Less Jefferson, More Paine:
Reclaiming the Spirit of the Rights of Man
and its pursuit of Life, Liberty, and Happiness
in the Time of Being
The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have witnessed the global ascendancy of liberal democracy, often celebrated as the "end of history" following the collapse of the eastern bloc and the apparent universalization of democratic capitalism. Yet this triumph is increasingly tempered by a profound moral and structural crisis. Economic inequality has reached unprecedented levels; democratic institutions, though formally intact, are frequently hollowed out by elite capture, corporate influence, and technocratic insulation; and the once galvanizing rhetoric of “freedom” and “rights” now often functions as a veneer for systemic stagnation, privatization, and dispossession.
Recent developments — from the 2008 global financial collapse to the resurgence of authoritarian populism, from the COVID-19 pandemic’s exposure of systemic fragilities to the intensifying climate crisis — have reignited questions about the foundations and future of democracy itself. Even in established liberal democracies, voter disenchantment, political apathy, and declining trust in public institutions reveal a growing sense that democracy is no longer capable of delivering on its promises. The Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, rational governance, and social progress — once seen as the pillars of modern civilization — are now the subject of both nostalgic invocation and critical reassessment.
Within this milieu, the foundational figures of Enlightenment political thought remain frequently cited but often misunderstood. In particular, the continued valorization of Thomas Jefferson as a principal architect of liberty in the American tradition invites deeper scrutiny. Jefferson, though an eloquent theorist of natural rights and republican government, embodied contradictions that modern defenders of liberalism often ignore: he extolled the virtues of liberty while owning slaves; he advocated limited government while consolidating executive power; and he spoke of popular sovereignty while maintaining deep suspicion of the political capacities of the poor and the uneducated.
In contrast, Thomas Paine, a far less institutionally celebrated figure, offers a radical and materially grounded vision of freedom that is strikingly relevant to the current moment. Paine’s political thought — uncompromising in its critique of hereditary privilege, unapologetic in its defense of universal rights, and pioneering in its calls for economic redistribution and social welfare — remains both a moral compass and a theoretical framework for rethinking democracy in crisis. Unlike Jefferson, whose vision of liberty was filtered through class privilege and elite republicanism, Paine envisioned freedom as a common inheritance — one that must be secured through public institutions, popular mobilization, and structural justice.
The enduring relevance of the Enlightenment, then, lies not in the cautious liberalism of gentlemen-philosophers, but in the revolutionary egalitarianism of its most daring voices. In an age where freedom is commodified, justice individualized, and government either demonized or rendered impotent, it is Paine — not Jefferson — who speaks most clearly to the task at hand. As intellectuals, policymakers, and citizens continue to debate the future of democracy, it is imperative to revisit the radical Enlightenment not as a historical footnote, but as a living tradition of dissent, grounded in the demand that liberty be both universal and material.
Jeffersonian Ambiguity (Expanded): The Paradox of Liberalism
Thomas Jefferson stands as both icon and enigma in the American political imagination. His legacy is everywhere invoked — in debates over liberty and federal power, public education, religious freedom, and the very definition of democracy itself. Yet this universal appeal often obscures the profound contradictions embedded within his political philosophy. Jefferson was not merely a man of his time; he was a theorist of liberty whose most enduring formulations were anchored in exclusions, silences, and accommodations to power.
Jefferson’s belief in individual liberty was sincere but circumscribed. His ideal citizen was, as he declared in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), the “independent yeoman farmer,” whose moral virtue and political clarity were guaranteed by his ownership of land. “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God,” Jefferson wrote, asserting that “corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example.” But this agrarian ideal, so central to his vision of a republic of virtue, excluded the landless, the enslaved, the urban poor, and women — those whose dependence, according to Jefferson, rendered them unfit for political participation.
In his correspondence, Jefferson made this hierarchy explicit. Writing to John Adams in 1813, he admitted his belief in a “natural aristocracy”, stating:
“There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.”
While Jefferson sought to distinguish this from an “artificial aristocracy” based on wealth or birth, in practice the lines blurred. His endorsement of meritocracy, though progressive by the standards of monarchy, still upheld a gatekeeping logic: only those with education and property — generally men of his class — were deemed capable of self-rule.
Nowhere is Jefferson’s ambiguity more glaring than in his treatment of slavery. He recognized it as a moral and political evil, yet refused to act against it meaningfully. In Notes on the State of Virginia, he wrote of slavery as a corrosive force:
“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.”
