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Background
Background
Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was an influential political writer and activist who advocated for the American and French revolutions and challenged the role of religion in society. He is best known for his pamphlets Common Sense, Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason.
Rights of Man: Being an answer to Mr Burke’s attack on the French Revolution is a book written by Thomas Paine in response to Edmund Burke’s criticism of the French Revolution. Paine argues that human rights are natural and inherent, and that governments are created to protect them. He claims that the French Revolution was a legitimate and necessary action to overthrow a tyrannical and oppressive monarchy. He also proposes a democratic system of government based on the principles of equality, liberty, and representation. He criticizes the British political system as corrupt and unjust, and advocates for the reform of the laws, taxes, and social institutions.
Rights of Man begins with a direct personal attack on Edmund Burke's writing in his pamphlet Reflections on the Revolution in France:
Among the incivilities by which nations or individuals provoke and irritate each other, Mr. Burke’s pamphlet on the French Revolution is an extraordinary instance… There is scarcely an epithet of abuse to be found in the English language, with which Mr. Burke has not loaded the French Nation and the National Assembly. Everything which rancour, prejudice, ignorance or knowledge could suggest, is poured forth in the copious fury of near four hundred pages…
Mr. Burke with his usual outrage, abused the Declaration of the Rights of Man, published by the National Assembly of France, as the basis on which the constitution of France is built. This he calls “paltry and blurred sheets of paper about the rights of man.” Does Mr. Burke mean to deny that man has any rights? If he does, then he must mean that there are no such things as rights anywhere, and that he has none himself; for who is there in the world but man? But if Mr. Burke means to admit that man has rights, the question then will be: What are those rights, and how man came by them originally?
If we remember, Burke's argument was based on three main points:
The concept of a right only makes sense if it is contextualised - it can't be abstracted from its circumstances
Rights exist only insomuch as they are what governments enforce.
Our criteria for establishing rights ought to be prejudice and precedent - i.e. respect for history.
Paine’s response was, in effect, that these propositions are inconsistent.
If we are to base our notions of rights on precedent, i.e. what happened in the past, then surely those events of the past ought also to be based on precedent, and so on and so on until we get back to the first man. If we don't go all the way back to the beginning of mankind, we will be contradicting ourselves. And so relying on precedent invariably leads to a notion of original or natural rights.
And because these rights stem from a first man, we must all have these rights since we are a unity - the same kind of thing.
And therefore, Rights are not granted by governments, instead it is a government's job to protect them.
- The concept of precedent leads to the concept of natural rights
The first step in this argument is to demonstrate the absurd consequences of thinking one can rely on precedent without a concept of original or natural rights:
The error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity, respecting the rights of man, is that they do not go far enough into antiquity. They do not go the whole way. They stop in some of the intermediate stages of a hundred or a thousand years, and produce what was then done, as a rule for the present day. This is no authority at all. If we travel still farther into antiquity, we shall find a direct contrary opinion and practice prevailing; and if antiquity is to be authority, a thousand such authorities may be produced, successively contradicting each other; but if we proceed on, we shall at last come out right; we shall come to the time when man came from the hand of his Maker. What was he then? Man. Man was his high and only title, and a higher cannot be given him. But of titles I shall speak hereafter.
…
Though I mean not to touch upon any sectarian principle of religion, yet it may be worth observing, that the genealogy of Christ is traced to Adam. Why then not trace the rights of man to the creation of man?
2. Our rights are universal
2. Our rights are universal
To support this argument, he draws on religious traditions from around the world, and especially the Christian tradition.
He builds on this the idea of the unity or equality of man. That men do not vary from one to the other in any significant way, and therefore are equal. (Notice how he does allow that there is a significant distinction between the sexes!)
Every history of the creation, and every traditionary account, … all agree in establishing one point, the unity of man; by which I mean that men are all of one degree, and consequently that all men are born equal, and with equal natural right, in the same manner as if posterity had been continued by creation instead of generation, the latter being the only mode by which the former is carried forward; and consequently every child born into the world must be considered as deriving its existence from God. The world is as new to him as it was to the first man that existed, and his natural right in it is of the same kind.
...
The Mosaic account of the creation, whether taken as divine authority or merely historical, is full to this point, the unity or equality of man. The expression admits of no controversy. ‘And God said, Let us make man in our own image. In the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.’ The distinction of sexes is pointed out, but no other distinction is even implied. If this be not divine authority, it is at least historical authority, and shows that the equality of man, so far from being a modern doctrine, is the oldest upon record.
3. Rights are not something that are granted by governments - they are inherent
3. Rights are not something that are granted by governments - they are inherent
He then makes the point that our civil rights, far from being granted us by the kindness of our superiors, as Burke seemed to argue, we in fact founded upon our natural rights.
His natural rights are the foundation of all his civil rights. A few words will explain this. Natural rights are those which appertain to man in right of his existence. Of this kind are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also all those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness, which are not injurious to the natural rights of others. Civil rights are those which appertain to man in right of his being a member of society. Every civil right has for its foundation some natural right pre-existing in the individual, but to the enjoyment of which his individual power is not, in all cases, sufficiently competent. Of this kind are all those which relate to security and protection.
Paine believes that there are three kinds of governments which can be distinguished in terms of the origin of their power:
First, Superstition.
Secondly, Power.
Thirdly, The common interest of society and the common rights of man.
The first was a government of priestcraft, the second of conquerors, and the third of reason.
Ultimately, because Human rights originate in Nature, these rights could not be granted by any political power, because that implies that rights are legally revocable, hence, would be privileges:
... It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It operates by a contrary effect—that of taking rights away. Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those rights, in the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few ... They ... consequently are instruments of injustice ... The fact, therefore, must be that the individuals, themselves, each, in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a contract with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.
Discussion
Discussion
But don't Burke's arguments still apply? If we decontextualise our rights, what are the criteria that define what they are and what it means -in practical terms- to have them.
The twentieth century Philosopher, Simone Weil argued that 'A right which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much.' Isn't that true? (She argues that instead we need a declaration of human obligations. 'A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds…An obligation which goes unrecognized by anybody loses none of the full force of its existence.'
Tasks
Tasks
Explain Thomas Paine's arguments against Burke's pamphlet.
How might someone object to what Thomas Paine says?
Evaluate Paine's position. Do you think that there are such things as original or natural Rights of Man?
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