Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (Books That Changed the World) by Christopher Hitchens

Author:Christopher Hitchens [Hitchens, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2008-09-15T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

Rights of Man, Part Two

Madame Roland may have been wrong when she said that Paine was more fit to scatter the kindling sparks than to lay the foundation, or ‘better at lighting the way for revolution than drafting a constitution… or the day-to-day work of a legislator’. His personal history shows him to have been a good committee-man in more than one legislature in America and France. And there is a remarkable and much-overlooked passage, in the first part of Rights of Man, in which the great radical compared Burke, to his disadvantage, to the moral author of capitalism.

Had Mr Burke possessed talents similar to the author of ‘On The Wealth of Nations’, he would have comprehended all the parts which enter into, and, by assemblage, form a constitution. He would have reasoned from minutiae to magnitude. It is not from his prejudices only, but from the disorderly cast of his genius, that he is unfitted for the subject he writes upon. Even his genius is without a constitution. It is a genius at random, and not a genius constituted. But he must say something. – He has therefore mounted in the air like a balloon, to draw the eyes of the multitude from the ground they stand upon.1

It is still more surprising that he expected his audience of artisans to know, and without even citing the author’s name, who and what he was talking about. But Adam Smith’s book, published in the same year as the American Revolution, in fact had a bracing effect on many radicals of the time. It argued against mercantilist monopolies and against colonialism, as restraints on free trade, and this of course recommended it very much in Philadelphia. It also argued for rules, concerning contract, that were intelligible and enforceable. This transparency was vastly preferable, in rational eyes, to the system of semi-magical authority so beloved by Burke. Remember also the way in which Burke delivered his woebegone elegy for ‘the age of chivalry’ and ‘the glory of Europe’. It had been succeeded by the age of ‘sophists, calculators and economists’. Economists! One could hear him almost spitting the word. So much for Adam Smith and his new-fangled Scots notions.

In the second part of Rights of Man, Paine set out, first, to adumbrate the principles of constitutional government and, second, to propose a system of social insurance. Part Two was dedicated to the Marquis de Lafayette, who Paine believed at that time would carry all before him as a French revolutionary general. If we excuse this piece of romanticism, we are dealing with a supremely realistic and businesslike work, of which the two main chapters are plainly entitled ‘Of Constitutions’ and ‘Ways and Means’.

It might have been a desirable thing, wrote Paine, if human society had remained at a level and scale that would have permitted an Athenian model of government by direct participation. ‘We see more to admire, and less to condemn, in that great, extraordinary people, than in anything which history affords.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.