Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 September 2010
Thomas Paine is customarily regarded as a pamphleteer, rhetorician, and polemicist rather than a significant political theorist. This article takes the philosophical content of Paine's thought seriously and argues that his account of property rights constitutes a distinct contribution to theoretical debates on the subject. Drawing on Paine's Agrarian Justice and other writings, this article shows that his theory of property defends a libertarian concern with private ownership that contains within its logic an egalitarian commitment to the redistribution of resources. Paine's justification of property is distinct from that of various other important figures in the history of ideas (including Grotius, Pufendorf, and Locke) and represents his simultaneous commitment to foundational liberal values of individual freedom and moral equality.
1 Keane's, JohnTom Paine: A Political Life (London: Bloomsbury, 1995)Google Scholar is the most impressive and comprehensive biographical treatment of Paine. Previous treatments include Conway, Moncure, The Life of Thomas Paine (London: Knickerbocker Press, 1892)Google Scholar; Woodward, W. E., Tom Paine: America's Grandfather (London: Dutton, 1946)Google Scholar; Aldridge, Alfred Owen, Man of Reason: The Life of Thomas Paine (London: Cresset Press, 1959)Google Scholar; Hawke, David Freeman, Paine (New York: Harper and Row, 1974)Google Scholar; Powell, David, Tom Paine: The Greatest Exile (London: Croom Helm, 1985)Google Scholar; Ayer, A. J., Thomas Paine (London: Secker and Warburg, 1988)Google Scholar; Fruchtman, Jack Jr., Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994)Google Scholar. The best studies of Paine's thought are Claeys, Gregory, Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Philp, Mark, Paine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and Fruchtman, Jack Jr., Thomas Paine and the Religion of Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.
2 Particularly little is known of Paine's early life. For a discussion of how his enemies tried to make political capital through scurrilous rumors about his private life, see Wagner, Corinna, “Loyalist Propaganda and the Scandalous Life of Tom Paine,” British Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies 28, no. 1 (2005): 97–115CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Cited in Claeys, Thomas Paine, 2.
4 MacIntyre, Alasdair, A Short History of Ethics (London: Routledge, 1989), 227Google Scholar.
5 For discussions of the former, see Himmelfarb, Gertrude, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (London: Faber and Faber, 1984)Google Scholar and Jones, Gareth Stedman, An End to Poverty? A Historical Debate (London: Profile, 2004)Google Scholar, and of the latter, Horne, Thomas, Property Rights and Poverty: Political Argument in Britain, 1605–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990)Google Scholar and Claeys, Gregory, “The Origins of the Rights of Labor: Republicanism, Commerce, and the Construction of Modern Social Theory in Britain, 1796–1805,” Journal of Modern History 66, no. 2 (1994): 249–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Paine, , Agrarian Justice, in The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Foner, Philip S. (New York: Citadel Press, 1969)Google Scholar [henceforth CW followed by volume number], 1:612.
7 With some notable exceptions, such as Claeys, Thomas Paine, 196–208 and Philp, Paine, 84–93. For discussion of it within a broader context of arguments for a proto-welfare state, see Jackson, Ben, “The Conceptual History of Social Justice,” Political Studies Review, vol. 3 (2005): 356–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Stakeholding payments can be contrasted with unconditional basic incomes because the latter are usually presented as regular payments that take place throughout a person's life, whereas the former are paid once with the intended effect of generating a civic-minded spirit and sense of responsibility and reciprocity that is thought part of having a “stake” in any society. For discussions, see Dowding, Keith, De Wispelaere, Jurgen, and White, Stuart, eds., The Ethics of Stakeholding (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Agrarian Justice can be read in the French context of François-Noël Babeuf's ill-fated attempt to establish communism after the Revolution. Nevertheless, though it was a contribution to debates prompted by Babeuf's “conspiracy,” Paine maintained that his plan “is not adapted for any particular country alone: the principle on which it is based is general” (Agrarian Justice, 606).
10 Appreciation of the religious element of Paine's thought is rare, no doubt partly because of the commonplace assumptions of his apostasy that followed his The Age of Reason, which proved to be his most controversial publication, ruining his reputation in his adopted home of America for years—early twentieth-century President Theodore Roosevelt notoriously referred to him as a “filthy little atheist.” The Age of Reason lampooned much of Christian doctrine, including the biblical narrative about creation, the concept of miracles, and the divine status of Jesus. Nevertheless, Paine was a deist and did hold a strong belief in God as “first cause” and was highly critical of atheism. His various writings on the subject thus warrant further analysis. Though much more work needs to be done on this virtually ignored part of Paine's writing, useful discussions of The Age of Reason can be found in Claeys, Thomas Paine, 177–95; Philp, Paine, 94–113; and Fruchtman, Thomas Paine and the Religion of Nature, 57–73. See also Prochaska, Franklyn K., “Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason Revisited,” Journal of the History of Ideas 33, no. 4 (1972): 561–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a discussion of the critical reception of Paine's most controversial publication.
