ABSTRACT
The first part of Rights of Man was published just a few months after Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and carefully responds to every counter-revolutionary argument it made. The second part advocates the reasoning behind and the potential of the republican system of government. Thomas Paine had two main motivations to write Rights of Man. First, he believed it was both necessary and important to defend the French Revolution from severe English criticism. Second, Paine wanted to replace existing aristocratic institutions with new liberal ones that would give common people a voice. Paine hoped to encourage the English lower classes to support revolution abroad and start one at home. He was also one of the first thinkers to propose international arbitration, while fearlessly opposing British colonialism in India and Africa. In these extraordinary aims, the issues Paine raised still form an important part of the agenda in both political and social debate.
