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When Paine took the gloves off. Four set-piece exchanges that defined the public-arguments tradition of the late eighteenth century.
Opponent: Edmund Burke -- Anglo-Irish statesman; author of *Reflections on the Revolution in France* (1790)
The founding exchange of modern political thought. Burke's *Reflections* (Nov 1790) attacked the French Revolution and inherited an entire tradition of conservatism; Paine's *Rights of Man* (Mar 1791) answered it and founded modern liberalism. Read as a pair ever since.
Opponent: Edmund Burke -- Anglo-Irish statesman
Part II of *Rights of Man* extends the argument from a defense of revolution to a positive program: progressive taxation, child allowances, old-age pensions, public education, public works for the unemployed. The first welfare-state proposal in English. Cost Paine his English liberty.
Opponent: Bishop Richard Watson -- Bishop of Llandaff; author of *An Apology for the Bible* (1796)
Watson's *Apology for the Bible* (1796) was the most widely-read of the dozens of clerical replies to *The Age of Reason* Part I. Paine added a long footnote to Part II answering Watson directly; the exchange became standard reading on both sides of the deistical controversy.
Opponent: George Washington -- President of the United States
Convinced Washington had let him rot in the Luxembourg as a Federalist favor, Paine wrote a public *Letter to George Washington* that crossed the line from grievance to disownment. Shocking even to Paine's own friends. Washington never replied. They never reconciled.