Thomas Paine's Rights of Man E-Book

Christopher Hitchens

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

'Christopher Hitchens... at his characteristically incisive best.' --The Times Thomas Paine is one of the greatest political advocates in history. Declaration of the Rights of Man, first published in 1791, is the key to his reputation. Inspired by his outrage at Edmund Burke's attack on the uprising of the French people, Paine's text is a passionate defence of man's inalienable rights. In Rights of Man Paine argues against monarchy and outlines the elements of a successful republic, including public education, pensions and relief of the poor and unemployed, all financed by income tax. Since its publication, Rights of Man has been celebrated, criticized, maligned and suppressed but here the polemicist and commentator Christopher Hitchens marvels at its forethought and revels in its contentiousness. Above all, Hitchens demonstrates how Thomas Paine's book forms the philosophical cornerstone of the first democratic republic, whose revolution is the only example that still speaks to us: the United States of America.

Leseprobe

Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man

A Biography

Christopher Hitchens is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and visiting professor in liberal studies at the New School in New York. His books include Why Orwell Matters and Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. The international bestseller, God is Not Great was published by Atlantic Books in 2007.

Other titles in the Books That Shook the World series:Available now:

Plato’s Republicby Simon Blackburn

Darwin’s Origin of Speciesby Janet Browne

The Qur’anby Bruce Lawrence

Adam Smith’s On the Wealth of Nationsby P. J. O’Rourke

Marx’s Das Kapitalby Francis Wheen

Forthcoming:

The Bibleby Karen Armstrong

Machiavelli’s The Princeby Philip Bobbitt

Homer’s The Iliad and the Odysseyby Alberto Manguel

Carl von Clausewitz’s On Warby Hew Strachan

First published in Great Britain in hardback in 2006 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic.

This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2007 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Christopher Hitchens 2006

The moral right of Christopher Hitchens to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The author and publishers are grateful to Dwarf Music for permission to reproduce material from ‘As I Walked Out One Morning’ copyright © 1968 by Dwarf Music. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.

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Dedicated by permission to President Jalal Talabani: first elected president of the Republic of Iraq; sworn foe of fascism and theocracy; leader of a national revolution and a people’s army. In the hope that his long struggle will be successful, and will inspire emulation.

‘Pain’s wild rebellious burst proclaims her rights aloud…’

William Wordsworth: Descriptive Sketches

‘As I walked out one morning, to breathe the air around Tom Paine’s…’

Bob Dylan: ‘As I Walked Out One Morning’

‘To all these champions of the oppressed Paine set an example of courage, humanity and single-mindedness. When public issues were involved, he forgot personal prudence. The world decided, as it usually does in such cases, to punish him for his lack of self-seeking; to this day his fame is less than it would have been if his character had been less generous. Some worldly wisdom is required even to secure praise for the lack of it.’

Bertrand Russell: The Fate of Thomas Paine

CONTENTS

Introduction

1   Paine in America

2   Paine in Europe

3   Rights of Man, Part One

4   Rights of Man, Part Two

5   The Age of Reason

Conclusion: Paine’s Legacy

Notes

Further reading

Index

INTRODUCTION

Children in the United States are taught early in life to sing ‘My Country, ’tis of thee’, in which the main verse goes:

My Country, ’tis of thee

Sweet land of liberty

Of thee I sing

Land where my fathers died

Land of the Pilgrims’ pride

From every mountainside –

Let freedom ring!

This is an averagely sentimental ditty, but it was promoted to immortality by the great Dr Martin Luther King, in the imperishable speech that he made on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, at the climax of the civil rights ‘March on Washington’ in the spring of 1963. Seizing the familiar words of the schoolroom for his peroration, he demanded that freedom should ring from every hilltop, north and south, from New Hampshire to California and down to Mississippi, until the original promise of the United States had been kept for all its citizens. ‘If America is to be a great nation,’ he proclaimed, ‘this must become true.’

