Paine’s achievement

How we understand Paine depends in part on how we think he constructed his arguments and whom he may have drawn upon in so doing. But the problem of Paine’s sources has always proved especially irksome for his interpreters. Though Common Sense has been linked inconclusively to Joseph Priestley’s Essay on the First Principles of Government, the writings of John Milton and a minor seventeenth- century republican, John Hall, it is usually conceded that Paine’s early writings responded primarily to specific events. A greater interest in abstract political ideas dates only from the Rights of Man, when Paine became a political thinker rather than a pamphleteer arguing a cause. ¹ Moreover, Paine’s shift of focus to Europe in 1791 altered his thinking on a number of critical issues. Erskine prudently claimed at Paine’s trial that the principles of Common Sense and the Rights of Man were identical, and Paine himself asserted that the only difference was a concern with British instead of American conditions, a view repeated by many historians. None the less this shift was of momentous import for Paine and would underlie his most significant innovations during the 1790s. For the problems of older nations were quite different from those of America and a distinction between the two was to become central to Paine’s thought, as well as to the debate which surrounded the Rights of Man. ²