Common Sense: Of the Origin and Design of Government
This little pamphlet helped make the Declaration of Independence happen. Only a third of American colonists favored separation from Britain before Common Sense was first published in January 1776; it swayed as much as another third. Paine’s compelling arguments about the purpose and nature of government still hold up.
“Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness Positively by uniting our affections, the latter Negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher…
Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise… For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest…
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.
Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one…
When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary…
The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances have, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all Lovers of Mankind are affected… The laying of a Country desolate with Fire and Sword, declaring War against the natural rights of all Mankind, and extirpating the Defenders thereof from the Face of the Earth, is the Concern of every Man to whom Nature hath given the Power of feeling…
O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.”
A transplanted Englishman, Paine understood the frustrations of Americans forced to live under a British political system based on inherited privilege. He argued that the idea of monarchy was antiquated, and that mankind was approaching an Age of Reason.
Only in America, he believed, could humans fully escape from the restraints of tradition and ignorance to become enlightened citizens active in their own self-government.
The first edition sold out within days. After a dispute with his publisher, Paine went to another with significant additions, including the phrase, “the Free and Independent States of America.”
(Paine’s other masterpiece, The American Crisis, was written at the end of 1776.)
★ Common Sense, early 1776 edition #22227 (courtesy of private collector)