Thomas Paine: Britain, America, & France in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution by J. C. D. Clark

Abstract

Reviewed by: Thomas Paine: Britain, America, & France in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution by J. C. D. Clark Thomas W. Merrill (bio) Keywords Thomas Paine, American Revolution, Enlightenment, Age of Revolutions, political thought Thomas Paine: Britain, America, & France in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution. By J. C. D. Clark. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2018. Pp. 485. Cloth, $40.95.) This book reinterprets Thomas Paine and his significance through the close study of Paine's contexts in the familiar fashion of the Cambridge school of the history of political thought. Clark argues against schools of thought that see Paine as an agent in an unambiguous narrative of the development of liberal democratic modernity. He identifies three such schools of thought: one that sees Paine as a progenitor of working-class politics in England (E. P. Thompson); a second that sees him as an advocate for a worldwide tide of democratic revolution (R. R. Palmer); and a third that sees him as an exemplar of "Enlightenment" discourses of human rights (Robert Lamb). Clark has a fourth set of interlocutors, who are focused less on the interpretation of modernity than on the meaning and scope of political theory itself: those scholars (here unidentified) who think that political theory is best understood as a set of "perennial problems." To this list one may add one more interlocutor: Paine himself. The man who asserted that "the cause of America is the [End Page 144] cause of all mankind" and that "we have it in our power to begin the world over again" invited his readers to see him as an agent of a grand narrative, articulating a universal, presumably perennial truth. The drama of this book, then, is the confrontation between the Cambridge school approach, with its skepticism of universal claims and its focus on particularistic contexts, and a thinker whose claim of universalistic, revolutionary significance was a defining feature of his self-presentation. Clark's thesis is as follows. Readers after Paine's time have tended to see him as the proponent of a universal democratic revolution premised on natural rights and continuous with causes we now associate with the left: universal suffrage, workers' rights, the welfare state, secularism, etc. But despite appearances to the contrary, this is not accurate. Paine did not anticipate movements asserting the rights of enslaved persons in America, the rights of women, or even universal manhood suffrage. Nor was Paine an atheist or a secularist in the way that some French revolutionaries or English Utilitarians became. Paine's frame of reference was in the past, in English discontent with the Hanoverian monarchy, not forward-looking toward ideological developments of the nineteenth century. Paine was moved more by a desire to negate monarchy and aristocracy (the hereditary principle) than he was by any well-deliberated positive picture of the world to come. Even Paine's advocacy of state assistance to the poor, often interpreted as anticipating the welfare state, has more to do with the English poor law, Clark thinks, than it does with a progressive concern for social justice. Clark does not deny that these social movements had roots in Paine's time, but he denies that Paine had much to do with them. One of the contributions of this book is an appendix in which Clark "de-attributes" to Paine texts that he thinks have been wrongly attributed to him (most notably a long passage in the Rights of Man, Part First that Clark thinks Paine got from Lafayette). Yet the purpose of the work can be said to be de-attribution in a broader sense as well: Clark aims to cut away misleading opinions we have formed about Paine by reading him in the light of our own preoccupations, leaving behind a somewhat homely figure whose universalist claims mask particular and now largely forgotten concerns. Clark thinks that Paine actually did not know much about America or France and that Paine's revolutionary writings have more to do with England than they do their ostensible subjects. He also thinks that it is incorrect to see the American and French Revolutions as motivated by a common belief in a doctrine of natural rights. The advocacy...