socially revolutionary. Similarly, understandings of French events depend on what phenomena are arbitrarily placed within that seemingly self-evident category, ‘the French Revolution’. Attention to contexts and categories shows that Paine was highly intelligent and well informed, but was so with respect to his own time and to preceding decades, not to an unknowable future. Modernism was never his context.
In particular, I invoke sometimes unfamiliar components of political argument, including dynastic discourse (the rending arguments over political authority that persisted for decades after the armed expulsion of James II in 1688) and the discourse of England’s ‘Patriot’ opposition of the 1730s (that uneasy alliance of opposites, Tory-Jacobites and extreme Whigs, against the corruption of Sir Robert Walpole’s regime), with both of which I here establish the anti-Jacobite Paine’s direct links. I emphasize the contextual significance for his politics of the limitations of his understanding of American and French events; instead, I indicate the lasting importance of his prior English preconceptions, including his Deism. Paine’s politics emerge as less abstract than they appear in the pages of political scientists; even his antipathy to hereditary monarchy was drawn from specific English antecedents. Paine’s Deism, in itself no secret to historians, is also shown here to have been a home-grown English plant rather than a set of Enlightenment generalizations learned in revolutionary America or France.
By placing Paine in his age, I seek to avoid prolepsis, the assumption that some later thing had already come into being. Like his contemporaries, he could not without prophetic foresight have adopted any of a series of political positions that were formulated only decades after his death; but his not adopting them was no personal shortcoming. It is no criticism of Paine that he did not anticipate Mill or Marx; it is, however, important. Contexts also help illuminate the counter-factuals, the things that might have happened; but an argument that Paine could have done something does not imply that he should have done it. If I dispense with some of the historiographical orthodoxies that have surrounded him, these revisions are not to be read as normative judgements on Paine himself.
Yet Paine was, and remains, enmeshed in value judgements. Some of his contemporaries argued that his role was more negative than positive, and focused on what they thought were his negations. In America, John Adams, although a hostile witness, wrote at an early date of the still-anonymous author of Common Sense that ‘this writer has a better hand in pulling down than building . . . This writer seems to have very inadequate ideas of what is proper and necessary to be done in order to form constitutions for single colonies, as well as a great model of union for the whole.’6 Later, in France, Marie-Jeanne Roland, though Paine’s Girondin ally, similarly thought him ‘better at throwing out sparks, so to speak, than at discussing the foundations or preparing the formation of a government’.7 These reactions are theorized here as an argument that political thinkers must be understood in terms of their negations as well as in terms of their affirmations. The origins of such
6 John Adams to Abigail Adams, Philadelphia, 19 March [1776]: Familiar Letters of John Adams and his wife Abigail Adams, during the Revolution, ed. Charles Francis Adams (1875; Freeport, NY, 1970), 146.
7 Mémoires de Madame Roland, ed. Paul de Roux (Paris, 1966), 169–70.
negations are far from obvious: the answers do not necessarily emerge from a close reading of Paine’s texts alone. Paine’s prose is often exciting; it can seem to offer a possibility of beginning the world over again; but examined in context, it becomes itself the thing to be explained, and these new explanations are excitingly different.
Positive value judgements, by Paine’s contemporaries and their successors, saw him put to a succession of uses, and I attempt to clarify how perspectives on his achievements changed into the early nineteenth century. Despite Paine’s recruitment into later causes, and thanks to growing doubts and revisions by a number of historians, on which I gratefully draw here, scholarship on Paine may be at a turning point. His involvement in episodes that were later reified and put to powerful practical uses tended to trap him in a series of ‘myths of origin’, whether national (as with ‘the American Founding’), sectional (as with ‘the working-class movement’), stadial (as with ‘the birth of modernity’), or credal (as with ‘the rise of modern secularism’). 8 These myths were powerful sources of anachronism, but they can now often be explained historically.
These larger anachronisms seriously hindered the understanding of Paine. The historic Paine was later obscured not least because of his dramatic part in two episodes, the American and French Revolutions, that were later unquestioningly held to have been ‘modern’ and to have articulated simply identifiable founding principles. Yet those two revolutions, complex and still disputed episodes as they were, produced a profusion of symbols and assertions of principle, often inconsistent, often retrospective, often the result of ‘accident, mischance or miscalculation’, often evolving in unexpected ways;9 these revolutions cannot easily be summed up in conveniently simple formulae, extracted from the writings of Paine or any of his contemporaries. It is a conclusion of this study that one cannot say ‘the American Revolution stood for this’, ‘the French Revolution had, at its heart, that’, or ‘the Enlightenment was united around the following’; and such renunciations compel major reconsiderations. A consequence is the untenability of the old assumption that the United States or the French Republic today have secular ‘founding principles’ or ‘core ideals’, any more than does Paine’s home country.
