Review by New York Times Review
Christopher Hitchens considers Paine and Burke. EARLIER this year, the Atlantic Monthly Press began to publish a series of books on "books that changed the world." Now comes "Thomas Paine's 'Rights of Man': A Biography," an examination by the journalist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens. Paine didn't amount to much until he left his native England in 1774, at the age of 37, for Philadelphia. A new world and its political travails unlocked his genius for journalism. "Common Sense" called for independence six months before the Declaration. The first number of "The American Crisis," a series of essays, has the greatest lead in history: "These are the times that try men's souls." The fall of the Bastille in 1789 caught Paine by surprise - he was in Europe shuttling between England and France, seeking backers for an iron bridge he had designed - but this revolution struck him as a glorious sequel to America's. The French Revolution alarmed European conservatives, who soon got a powerful champion. Edmund Burke, a Whig member of Parliament, had spoken out for underdogs, including Americans, Irish Catholics and slaves. But in 1790 he published "Reflections on the Revolution in France," a blistering analysis of French events and a defense of traditional institutions as humanizing forces. Paine answered with "Rights of Man," published in two pans in 1791 and 1792. Apparently warned by William Blake that the English government was about to arrest him for sedition, Paine fled to France, where he was elected to the revolutionary legislature. Hitchens's discussion of Paine's book is really a discussion of two books, Paine's and Burke's. "This classic exchange between two masters of polemic," he says, "is rightly considered to be the ancestor of all modern arguments between Tories and radicals." Hitchens is in Paine's corner, but like a good trainer, he knows the other fighter's strengths. Burke understood that the social contract was a complex thing. "The state," he wrote, is "a partnership ... between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born." Paine saw only mystification and special pleading in such arguments, and was exercised by the problems of the day: "It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated." Burke distrusted abstract formulas, dismissing France's Declaration of the Rights of Man as "paltry and blurred sheets of paper." Paine praised written constitutions "as a law of control to the government." Burke mocked the declamatory style of radicals, comparing them to insects: "Half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink." Europe's aristocrats made Paine think of different insects: "the drones, a seraglio of males, who neither collect the honey nor form the hive, but exist only for lazy enjoyment." BURKE was the better prophet in the short run, predicting that France's first wave of revolutionaries would make incompetent rulers and that a general would supplant them. Paine's French career bore Burke out: after being jailed and nearly guillotined, he made the acquaintance of Napoleon, the successful general. He returned to the United States, where he died in 1809. How goes the great debate today? Hitchens dedicates his book to Jalal Talabani, president of Iraq, whom he calls the "leader of a national revolution and a people's army." Hitchens wants to put Paine in Talabani's corner. Yet some modern radicals of the multicultural variety see mullahs and terrorists as the revolutionary vanguard in the Middle East. They are joined, in a sinister perversion of Burke, by "realists" who argue that traditional culture is so powerful and so malign that the region must be left to stew in its juices. Paine and Burke are sharp, eloquent and, sadly, unfashionable. Richard Brookhiser is the author of "What Would the Founders Do? Our Questions, Their Answers."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Hitchens' sprightly Books That Changed the World volume arrives fortuitously, while his atheist screed God Is Not Great (2007) rides high on American best-seller lists. For Paine, though not precisely atheist (he was a deist), contributed vitally to nonbelief through his logical, materialist rejection of biblical literalism. Hitchens inserts scraps of Paine's religious criticism into an appreciation that primarily stresses Paine's advocacy of antimonarchical revolution and constitutional republicanism. Paine's most practically influential writing was the pamphlet Common Sense (1776), which inspired the American Revolution, but Rights of Man (1791-92) is his greatest work. It is largely a reply to Edmund Burke's severely critical Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), and Hitchens discusses it as such, giving Burke his due but affirming Paine's greater liberalism and demonstrating his more accessible and engaging literary style. Though Hitchens eschews discussion of rights per se, including Paine's definition of them, he refreshingly notes his hero's great shortcoming: he didn't see that ideologically driven revolution would lead to tyranny.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Thomas Paine's critique of monarchy and introduction of the concept of human rights influenced both the French and the American revolutions, argues Vanity Fair contributor and bestselling author Hitchens (God Is Not Great) in this incisive addition to the Books That Changed the World series. Paine's ideas even influenced later independence movements among the Irish, Scots and Welsh. In this lucid assessment, Hitchens notes that in addition to Common Sense's influence on Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, Paine wrote in unadorned prose that ordinary people could understand. Hitchens reads Paine's rejection of the ministrations of clergy in his dying moments as an instance of his unyielding commitment to the cause of rights and reason. But Hitchens also takes Paine to task for appealing to an idealized state of nature, a rhetorical move that, Hitchens charges, posits either "a mythical past or an unattainable future" and, Hitchens avers, "disordered the radical tradition thereafter." Hitchens writes in characteristically energetic prose, and his aversion to religion is in evidence, too. Young Paine found his mother's Anglican orthodoxy noxious, Hitchens notes: "Freethinking has good reason to be grateful to Mrs Paine." (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
O rare Tom Paine! Prolific political pundit Hitchens (God Is Not Great, 2007, etc.) sizes up the "self-taught corset-maker and bridge-designer" who fomented rebellion across the world two centuries ago. Paine's Rights of Man--the ostensible center of this entry in Atlantic's Books That Changed the World series--was, writes Hitchens, "both a trumpet of inspiration and a carefully wrought blueprint for a more rational and decent ordering of society," as well as "an attempt to marry the ideas of the American and French Revolutions" with the aim of introducing them to Britain. Of course, America and France found manifold ways to shake off revolutionary rationality, and Paine quickly found himself a prophet without honor, even if William Pitt allowed that Paine was of course right. (Pitt added, though, that to encourage Paine's opinions would be to invite revolution indeed.) Antimonarchical but at once radical and conservative--for instance, Paine "often wrote of economic inequalities as if they were natural or inevitable," and he resisted the atheism of the French Revolution--Rights of Man asserted a few contradictions and foreshadowed, in some ways, the notion of a dictatorship of the proletariat, but it also pressed for a certain wide-ranging species of liberty, against which Hitchens contrasts Edmund Burke, whose own ideas of equality and liberty turned on the presence of a hereditary king. Paine's vigorous and plain prose, Hitchens observes, has been taken as evidence of an uncouth nature, but Paine's ideas were elevated, and of course widely influential--reverberating, in time, in the labor movement, women's suffrage and Franklin Roosevelt's famous speech after Pearl Harbor. Paine, as Hitchens notes in this lucid and fast-moving appreciation, has no proper memorial anywhere; this slender book makes a good start. Less exuberant than Tom Collins's essential book The Trouble with Tom (2005). Still, as with all Hitchens, well worth reading and arguing with. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