Yet in the same text, Jefferson engaged in quasi-scientific racism, questioning the intellectual capacity of Black people and expressing doubt that the two races could ever live together in freedom:
“Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior... and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.”
These statements reflect not only personal prejudice but the ideological blind spot of liberalism: its tendency to elevate abstract principles while deferring — or outright denying — their practical application to marginalized groups. The disjunction between Jefferson’s rhetoric and his record is not simply hypocrisy. It is symptomatic of a political philosophy that imagines freedom as the absence of state coercion but remains silent about private domination, systemic exploitation, or inherited social inequality.
Jefferson’s economic worldview likewise reveals the reactionary underpinnings of his libertarian impulses. He opposed Alexander Hamilton’s program of central banking and industrialization, fearing it would create a “moneyed aristocracy” and corrupt the republic. Yet his alternative — a decentralized agrarian economy — was built upon a slave-based plantation system and could not adapt to the demands of a growing, urbanizing, and diversifying nation. “I am not a friend to a very energetic government,” Jefferson warned, “It is always oppressive.” But in resisting strong government, Jefferson also resisted the very tools — taxation, redistribution, public investment — that modern democracies would come to use to ameliorate inequality and expand rights.
Even Jefferson’s vaunted support for education and knowledge must be read within this elitist framework. While he founded the University of Virginia and promoted a secular, Enlightenment curriculum, he envisioned higher education as a means of cultivating a leadership class, not empowering the masses. His fear of the uneducated mob remained central:
“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”
Thus, Jefferson’s liberalism was cautious and managerial, not revolutionary. Unlike Paine, who placed his faith in the broad masses of people and advocated for economic justice through taxation and welfare, Jefferson worried about instability, disorder, and the leveling implications of radical democracy.
Yet perhaps the most enduring impact of Jefferson lies in the ambiguities he left behind — ambiguities that have allowed both left and right to claim his mantle. Libertarians cite him as a champion of minimal government; progressives invoke his defense of civil liberties; conservatives adopt his paeans to limited taxation and federal restraint. This ideological elasticity speaks not to his clarity, but to his political indeterminacy. Jefferson stands for liberty, but rarely specifies whose liberty, or at what cost.
In this current time, when democratic institutions face crisis after crisis — from voter suppression to oligarchic control of wealth, from disinformation to permanent war — the Jeffersonian model offers little guidance. It champions a freedom conceived in the negative — freedom from — but falters when confronted with the demands of positive liberty — freedom to: to eat, to learn, to live in dignity. As long as liberalism avoids addressing these material foundations, it will continue to reproduce inequality under the name of liberty.
To interrogate Jefferson is not to condemn him alone, but to expose the limits of classical liberalism as a whole. It is to understand that ideals, no matter how beautifully written, are only as emancipatory as the structures that realize them. And it is to ask, finally, whether the democratic future society hopes to build needs less reverence for founders — and more fidelity to the people whose freedom they too often denied.
Paine’s Radical Enlightenment: Justice from Below
If Jefferson represents the patrician ambiguity of liberal Enlightenment thought, Thomas Paine embodies its radical, plebeian core. Where Jefferson theorized liberty from the comfort of Monticello, Paine carried the revolution in his bones — from the cobbler’s shop to the printing press, from revolutionary Philadelphia to Jacobin Paris, and later into exile. Paine’s writings, stripped of philosophical ornament and rhetorical elitism, remain among the most forceful, consistent, and morally urgent contributions to the Enlightenment project. In Paine, liberty was not a rhetorical flourish, but a political imperative; not an aristocratic privilege, but a birthright of all humanity.
Unlike Jefferson, whose Enlightenment was mediated through elite circles and a classical education, Paine emerged from the artisan class of England, deeply influenced by dissenting Protestantism, working-class republicanism, and the practical philosophy of justice forged in the social struggles of the eighteenth century. In Common Sense (1776), he made what historian Eric Foner calls “the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the American Revolution,” calling for immediate independence from Britain, the abolition of monarchy, and the establishment of a democratic republic grounded in popular sovereignty. It was not merely his call for revolution that was radical — it was the moral clarity with which he dismissed hereditary rule and the entire edifice of aristocratic privilege. As according to his work "Common Sense", he said:
“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.”