11 Paine, The Age of Reason, Part First, CW 1:464. Though Paine's thought developed in interesting ways between the American and French revolutions, his commitment to human moral equality is clearly observable in his early writings, including Common Sense (CW 1:9, 13). Assertion of the equality of “man” raises questions about the relevance of gender and it should be acknowledged that the moral status of women in Paine's thought is rather unclear. In Rights of Man, he had already argued that “the distinction of sexes” is the only one identified by God (CW 1:274) and he had done likewise in Common Sense (9). However, in none of his writings does he suggest that this distinction legitimates unequal treatment in the political sphere or less than equal rights. Evidence suggests that he was not (as once thought) the author of the critique of female oppression, “An Occasional Letter on the Female Sex,” that appeared in the Pennsylvania Magazine in 1775, but Philip Foner includes the letter in Paine's Complete Writings on the grounds that “it indicates his interest as editor of the magazine in the subject, and because some of the language of the essay is his” (CW 2:34–38).
12 Paine, Rights of Man, 274.
13 Paine, Agrarian Justice, 606.
14 Ibid., 609. The fact that immediately following his distinction between sexes Paine says God gave the earth to “them for their inheritance” seems to suggest that not only men received such an inheritance and the rights it entails.
15 See, for example, Claeys, , The French Revolution Debate in Britain: The Origins of Modern Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 38–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 Paine, Rights of Man, Part Two, CW 1:398.
17 Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Laslett, Peter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), II, §41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Campbell, R. H. and Skinner, A. S. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), I.i.11Google Scholar; Smith, , Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. Meek, R. L., Raphael, D. D., and Stein, P. G. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1978), 208Google Scholar. Paine was familiar with Smith's Wealth of Nations.
19 Recent scholarship has presented an interesting understanding of Smith's economic thought as a response to Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, one that championed commercial society whilst also worrying about the problem of significant material inequalities within it. See Rasmussen, Dennis, The Problems and Promise of a Commercial Society: Adam Smith's Response to Rousseau (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008)Google Scholar and Hanley, Ryan Patrick, Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For discussion of Paine in the context of Smith's thought, see Stedman Jones, An End to Poverty? 16–63.
20 Paine, Rights of Man, Part Two, 398. He is adamant that this is not due to any “natural defect in the principles of civilization, but in preventing those principles having a universal operation” (398).
21 Thus, he argues that “[t]o preserve the benefits of what is called civilized life, and to remedy at the same time the evil which it has produced, ought to be considered as one of the first objects of reformed legislation” (Agrarian Justice, 609).
22 Paine, Agrarian Justice, 610.
23 “To understand what the state of society ought to be, it is necessary to have some idea of the natural and primitive state of man; such as it is at this day among the Indians of North America. There is not, in that state, any of those spectacles of human misery which poverty and want present to our eyes, in all the towns and streets of Europe” (ibid.).
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., 612.
26 Ibid., 617.
27 Paine, Rights of Man, 276.
28 In the case of punishment, Paine suggests that individuals have a right to “judge in their own cause” but surrender this right to a magistrate because the power to invoke it becomes redundant once civil society has been generated: “every man takes the arm of the law for his protection, as more effectual than his own; and therefore, every man has an equal right in the formation of the government and of the laws by which he is to be governed and judged” (Paine, Dissertation on First Principles of Government, CW 2:583–84).
29 Locke, Two Treatises, II, §35, first emphasis mine.
30 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, in The Social Contract and Discourses, ed. Jimack, P. D. (London: Everyman, 1993), 84Google Scholar.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., 125.
33 Paine, Agrarian Justice, 610.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid.
36 Paine rarely offers utilitarian arguments and viewing him in that tradition would certainly sit oddly with the central theme that runs throughout his political thought (especially in the 1790s): the inviolability of individual rights.
37 Paine, Rights of Man, 275–76.
38 Ibid., 251, 254.
39 Paine, Dissertation on First Principles of Government, 577–78.
40 Ibid., 580.
41 See Paine, Rights of Man, 252.
42 Though modern philosophers would doubtless regard the notion of such a right as hopelessly vague in its formulation, a commitment to the moral duty to preserve human life is a staple of early modern and modern accounts of rights, from (at least) its well-known incarnation in Aquinas to (at least) as far as Locke.
