ABSTRACT
Rights of Man was ‘in answer to Mr Burke’, it was not just a reply to him but also a defence of ‘a system established and operating in America’ which Thomas Paine ‘wished to see peaceably adopted in Europe’. Although Edmund Burke devoted 100 pages of his Reflections to refuting Price, the premises on which Burke based his refutation were flawed in Paine’s view, so Thomas Paine’ spent little time dismissing them in Rights of Man before moving on to the French Revolution. Paine opened his defence of the Revolution against Burke’s strictures by contrasting the proposals of Marquis deLafayette for a declaration of rights with the denial of them in the Reflections. Paine’s purpose in the original Rights of Man was to advocate as a model for Britain the reformed constitutional monarchy which he thought had been achieved by Lafayette in France.
