ABSTRACT
Thomas Paine's Rights of Man is not organized as a structured academic work. Its main goal is to defend the inalienable rights of man, but it also tackles the issue of what a legitimate government is and how it can be set up. Paine also examines the defects of monarchical and aristocratic forms of rule, even as he provides a practical agenda for reforming England. Paine wrote Rights of Man as a direct, explicit response to statesman and political thinker Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, a 1790 pamphlet and masterpiece of modern conservatism. The theoretical hostility between these two thinkers was so influential and so apparent that it became widely known as the "Burke–Paine debate". While Burke attacked the French Revolution and its principles, Paine wanted to demonstrate that the deep transformations in politics and society that were taking place in France were legitimate.