In the twentieth century, when the opposite view was accepted, Paine was not merely explained but celebrated in various ways, notably as an architect of ‘modernity’, hailed as the prophet of a new age, his prophetic status seemingly confirmed by his unique role of acting in and expounding these two formative revolutions. In contrast, by taking modernity to be an intellectual project of the late nineteenth century rather than a social process of the late eighteenth, I argue that Paine’s role was both more important and more difficult to grasp. Paine lacked not only the concept of ‘modernity’, a term that was absent from his published work, but even the now-ubiquitous idea of social ‘process’ itself.10
8 The myth of origin of the United States has proved more resistant to revision than the myth of origin of the French republic, but even here dissenting voices have been raised, e.g. Francis Jennings, The Creation of America: Through Revolution to Empire (Cambridge, 2000).
9 William Doyle, ‘The Principles of the French Revolution’, in Doyle, Officers, Nobles and Revolutionaries: Essays on Eighteenth-Century France (London, 1995), 163–72. This book advances a similar argument for the American Revolution also.
10 In the eighteenth century a ‘procession’ was said to ‘process’ from one place to another. The reified present-day meaning of ‘process’ was absent from Common Sense, Letter Addressed to the Abbe
This argument is compatible with recent scholarship which has in general shown that less was new in the causes of either the American or French Revolutions than was once popularly assumed. Their agents necessarily drew on what they knew of the past as a guide to their own actions; indeed the more fraught the crises they experienced, the more desperate their recourse to past examples was.11 The same is true of the present day, when the return of contingency in historical analysis has weakened the old faith in ‘underlying’ causes and re-emphasized the incomprehensible randomness of things, against which all historians contend. Genuinely new ideas not acting as causes of revolution in 1776 or 1789 (for example: anti-slavery, universal manhood suffrage, the redistribution of land, and equality for women) were indeed developed in the late eighteenth century, primarily in England, but the evidence presented here shows that Paine was not a leading framer of any of them. If the American and French Revolutions were thought to have created a new world, this book suggests that they did so more because of their then hardly understood consequences than because of any already-understood intellectual origins. That world, after 1783, often proved indifferent or hostile to the historic Paine. When it later wished to celebrate him, it reconstructed him.
The conceptual lexicon of the society from which Paine came therefore deserves careful attention. Like his contemporaries he lacked much of the intellectual equipment devised only in the century after his death (concepts denoting political positions, like radicalism, liberalism, and conservatism; models of social and economic change, like the Industrial Revolution; processes, like modernization and secularization; symbols of identity, like social class and nationalism; psychological states, like emotion or nostalgia).12 Certainly, Paine could not offer ‘a liberal theory
Raynal, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason, The Age of Reason. Part the Second, Dissertation on FirstPrinciples of Government and Agrarian Justice. Even in the famous chapter V of Rights of Man. Part the Second, the word appeared in a far from Utopian context: ‘As to mere theoretical reformation, I have never preached it up. The most effectual process [i.e. manner of proceeding] is that of improving the condition of man by means of his interest; and it is on this ground that I take my stand’: CW, i. 400 (text corrected). Other instances of ‘process’ similarly referred to legal or constitutional procedure, not to a logic of events: CW, i. 350, 378, 447; ‘To the Citizens of the United States’, Letter II (1802): CW, ii. 915. This linguistic argument is not conclusive: did Paine nevertheless have the concept, without a label for it? His closest instance was his ‘figure’ of a budding twig as a harbinger of spring, a metaphor for the extension of revolution across Europe: Rights of Man. Part the Second (1792): CW, i. 453–4. But metaphor fell short of analysis, and he framed no account of revolution as process.
11 For challenges to the claims of French revolutionaries that they were starting afresh, and explorations of their recourse to historical examples, including seventeenth-century English ones, see Rachel Hammersley, French Revolutionaries and English Republicans: The Cordeliers Club, 1790–1794 (Woodbridge, 2005); Hammersley, The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France: Between the Ancients and the Moderns (Manchester, 2010); Pierre Serna, ‘In Search of the Atlantic Republic: 1660–1776–1799 in the Mirror’, in Manuela Albertone and Antonino De Francesco (eds), Rethinking the Atlantic World: Europe and America in the Age of Democratic Revolutions (Basingstoke, 2009), 257–75.
12 For an argument that ‘emotion’ was a category only invented in the early nineteenth century see Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge, 2003). The term appears in Paine’s publications only once: ‘could I find a miser whose heart never felt the emotion of a spark of principle’: The American Crisis Extraordinary (4 Oct. 1780): CW, i. 177. But the term there carried meanings different from its later ones. Rather, he wrote of ‘the passions and feelings of mankind’: [Paine], Common Sense (1776): CW, i. 22. Paine’s rejection of monarchy and aristocracy was not an ‘emotional’ one.
