ABSTRACT
The most astonishing fact concerning Thomas Paine scholarship is that nearly two centuries after the publication of Common Sense in January 1776, nothing like a complete edition of the works of this Anglo-American master of political prose has yet been published. An entire book devoted to tracing the influence of Rousseau in eighteenth-century America has failed to reach a firm conclusion concerning Paine. Paine's innovative schemes for obtaining economic equality in an industrial-agrarian society were almost entirely neglected until after World War II. An anthology of the Burke-Paine debate intended for college classes has been edited by Robert B. Dishman. Paine's religious opinions are systematically dissected in a book by Ira M. Thompson, but unfortunately the background information or philosophical interpretation offered as commentary is so scant that practically nothing is revealed concerning Paine's ideology not already apparent in Paine's own works.