This single sentence cuts to the core of Paine’s radicalism: injustice persists not merely through coercion, but through normalization — through the dead weight of tradition. For Paine, revolution was not only political but epistemic: it demanded that ordinary people learn to see clearly what had long been obscured by dogma, deference, and ideology.
Whereas Jefferson couched his critique of monarchy in natural law theory and Lockean abstraction, Paine made monarchy itself absurd and offensive to reason:
“Of more worth is one honest man to society… than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.”
Here, Paine rejected not just monarchy but the entire principle of inherited authority, drawing a direct line between political privilege and moral corruption. This egalitarian impulse would inform all of his later works — most notably The Rights of Man (1791–92), in which he defended the French Revolution against its conservative critics (particularly Edmund Burke) and elaborated a vision of universal, egalitarian rights grounded in common humanity, not class, lineage, or property:
“Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow.”
This statement, remarkable for its time, contains not only an implicit denunciation of slavery — more forceful than anything Jefferson ever wrote — but a direct rebuke to patriarchy, oligarchy, and intergenerational domination. For Paine, justice was incompatible with any form of inherited subordination — economic, political, or social. His Enlightenment was not merely an appeal to reason, but to emancipation: it demanded action, institutional change, and redistribution.
This brings us to perhaps Paine’s most prescient and underappreciated work: Agrarian Justice (1797). Written in the wake of the French Revolution and his imprisonment by the Jacobins, Agrarian Justice is nothing less than a blueprint for proto-social democracy. In it, Paine proposed a tax on inherited property — particularly land — to fund a national system of old-age pensions and a universal basic income for young adults. He did not advocate for abolishing private property, but he insisted that land ownership had originated through dispossession and thus carried with it a moral obligation of restitution:
“The earth, in its natural, uncultivated state was… the common property of the human race. In that state every man would have been born to property… It is the value of the improvement only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property.”
This vision of justice is fundamentally at odds with both classical liberalism and modern capitalism. It recognizes that freedom without economic security is hollow, and that any legitimate political order must address material inequality — not merely formal rights. This is precisely the dimension of the Enlightenment that most contemporary liberal discourse suppresses: that rights must be backed by redistribution, and that liberty must be secured not just by law, but by livelihood.
Paine’s radicalism was not confined to economics. He was one of the few revolutionary thinkers of his time to consistently call for women’s education, the abolition of slavery, religious freedom (he was a fierce critic of organized religion in The Age of Reason), and genuine democratic participation. His universalism was not rhetorical; it was existential. When he declared, “My country is the world, and my religion is to do good,” he articulated an ethic of global solidarity and civic virtue far more expansive than Jefferson’s parochial republicanism.
Moreover, Paine never retreated into elitism. Unlike Jefferson, who preferred rule by a "natural aristocracy," Paine placed trust in the people. He believed that ordinary citizens — armed with education, political equality, and economic security — were fully capable of governing themselves. This faith in the masses made him both popular and dangerous: he was vilified by conservatives, abandoned by former allies, and ultimately died in relative obscurity. Yet his ideas endure — not as relics, but as living principles of a democratic project yet unfinished.
In this present moment — when economic inequality threatens democratic institutions, when rights discourse is increasingly commodified, and when government is seen as either a tool of elites or a failed bureaucracy — Paine’s radical Enlightenment offers a critical counterpoint. He reminds us that freedom must be real, not rhetorical; that justice must be social, not merely individual; and that democracy must be transformative, not merely procedural.
The Misuse of Enlightenment Language: Liberty Without Substance
The legacy of the Enlightenment, like that of any major intellectual tradition, is subject to contestation, reinterpretation, and, increasingly, strategic misappropriation. In the contemporary era, especially under the twin pressures of neoliberal ideology and reactionary populism, Enlightenment language — liberty, reason, rights, individualism — is frequently invoked in ways that distort or evacuate its original emancipatory content. What was once a call to arms against arbitrary power, economic dependency, and clerical domination has, in many quarters, degenerated into ideological camouflage for inequality, privatization, and elite governance.