‘My Country, ’tis of thee’ would be a fairly easy song for British schoolchildren to master as well. It is sung, for one thing, to the tune of the National Anthem. This rather unimaginative hymn – the first national anthem in the world, as it happens – seems to have originated as a Jacobite chanson, but was rewritten for the cause of (Protestant) Church and King in September 1745, as the Jacobite rebel invaders from Scotland were menacing the throne. A theatre audience in London rose to intone, as well as the first verse, the less commonly heard second one:

O Lord our God arise,

Scatter his enemies

And make them fall:

Confound their politics,

Frustrate their knavish tricks

On him our hopes are fix’d

O save us all.

The ‘him’ in this case was George II, representative of the Hanoverian usurpation that endures on the British throne to the present day. By the early 1800s his son, George III, was being greeted by this song on official occasions. And by that time, another version was in circulation, written by the great radical artisan poet Joseph Mather:

God save great Thomas Paine,

His ‘Rights of Man’ explain

To every soul.

He makes the blind to see

What dupes and slaves they be,

And points out liberty

From pole to pole.

Thousands cry ‘Church and King’

That well deserve to swing,

All must allow:

Birmingham blush for shame,

Manchester do the same

Infamous is your name,

Patriots vow.

Pull proud oppressors down,

Knock off each tyrant’s crown,

And break his sword;

Down aristocracy,

Set up democracy,

And from hypocrisy

Save us good Lord.

Why should despotic pride

Usurp on every side?

Let us be free:

Grant freedom’s arms success,

And all her efforts bless,

Plant through the universe

Liberty’s Tree.

Facts are seditious things

When they touch courts and kings,

Armies are raised,

Barracks and Bastilles built,

Innocence charged with guilt,

Blood most unjustly spilt,

God stands amazed.

Despots may howl and yell,

Though they’re in league with hell

They’ll not reign long;

Satan may lead the van,

And do the worst he can,

Paine and his ‘Rights of Man’

Shall be my song.

This fine parody, composed in 1791, is taught in no school and sung in no assembly. But it captures, with its defiant and satirical pugnacity, the spirit that was aroused that year by the publication of Thomas Paine’s classic. Joseph Mather was a radical file-maker in the city of Sheffield; one wonders whether he inspired, or whether he drew from, the song that was struck up at an evening of the more mainstream Society for Constitutional Information, which at its London meeting in March 1791 voted its thanks to Paine and then heard members of the successful majority intone:

God save The Rights of Man!

Let despots, if they can,

Them overthrow…

It seems likely that Mather was writing later in the year, since it is easy enough to interpret his apparently odd phrase ‘Birmingham blush for shame’. It was in Birmingham in the autumn of 1791 that a Tory-inspired mob, frenzied by the cry of ‘Church and King’, broke into Joseph Priestley’s house, destroying the library and laboratory of the self-taught scientist who had discovered oxygen. This incident – another of those historical episodes that is not taught in school – decided Priestley on a move to America, whose revolutionary and republican cause he had already espoused in a pamphlet. He was there to become a welcome guest, and a participant in the great Philadelphia renaissance that featured such men as Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush and Thomas Jefferson. One should not allow oneself to forget that the English friends of the revolutions in America and France were not always greeted only with the high moral tones of Edmund Burke (who approved of the ‘Church and King’ mobocracy when the mob was on his side) but also with persecution and repression of quite a high and systematic degree.

Other contemporary clues can be found in Mather’s lines. He used the word ‘Patriot’ to describe the supporters of the democratic and radical cause. This had also been the term employed by John Wilkes’s faction in Parliament and its supporters outside it: the famous partisans of ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ against a German Crown and a Tory-dominated system of rotten boroughs. (It was only that version of ‘Patriotism’, incidentally, that the Tory Dr Samuel Johnson described, in a remark that has been misunderstood and misquoted ever since, as ‘the last refuge of the scoundrel’.)

The word ‘Bastille’ was also fresh in the mind in 1791, as the symbol of the French absolutist monarchy and as a synonym for the many dark prisons in which the liberals of Europe had so long been confined and tortured. The Marquis de Lafayette, chivalric hero of both the American and the French Revolutions, gave the key of the Bastille to Thomas Paine and requested him to forward it to President George Washington as a token of French regard to the American people. Paine had done so with delight in the year before he published Rights of Man, adding a covering letter which described the key as ‘this early trophy of the spoils of despotism, and the first ripe fruits of American principles transplanted into Europe’. The key hangs to this day on the wall of Washington’s home at Mount Vernon. The date of Paine’s letter was the first of May, which a century or so later was the date selected by American workers as the one on which to begin the struggle for the eight-hour day, and afterwards by the labour movements of all countries as May Day: the holiday and carnival and fiesta of the oppressed.

