Review of the Book
Thomas Paine and the Promise of America
by Harvey J. Kaye
Edward J. Dodson
[This review was written in January 2006 with the
title, "Resurrecting the Legacy of Thomas Paine". Professor
Kaye is Director of the Center for History and Social Change,
University of Wisconsin]
Professor Harvey Kaye provides us with a stimulating and enjoyable
examination of, first, the life and times of Thomas Paine, and,
second, the influence of his words and deeds on events to come. The
very fact that this book has been written speaks volumes about the
thoughtful reading public's desire to learn about the author of Common
Sense and his contributions to history, moral philosophy,
political philosophy and political economy. As someone who has studied
much of the available material on Paine and provided my own assessment
of Paine's contributions, I found Professor Kaye's treatment valuable
and unique.
This book is less about the details of Paine's life than the
influence his ideals and writings had on the thinking and behavior of
people who came to share Paine's passion for justice and for bringing
to an end the entrenched privilege that produces the division between
haves and have nots in our societies. Professor Kaye
joins others in recognizing Paine's pivotal role in igniting and
keeping aflame the revolutionary torch. "Paine saw all of history
turning on the outcome of the American colonies' conflict with
Britain," writes Kaye. Coming so soon from Britain, where the "rights
of Englishmen" were quite narrowly enjoyed, Paine realized that
North America could become the safe haven for the oppressed and
enslaved of the Old World. The key was not just independence but the
establishment of a democratic republic.
I am reminded of Peter Drucker's description in his book, The
Future of Industrial Man (1942), of the early phase of the
uprising against British authority as a conservative
counter-revolution, one in which the landed and other conservative
elements in the colonies were demanding a return to the long period of
"salutary neglect" under which they had acquired their
wealth and social positions. Paine, to their chagrin, called attention
to all of the inequities characteristic of colonial society. Now was
the time for the creation of a new societal structure. "Paine,"
observes Kaye, "called upon Americans to make a true revolution
of their struggles."
Paine's idealism was clearly ahead of its time. The blueprint he
provided, in Common Sense, first, and then throughout his
later writings, certainly called for a "revolution in the state
of civilization," but it was a blueprint shared by few others.
With independence secured, the natural inclination of those in power
to do whatever they could to entrench themselves and their positions
again arose. As Professor Kaye observes, not even Thomas Jefferson
possessed anything close to the deep faith in participatory democracy
that stood at the heart of Paine's political philosophy. Yet,
Jefferson proved a more accurate forecaster of the immediate future
than Paine. Their contemporaries saw to it that the new United States
of America was established as a republic. The most hated elements of
Old World political and economic power -- monarchy, hereditary
aristocracy, primogeniture and entail - were removed. With a huge and
nearly empty continent to subdue, and with fortunes to be made
speculating in land, the Framers compromised principle for expediency.
They ignored both slavery and the land question. The more thoughtful
among them hoped these and other issues could be resolved as the
nation matured. As Professor Kaye reminds us, however, the new nation
was seriously divided over unresolved sectional, territorial and
financial interests. It is worth noting that neither Paine nor
Jefferson participated in the Constitutional Convention. From Paris,
Jefferson wrote favorably of the proposed constitution, but in a
letter to Madison in December 1787 he expressed concern over the
absence of a bill of rights. "A bill of rights is what the people
are entitled to against every government on earth, general or
particular, and what no just government should refuse," he
declared.
Despite the protections individuals gained under the first
constitutional amendments, very little time passed before widespread
disillusionment began to set in. Many of the disillusioned found
inspiration and passion for righting wrongs by absorbing Paine.
Professor Kaye's research reveals that even those who were repulsed by
Paine's Deist spiritual beliefs and his attacks on mainstream religion
found solidarity with his positions in the socio-political arena.
In my own writing, I describe Paine as the "architect of
cooperative individualism," a set of moral principles upon which
the just society - one that secures and protects equality of
opportunity - is established. With Paine's death, the torch of
cooperative individualism nearly went out. None of the individuals who
followed Paine in the nineteenth century fully grasped the depth of
his principles, nor adopted them as their own. Not until Henry George
emerged in the last two decades of the century was the torch again
raised, its flame ignited. Professor Kaye writes briefly about Henry
George as a reformer whose "plan to re-create American equality
and democratic life descended directly from Agrarian Justice
and clearly reflected Paine's spirit." Henry George never
referred to himself as a Paineite or as having been strongly
influenced by reading Paine. That said, they clearly came from the
same mold. And, as Paine's success came after coming to America,
George's occurred after serving as a correspondent of the Irish
World covering the Irish resistance to British rule.