This misuse is not accidental; it is structural. In a political economy dominated by capital accumulation and increasingly mediated by corporate media, think tanks, and technocratic elites, language itself becomes commodified — divorced from its historical and material roots, turned into branding. “Freedom” is repurposed to defend deregulation; “rights” are weaponized to resist taxation or public health mandates; “government overreach” becomes a catch-all justification for dismantling public institutions. This is the Jeffersonian register of liberty, stripped of its republican conscience and radical core — a hollowed-out Enlightenment reduced to what philosopher Charles Taylor once called “atomism”: the isolated, self-interested individual protected from interference, but also abandoned by the collective.
Consider the contemporary discourse around “freedom” in the context of healthcare, labor rights, or education. In the United States and increasingly elsewhere, public provision of basic services is denounced as a violation of individual liberty. The idea that one might be entitled to medical care, housing, or dignified employment is dismissed as collectivist or even totalitarian — a distortion of the Enlightenment ideal. And yet, as Thomas Paine argued more than two centuries ago, freedom without economic security is an illusion. In Agrarian Justice, he insisted that society owed each person a “right of natural inheritance” — a claim that would today be labeled “unrealistic” by centrists or “socialist” by conservatives. Paine understood what many modern interpreters do not: that liberty must be made real through public provision and institutional design.
By contrast, Jeffersonian liberalism — at least in its vulgarized, modern form — offers a dangerously thin conception of freedom: one that privileges property rights over human rights, choice over capacity, and procedural democracy over substantive justice. The notion that a person sleeping under a bridge and a billionaire each have the same “freedom” to purchase a home, or that both are “equally free” in a market unmediated by regulation, is not merely absurd — it is ideological mystification. It cloaks structural inequality in the language of fairness, while undermining any collective response to shared crises.
This ideological maneuver is not limited to market libertarians. In global affairs, Enlightenment language has been equally repurposed to justify interventionism and imperial projection. Phrases such as “spreading democracy,” “human rights enforcement,” and “liberation from tyranny” have been used to rationalize military invasions, regime change operations, and economic restructuring plans imposed by global financial institutions. Here, the Enlightenment's universalism is weaponized — not to emancipate, but to dominate. The result is a form of liberal empire, cloaked in the very values that once sought to abolish empire altogether.
Nor is the misuse of Enlightenment language confined to the right. Progressive movements, too, sometimes fall into the trap of abstract moralism — invoking “justice,” “equality,” or “human dignity” without fully grappling with the institutional mechanisms required to realize them. This reflects the moral thinning of political discourse: ideals are presented as self-evident, without connection to the structures of labor, ownership, governance, and social reproduction that make or break them in practice. The Enlightenment was, at its best, not simply a celebration of high-minded values, but a confrontation with how power, superstition, and custom conspire to deform those values in the real world.
This is what makes Thomas Paine’s Enlightenment so vital: it never loses sight of the material basis of liberty. Paine was not content with rights on paper or freedom as metaphor. He demanded concrete reforms — pensions, land redistribution, universal suffrage — that would institutionalize liberty in everyday life. In doing so, he exposed the limits of a purely rhetorical Enlightenment and insisted on a republic of substance, not just form.
As according to his work "The Rights of Man", Paine said:
“It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It operates by a contrary effect — that of taking rights away.”
In this short line, Paine demolishes centuries of contractual ideology. Rights, for him, are not granted by rulers, constitutions, or governments — they are inherent, and any system of law that fails to reflect them is illegitimate. This stands in stark contrast to the legal formalism that dominates much of liberal jurisprudence today, where the mere existence of procedural channels is taken as proof of justice, even when those channels systematically favor the powerful.
To recover the Enlightenment — not as myth, but as method — is to return to this spirit of radical critique. It means rejecting the idea that freedom can be divorced from equality, that justice is merely procedural, or that government is either omnipotent or unnecessary. It means recognizing that Enlightenment values must be realized through institutions, not slogans; through solidarity, not atomization; through redistribution, not rhetoric.
In short, the Enlightenment people are taught to revere — often reduced to Jeffersonian clichés — is not the Enlightenment people need. But instead, people need Paine’s Enlightenment: impolite, uncompromising, material, and democratic to its core.
Feudalism Without Noblesse Oblige, Democracy Without Equality?
-The Jeffersonian Contradiction
Thomas Jefferson, for all his Enlightenment sympathies and rhetorical commitment to liberty, projected a political and social vision that was deeply hierarchical in both structure and imagination. His writings overflow with paeans to reason, science, and natural rights — yet the world he desired bore an eerie resemblance not to a radically new order, but to a sanitized restoration of old ones: a republic of landed gentry without monarchs, a feudal economy without titled lords, a democracy without equal citizens.