43 Paine, Agrarian Justice, 611.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid., emphasis altered.
46 This “four-stage” account of economic history was a staple of the political thought of the Scottish Enlightenment, in particular Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. The four stages cited by Smith were that of “hunter,” “shepherd,” “agriculture,” and “commerce.” Analyses of the historical development of the four-stage theory can be found in Berry, Christopher J., Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 93–99Google Scholar; and, beyond the case of the Scots, in Hont, Istvan, “The language of sociability and commerce: Samuel Pufendorf and the theoretical foundations of the ‘Four-Stages Theory,’” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Pagden, Anthony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 253–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
47 Paine, Agrarian Justice, 611.
48 Ibid., 611–12.
49 Ibid., 612.
50 Ibid.
51 In doing so, I follow the structure of Waldron's, Jeremy discussion of natural law theories in The Right to Private Property (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 149–57Google Scholar.
52 Pufendorf, Samuel, On the Duty of Man and Citizen, ed. Tully, James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 84Google Scholar.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid., 84–85.
55 See Rights of Man, especially 249–52, where Paine intervenes in the debate between Richard Price and Edmund Burke about the status and meaning of the English “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. In his A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, Price argued that the constitutional settlement of 1688 established a set of inviolable rights of Britons held against any sovereign monarch, a claim that Burke rejected in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Paine's response is that it does not matter which account of 1688 is historically accurate, because the members of each generation have the right to give consent to government, thus robbing constitutional arrangements of any permanent legitimacy.
56 “Every generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it” (Paine, Rights of Man, 251).
57 I refer here to the taxonomy of legal concepts developed by Hohfeld, Wesley N. in Fundamental Legal Conceptions As Applied in Judicial Reasoning, ed. Cook, W. W. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919)Google Scholar.
58 Grotius, Hugo, The Rights of War and Peace, ed. Tuck, Richard (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), 2:420–21Google Scholar. For an excellent discussion of Grotius on property, see Salter, John, “Hugo Grotius: Property and Consent,” Political Theory 29, no. 4 (2001): 537–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
59 Paine, Agrarian Justice, 607.
60 Locke, Two Treatises, II, §25.
61 Ibid., II, §27.
62 Ibid., II, §30. Such an argument is distinct from the example of theatre seats used by Grotius, which links property ownership merely to first occupancy because the only action the theatre-goer had to engage in is sitting down before somebody else. By contrast, for Locke, the deer belongs to the Indian that killed it rather than, say, his neighbor who managed to sprint more quickly toward it after it died. The act of killing would trump any first occupancy because of the moral relevance of the labor such an act involves.
63 Nozick, , Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), 174–75Google Scholar. As he memorably puts it, “If I own a can of tomato juice and spill it in the sea so that its molecules (made radioactive, so I can check this) mingle evenly throughout the sea, do I thereby come to own the sea, or have I foolishly dissipated my tomato juice?”
64 Locke, Two Treatises, II, §32, emphasis added. There is insufficient space to provide a complete account of Locke's theory of property, the nature of which remains contentious. My reading fits with much recent work on the subject, including the observed “religious turn” in Locke scholarship, which views the justification for and restrictions placed on property ownership as a derivation from his understanding of the law of nature and theologically infused assumptions about morality. For detailed interpretive accounts of Locke's theory of property that stress the theological components, see Tully, James, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and His Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Waldron, The Right to Private Property, chap. 7; Simmons, A. John, The Lockean Theory of Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Sreenivisan, Gopal, The Limits of Lockean Rights in Property (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar. For broader analyses of the importance of his theology for understanding his political thought, see Dunn, John, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the “Two Treatises of Government” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Waldron, Jeremy, God, Locke and Equality: Christian Foundations in John Locke's Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sigmund, Paul E., “Jeremy Waldron and the Religious Turn in Locke Scholarship,” Review of Politics 67, no. 3 (2005): 407–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
65 Locke, Two Treatises, II, §6. For discussions that stress the relevance of this, see Waldron, The Right to Private Property, 145–47 and Simmons, The Lockean Theory of Rights, 243–52. See also Tully, A Discourse on Property, 131.
66 Paine, Agrarian Justice, 611.
67 Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 175
68 Locke, Two Treatises, II, §40.
69 Ibid., II, §37.
70 Ibid., II, §42.
71 Though it should be noted that I do not assume that Locke offers what subsequently came to be known as the “labor theory of value” associated with Smith, Ricardo, and Marx.