Spring, and the natural world, were ordinary metaphors for Paine, as they have always been for those who witness the melting of political glaciers and the unfreezing of the tundra of despotism. ‘I have not the least doubt of the final and complete success of the French Revolution,’ Paine went on in his letter to George Washington. ‘Little ebbings and flowings, for and against, the natural companions of revolutions, sometimes appear, but the full current of it is, in my opinion, as fixed as the Gulf Stream.’ The same metaphor, of a warming current coming from across the seas, is to be found in Paine’s dedication of Rights of Man:

To

GEORGE WASHINGTON,

President of the United States of America

SIR,

I present you a small Treatise in defence of those Principles of Freedom which your exemplary Virtue hath so eminently contributed to establish. – That the Rights of Man may become as universal as your Benevolence can wish, and that you may enjoy the Happiness of seeing the New World regenerate the Old, is the Prayer of

SIR,

Your much obliged and

Obedient humble Servant,

THOMAS PAINE.1

It was that Pitt-supporting Tory, George Canning, who in 1826 claimed that he had ‘called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old’. Winston Churchill, evoking the Atlantic alliance in a time of peril, told Parliament – this time quoting Arthur Hugh Clough – ‘but westward look, the land is bright’. The metaphysical poets had often compared romantic America to a lover – ‘my America, my new found land’. Pilgrims had sailed to ‘the Americas’ to establish doctrinal purity, and pirates had made the same voyage in search of treasure and slaves. In Paine’s time, however, the New World of ‘the United States of America’ (a name he may have coined) was an actual and concrete achievement; not an imaginary Utopia but a home for liberty and the conscious first stage of a world revolution.

‘Liberty’s tree’ would have been well understood by Mather’s fellow artisans and self-taught workers, as the symbol of the Enlightenment and of democratic revolution. It recurs as an image in numberless poems, oaths, toasts and songs of the period, and from the United Irishmen all the way to the letters of Thomas Jefferson (who was not the only one to say that the tree of liberty must be nurtured by the blood of tyrants, as well as of patriots). The greeting of the radical Protestant-dominated United Irishmen went like this:

‘Are you straight?’

‘I am.’

‘How straight?’

‘As straight as a rush.’

‘Go on, then.’

‘In truth, in trust, in unity and liberty.’

‘What have you got in your hand?’

‘A green bough.’

‘Where did it first grow?’

‘In America.’

‘Where did it bud?’

‘In France.’

‘Where are you going to plant it?’

‘In the crown of Great Britain.’

Robert Burns wrote a poem called ‘The Tree of Liberty’, which opens in this vein:

Heard ye o’ the tree o’ France,

I watna what’s the name o’t;

Around it a’ the patriots dance,

Weel Europe kens the fame o’t.

It stands where once the Bastille stood,

A prison built by kings, man,

When Superstition’s hellish brood

Kept France in leading-strings, man.

We can thus be sure that Burns – a great partisan of the 1789 Revolution in France – had read Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, which at one point described monarchy as a form which infantilized and retarded society as well as increased its tendency towards senility: ‘It appears under all the characters of childhood, decrepitude, dotage, a thing at nurse, in leading strings, or on crutches.’2 And Burns’s most famous poem, ‘For a’ that’, breathes with a mighty scorn for the conceits of heredity and the hereditary principle, so comprehensively lampooned by Paine. For their part, the United Irishmen, founded in this epic year of 1791 to attach ‘Protestants of the middling ranks’ to the cause of national and parliamentary reform, made Paine an honorary member. He was one of those rare Englishmen of the period who could write that: ‘The suspicion that England governs Ireland for the purpose of keeping her low, to prevent her becoming her rival in trade and manufactures, will always operate to hold Ireland in a state of sentimental hostility with England.’