Here, I digress momentarily to correct Professor Kaye's restatement
of Henry George's proposal regarding landed wealth. George did not, as
Professor Kaye writes, argue "that government should severely tax
landowners' profits." Rather, George expanded on Paine's argument
in Agrarian Justice that anyone who controls land owes to the
community a ground rent for the privilege. George explained that every
parcel of land yields a ground rent, the amount of which is determined
as an outcome of market dynamics. If the community collects all ground
rents via taxation, the landowner, as such, cannot sell land for
profit. Interestingly, George later wrote approvingly of the
pioneering writing on the land question by the French group of
political economists known as Physiocrats. Paine was likely introduced
to physiocratic ideals by their most important American adherent,
Benjamin Franklin. And, while in France during the early stages of the
French Revolution, Paine was undoubtedly warmly accepted within this
circle of enlightened intellectuals, many of whom would meet their end
during the Jacobin reign of terror. One of the leading physiocrats -
Pierre-Samuel du Pont de Nemours - escaped France to establish what
can only be described as an American dynasty of economic power. Only
recently have the French people been re-introduced to the legacy of
the Physiocrats, dismissed to a large extent by European intellectuals
as irrelevant in a world where land and land ownership were of minor
concerns. The landed have certainly felt relief that their entrenched
privilege was not jeopardized by the policies of social democrats
during their periodic opportunities to hold political power. Paine
was, to be sure, far more revolutionary in his thinking than the
Physiocrats ever contemplated; yet, in the realm of political economy
what they offered was a deep insight into the causes of the
maldistribution of wealth. I have long been convinced that Paine's
Agrarian Justice came about as a result of his exposure to
physiocratic principles.
Many of those who were first influenced, at least in part, by reading
Paine, would later in life become admirers and supporters of Henry
George. Samuel Clemens, who, Professor Kaye writes, "genuinely
admired Paine," eventually met and befriended Henry George in
California and accompanied him on a speaking tour of Australia.
Clemens' essay Archimedes is Henry George on "the land
question" as interpreted by Mark Twain. Louis F. Post, also
mentioned by Professor Kaye, became Henry George's most dedicated
supporter, serving as editor of George's New York newspaper, The
Standard, and carrying on George's work after his death in 1897.
Paine's influence on the thinking of leading socialists, such as
Eugene Debs, should not be surprising. George Bernard Shaw and other
Fabian socialists traced their commitment to social causes to lectures
delivered in the United Kingdom by Henry George during the 1880s.
Clarence Darrow also shared a great admiration for both Paine and
George. In 1933, Darrow actually delivered an address to the Henry
George Congress, held that year in Chicago. In a very real way,
Paine's writing - more than that of anyone else (e.g., Herbert
Spencer's Social Statics) - added legitimacy to what people
heard from Henry George. They were both men of the people, from the
working class, possessed of remarkable intellects and a commitment to
truth.
As proponents of departures from tradition and long-established
socio-political arrangements, both Paine and George have been
discovered by the opposing political camps. Within the Henry Georgist
community there has long existed a strong individualist-libertarian
wing (a self-described "remnant" who came to their
principles under the tutelage of writers such as Franz Oppenheimer,
Francis Neilson, Albert Jay Nock and Frank Chodorov). Others, many of
whom worked in government or in the professions, sought an expanded
role for government and looked to the societal "rent fund"
as the source of revenue for meeting societal needs.
The individualist remnant never abandoned Paine nor his moral
principles, as interpreted by their leading lights. We need to
understand - and Professor Kaye's work makes an important contribution
to this understanding - that the structure of social democracy that
exists in the West today is a tenuous compromise between the
entrenched privilege and justice, between what John Locke described as
liberty and license. The economist John Kenneth
Galbraith coined the phrase "countervailing power" to
describe this accommodation, characterized by big business, big
government and big labor. Fourth and fifth legs have been added to
this stool since the end of the Second World War - a big non-profit
sector and a big NGO sector functioning on the international arena.