72 Locke, Two Treatises, II, §40. This use right is outlined at the start of chapter 5: “whether we consider natural Reason, which tells us, that Men, being once born, have a right to their Preservation, and consequently to Meat and Drink, and such other things, as Nature affords for their Subsistence” (II, §25). This passage is occasionally invoked to demonstrate Locke's commitment to a universal right to individual subsistence, but such a claim wrenches the passage from its textual context, which is a presentation of an original (pre-proprietary) community of goods.
73 For an excellent analysis of the role of labor in Locke's argument “as a kind of purposive activity aimed at satisfying needs or supplying the conveniences of life,” see Simmons, The Lockean Theory of Rights, 264–77 (quoted material at 273).
74 Paine, Agrarian Justice, 612.
75 Ibid. Like Locke, Paine makes the claim on two different occasions in the text.
76 Ibid., emphasis added.
77 Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 175.
78 Paine, Agrarian Justice, 606.
79 Ibid.
80 Paine, Dissertation on First Principles of Government, 580.
81 Paine, Agrarian Justice, 612.
82 Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, 150–64.
83 Paine, Agrarian Justice, 611.
84 Ibid., 613.
85 A “national fund” will give “to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling” (ibid., 612–13).
86 It is important to stress that Paine's theory of property rights in Agrarian Justice does not exhaust his account of distributive justice, because he also defends substantial welfare rights based on principles of need. See Paine, Rights of Man, Part Two, and for a discussion, see Seaman, John W., “Thomas Paine: Ransom, Civil Peace, and the Natural Right to Welfare,” Political Theory 16, no. 1 (1988): 120–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
87 Locke, Two Treatises, II, §38; I, §42.
88 Paine, Agrarian Justice, 620.
89 Ibid.
90 Paine, Rights of Man, Part Two, 357.
91 Claeys, Thomas Paine, 202.
92 Ibid.
93 Paine's theory is clearly grounded in markedly atomistic assumptions about human behavior, and he notably does not address the issue of how and whether it is possible for individuals to acquire the physical and intellectual skills necessary to acquire property through improving the land without “living in society.”
94 One of the referees for this article suggested a possible tension between Paine's fundamental commitment to consent as the basis for legitimate government and his commitment to private property rights that are inviolable to taxation: exercises of the former seem entirely capable of undermining the latter. This does not, however, strike me as a real tension, since a commitment to the trumping force of consent seems in some sense fundamental to all libertarian political theories. Thus, as Nozick suggests in his sketch of a libertarian “utopia,” “in a free society people may contract into various restrictions which the government may not legitimately impose upon them” (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 320). So, for example, even in a perfectly libertarian society with inviolable ownership rights over “created artificial property,” the proprietors would surely be able to consent to a transfer of property in order to engage in projects intended to benefit whichever community they considered themselves a part of and such projects could conceivably range from building monuments to providing aid to the destitute.
95 Paine, Agrarian Justice, 612.
96 Among other things, Paine's belief in divinely willed original communism and his commitment to inviolable rights rather than utilitarianism render his account of property completely different from that advanced by the other major theoretician of 1790s British radicalism, William Godwin (in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice [1798]). The attempt to use Lockean arguments about the significance of labor to justify a redistribution of property in Agrarian Justice is also visible in John Thelwall's The Rights of Nature (1796), which was composed contemporaneously (though the two were on opposite sides of the channel with apparently no knowledge of what the other was writing). However, Thelwall, unlike Paine (but like Godwin), does not appeal to God in his arguments at all; moreover, he justifies the existence of property on partly utilitarian grounds. And Thomas Spence—who, like Paine, did assert that God gave the world to human beings in common—provided a vituperative critique of Agrarian Justice, arguing that the redistributive plans it advocated were “neither just nor satisfactory” and, furthermore, that “Mr. Paine, instead of erecting on this rock of ages an everlasting Temple of Justice, has erected an execrable fabric of compromissory expediency, as if in good earnest for a Swinish Multitude” (Spence, The Rights of Infants, in The Political Works of Thomas Spence, ed. H. T. Dickinson [Newcastle: Avero Publications, 1982], 47). For some discussions of theories of property in the 1790s, see Lamb, Robert, “For and Against Ownership: William Godwin's Theory of Property,” Review of Politics 71, no. 2 (2009): 275–302CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lamb, , “Labour, Contingency, Utility: Thelwall's Theory of Property,” in John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon, ed. Poole, Steve (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), 51–60Google Scholar; Claeys “The Origins of the Rights of Labor”; Claeys, The French Revolution Debate in Britain.
97 For comprehensive accounts of this development, see Claeys, Thomas Paine, especially 39–109 and Philp, Paine.