Jefferson’s “ideal society” was one in which a class of independent property holders — educated, virtuous, and agrarian — would govern themselves through deliberation and mutual respect. But this ideal was not a break from the past. Rather, it was a translation of older hierarchies into republican language. The yeoman farmer was not a revolutionary subject but a stand-in for the medieval vassal — loyal, moral, independent in form but interdependent in function. Jefferson despised the European nobility, but not necessarily its social function as a class of supposed moral custodians. He merely redistributed this function horizontally to white, male property owners, without any formal obligation to those below.
In this way, Jefferson’s society resembled feudalism stripped of its ethical duties. Unlike the medieval ideal of noblesse oblige, which required the ruling classes to care for the peasantry and defend the realm in exchange for privilege, Jefferson’s ruling class bore no such burdens. Their virtue was assumed; their wealth considered natural. What replaced obligation was ideology — the belief that freedom was its own reward, and that the free man owed nothing to those who had not achieved the same status.
This vision dovetailed with a Greek model of citizenship, which Jefferson admired — particularly the Athenian notion of active participation in civic life. But Jefferson also mirrored its exclusions: just as Athenian democracy was built atop a foundation of slavery and patriarchy, Jefferson’s republic systematically excluded women, the poor, the enslaved, and Indigenous peoples. Equality, in his schema, was not a universal right but a selective privilege — extended only to those deemed capable of reason, self-governance, and property stewardship. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson muses:
“The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them.”
And yet, his own actions — as a slaveholder, land speculator, and President — contradicted this very sentiment, placing him firmly among the “booted and spurred.”
In practice, Jefferson’s political project complemented the existing order rather than replaced it. Where monarchy relied on divine right and bloodline, Jeffersonian republicanism substituted education and landownership as the new currency of power. Where feudalism demanded loyalty in exchange for protection, Jeffersonianism demanded nothing but acquiescence from the unpropertied. The Enlightenment's promise of universal reason and natural equality was, in his hands, narrowed to fit a colonial, racialized, and patriarchal framework.
Thus, Jefferson’s system was radical in appearance but conservative in function. His rhetoric allowed elites to claim the mantle of liberty while preserving their economic and racial privileges. His Enlightenment was bounded — a philosophy that could be universal in theory but particular in application.
This contradiction persists into the present. In the modern neoliberal order, one can trace the Jeffersonian logic in the valorization of the “self-made individual,” the suspicion of the state, and the resistance to redistributive justice. Liberty is praised, but obligation is scorned. Democracy is performed, but equality is postponed. Structural power is obscured by the illusion of choice. The elite citizen is still “booted and spurred,” though now riding algorithms and hedge funds instead of horses.
To reclaim the democratic project today requires confronting this Jeffersonian legacy not with reverence but with rigor. One must ask: What kind of freedom is the people defending, and for whom? What kind of democracy do people want — one of rituals and abstractions, or one of equal power and shared responsibility?
Toward a Democratic Renewal: A "Laocracy" of the People
The Enlightenment — that epochal shift in human self-understanding — was never a monolith. It was always a contested arena, a field of argument and rupture, as much as of consensus. Across Europe and the Atlantic world, its champions waged war against inherited privilege, ecclesiastical absolutism, and feudal stagnation — but they did not all envision the same end. Jeffersonian liberalism and Paineite republicanism emerged from the same crucible, but diverged sharply in purpose. Today, as we confront mounting crises — ecological, political, economic, and epistemological — the task is not to recover the Enlightenment as it has been canonized, but to resurrect and refine its unrealized, suppressed, and radical traditions.
Modern liberal democracies often claim descent from Enlightenment values. And yet the forms of representative government they uphold frequently coexist with, and indeed depend upon, deep inequalities of wealth, access, and recognition. Elections are held, but policy remains largely insulated from popular will. Rights are proclaimed, but increasingly hollowed out by market dependency. The institutions of democracy persist, but their legitimacy erodes under the weight of technocracy, plutocracy, and surveillance.