For those Americans who accept diligence as integral to our
responsibilities as citizens, the intellectual and moral struggle has
been to both preserve and protect what is good and to remedy what is
not good, to expand the democracy and to secure equality of
opportunity. The deep disagreement is over the measures required to do
so. And, here, Paine is an attractive source of powerful rhetoric for
statists and anti-statists alike. Even within ourselves, the
contradictions can be ever-present. The mainstream conservative tends
to argue against restrictions on activity in the realm of property,
but for restrictions in the realm of individual behavior. The
mainstream liberal tends to argue just the opposite. Yet, in terms of
public policy, these arguments often come down to differences of
degree rather than absolutes. Did Paine ever compromise principle in
the interest of incremental change or progress? Yes, of course. How
else does one explain his friendship with and support of slave-owning
leaders such as Jefferson, or his willingness to help the American
cause for independence by soliciting financial and military assistance
from a despotic French monarchy. Yet, he consistently stated his views
openly for all to read and exposed himself to very real personal
dangers from those he attacked. To fully appreciate Paine, one must
study Paine at some depth. This, Professor Kaye appropriately
concludes, is the last thing the proponents of entrenched privilege
want to happen:
"Paine's texts may be selectively read and variably
interpreted, but as much as those on the political right can quote
and try to command him, Paine himself was no conservative. He was a
radical, a revolutionary democrat. He fought to liberate men and
women from the authoritarianism of states, classes, and churches and
to empower them to think and govern themselves."
The contradictions emerge even when intent is clearly sincere. Thus,
we should not be surprised to find Woodrow Wilson campaigning for a
global vision of a remade postwar world based on "revived ideas
Paine first advanced in Rights of Man" while
side-stepping the Constitution in order to suppress opposition to
United States involvement in the First World War. As Professor Kaye
recalls, "Wilson and his appointees
would license
authoritarian acts and foment a reactionary political climate that
would outlast the war itself." Paine would have been appalled at
the Wilson administration's attacks on the freedom of speech and of
the press. He would have been in the forefront of those calling for
Wilson's impeachment and affirmation of the Bill of Rights.
I am heartened to find Professor Kaye crediting Louis F. Post with
using his influence to counter the Wilson administration's harsh
treatment of "radical immigrants and aliens." Louis F. Post
was, indeed, a staunch defender of individual liberties. Professor Kay
might well have added the name of another Henry Georgist, Frederic C.
Howe, to that of Post. Howe was instrumental as Wilson's appointed
Commissioner of Ellis Island in humanizing the treatment of immigrants
coming through that facility. Howe had gained his political
credentials working in the mayoral administration of the Henry
Georgist mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, Tom L. Johnson. Howe's book, The
Confessions of a Reformer (1925) is an extraordinary commentary on
the Progressive era and the emergence of liberalism in the United
States.
The one person who, in my mind, ranks close to Henry George as
lifting Paine's torch of cooperative individualism is only alluded to
in passing by Professor Kaye. This is the philosopher Mortimer J.
Adler. Among his accomplishments over a life that spanned nearly a
full century, Adler served with Robert M. Hutchins (Chancellor of the
University of Chicago and later founder of the Center for the Study of
Democratic Institutions) as co-editor of the Encyclopaedia
Brittanica and as creator of the Great Books reading program that
continues to this day. Professor Kaye notes that as the United States
entered the Second World War, "a radio series on the 'Great Books
of Western Civilization,' dedicated a program to contrasting [Edmund]
Burke and Paine on liberty." Adler's book, The Common Sense
of Politics, written in the 1970s, is well-described as an update
on Paine's Rights of Man. I have long felt these two books ought to be
required reading for any student of the liberal arts.
Paine's extensive body of work provides us with much to ponder. His
willingness to seek truth and write objectively about what he found
regardless of the consequences to himself and his own standing in the
world community is a standard desperately needed today. Professor Kaye
concludes, that "conservatives do not - and truly cannot -
embrace him and his arguments." Certainly, those who today call
themselves conservative do not embrace the same moral principles as
did Paine. Paine believed in universal moral principles. A world
plagued by artificial scarcity continues to adhere to moral
relativism, to the false principles ethnic nationalism and
pseudo-religious group sovereignty. Paine would certainly be dismayed
that we have achieved so little after so much sacrifice.
Central to Paine's morality is the principle that the earth is our
equal birthright; from that principle all law must arise. No person or
groups of people have a greater claim to any portion of the earth -
and its natural resources - than any other. Ground rent must be paid
for the privilege experienced when the community (thought of in its
universal sense) grants to some exclusive control over any portion of
the earth. Absent this, those who labor - who produce goods and
provide services - are at the mercy of the landed. Paine called for
what I describe as a "labor and capital goods theory of property"
buoyed by public policies remedial in character (e.g., inheritance
taxes and the establishment of citizen trust funds). He put his faith
in participatory democracy to allow citizens to decide the proper
responsibilities of government, on what public goods and services
ought to be provided out of the revenue raised by fair and equitable
taxation. He is, without question, the father of cooperative
individualism.
I join with Professor Kaye in hoping the expanding interest in Paine
and his ideas will serve to stimulate a more sincere public discussion
of what constitutes the just society. The revolution Paine helped to
ignite is far from completed, and in many ways has been subverted
beyond recognition. Despite what Paine wrote, the times that try men's
souls have yet to come to a close.
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