In this context, Enlightenment language has become dangerously plastic — able to support both emancipatory and reactionary projects. “Freedom” is evoked to defend the right of corporations to pollute, “reason” to justify drone warfare, and “progress” to displace indigenous communities in the name of development. This is not Enlightenment as a practice of liberation, but Enlightenment as managerial ideology — as cultural varnish for neoliberal governance. As philosopher Nancy Fraser has noted, the “progressive-neoliberal” coalition of the late twentieth century offered a version of emancipation that was hollowed of solidarity and unmoored from material redistribution. In this vacuum, populist reactionaries have seized Enlightenment rhetoric to further insidious ends — claiming the mantle of "free speech," "national sovereignty," and "civic tradition" while attacking democratic pluralism and social protection.
Thomas Paine’s writings present a fundamental alternative to this captured Enlightenment. He did not write to flatter the existing order, but to upend it. Unlike Jefferson, who envisioned an agrarian republic based on propertied independence and a stratified polity, Paine called for a democratic revolution of both form and content. He sought not merely representative government, but active citizenship — what the ancient Greeks might have called laokratia, rule by the demos in its living sense.
For Paine, democracy was not merely a structure of electoral choice, but a moral commitment to the dignity and capacity of ordinary people to govern themselves and shape their common world. In The Rights of Man, he excoriated monarchies not only for their injustice, but for their infantilization of the populace — the idea that people must be ruled because they cannot rule themselves. And in Agrarian Justice, Paine proposed concrete policies that would later influence the welfare state: pensions for the elderly, support for the poor, and a form of basic income funded by a land tax. These were not utopian dreams, but rational applications of Enlightenment principles to lived reality.
“When it shall be said in any country in the world, my poor are happy... my jails are empty... the aged are not in want... the taxes are not oppressive... then may that country boast its constitution and its government.” — The Rights of Man
This standard — material, moral, and institutional — remains far from realized even in the most developed democracies. The U.S., for example, boasts a constitutional tradition of liberty while presiding over mass incarceration, child poverty, medical bankruptcy, and disenfranchisement. Such conditions are not failures of execution but symptoms of foundational compromises: a liberalism afraid of equality, a democracy fearful of its demos.
To reclaim democracy in the Paineite sense, we must think beyond the empty rituals of formal citizenship. The ballot box alone is insufficient if economic power remains oligarchic, and if public deliberation is drowned out by capital-intensive media, lobbying, and corporate misinformation. Real democracy — laocracy — requires participatory institutions, economic democratization, and civic education.
Imagine a democracy in which workers co-own their enterprises, in which local assemblies shape budgetary priorities, in which digital platforms are public utilities designed for common deliberation, not private surveillance. This is not fantasy. Experiments in participatory budgeting, worker cooperatives, and citizens’ assemblies are already underway — from Porto Alegre to Barcelona to Iceland. But they remain fragmented and under assault by systems built to favor elite control.
Paine’s vision of democracy is instructive here not because he foresaw today's technologies, but because he understood the enduring questions: Who decides? Who benefits? Who belongs? His demand that “the world be made anew” was not a call for abstract reform, but for a reconstitution of authority — a dethroning of inherited privilege and a return of power to its source: the people, in their diversity, dignity, and reason.
“There are two distinct classes of men — those who pay taxes and those who receive and live upon the taxes.” — Rights of Man
This class analysis, often overlooked in liberal readings of Paine, reveals his core insight: democracy must be built not just against tyranny but against structural dependence — whether feudal, clerical, or capitalist. To this end, he prefigured many of the demands now central to democratic renewal: public control of essential services, social provision of welfare, and the extension of rights beyond the bounds of nationality or class.
Paine’s Enlightenment was never parochial. Unlike Jefferson — whose liberty was bound up with landowning and whose republicanism was bounded by the nation-state — Paine insisted that justice must be universal. He supported the French Revolution, the abolition of slavery, and the emancipation of women, despite prevailing norms. His idea of “The world is my country” was not a negation of local community, but a rejection of arbitrary borders as moral boundaries.
This has profound implications today. In an era of climate crisis, migration, and global inequality, democracy cannot stop at the water’s edge. The structures that govern lives — from financial flows to carbon emissions — are planetary in scope. Any democratic renewal must therefore include new forms of global solidarity and governance. This might mean global tax coordination, transnational unions, climate assemblies, and digital commons — institutions capable of enacting the shared interests of humanity rather than the extractive interests of a few.
In this light, Paine’s republicanism anticipates not merely a better national politics, but a reconstitution of global order: democratic in form, egalitarian in substance, and emancipatory in scope.
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