The MeetingThe Quaker Tradition
17th-18th c. · English / American
The deepest layer. Paine’s father Joseph was a Quaker; the meeting at Thetford taught Paine plain prose, suspicion of priestcraft, distrust of titles, and the right of any conscience to read the world for itself. The Quaker objection to the slave trade reaches Paine’s African Slavery in America (1775); the Quaker objection to oaths and salutes reaches every later argument against ceremonial authority. Paine fought with American Quakers over war (they were pacifists; he was not) but never lost the meeting’s grammar of conscience.
The EnglishmanJohn Locke
1632-1704 · English
The natural-rights argument in Common Sense and Rights of Man is Lockean in shape: government rests on consent, consent can be withdrawn, the state is a trust the people may dissolve when it betrays them. Paine never quotes Locke; he absorbs him through the dissenting press of his Lewes years and reissues the argument in plainer English than Locke ever wrote it.
The GenevanJean-Jacques Rousseau
1712-1778 · Genevan
The general-will tradition Paine inherits in Paris -- the case for direct expression of popular sovereignty against the “balanced” constitutional schemes of Burke and the British Whigs. Paine’s 1793 work with Condorcet on the Girondin draft constitution is the most Rousseauian moment of his career; it is also the constitution the Jacobins killed.
The MathematicianIsaac Newton
1643-1727 · English
The deistical theology of The Age of Reason rests on a Newtonian premise: the universe is regular, intelligible, and lawful, and therefore points to a Creator inferable from nature alone -- not from scripture. Paine taught himself enough mathematics to read Newton seriously; the iron-arch bridge model he carried back to Europe in 1787 is one piece of evidence, the late letters on natural philosophy another.
The EncyclopedistThe French Philosophes
mid-18th c. · French
By the time Paine reached Paris in 1787 the high Encyclopedie generation was largely dead, but their pamphleteer disciples -- Condorcet, Brissot, Sieyes -- were the company he kept in the early Convention. The deistic religion of The Age of Reason, the rationalist confidence in human improvement, the contempt for clerical authority: all of it has Diderot and d’Alembert in the bloodline, transposed into Paine’s plainer English idiom.
The BooksellerJoseph Johnson’s Circle
1738-1809 · London
Joseph Johnson’s shop in St Paul’s Churchyard was the working address of late-18th-century English radicalism: Wollstonecraft, Blake, Priestley, Godwin, Holcroft, Fuseli. Paine sat at Johnson’s table during the 1790-92 London years and published Part I of Rights of Man through Johnson’s press (Johnson lost his nerve at the proof stage; J. S. Jordan finished the print run, and was prosecuted for it).
The PamphleteersThe Real Whigs
17th-18th c. · English
Algernon Sidney, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon (Cato’s Letters), James Burgh: the radical-Whig opposition tradition that travelled from London to Boston in the chests of every literate American Patriot. The standing-army argument, the executive-corruption argument, the case for representation against virtual representation -- all of it reaches Paine through the same channel it reached Adams and Jefferson.
The ScientistBenjamin Franklin
1706-1790 · American
Less an intellectual influence than a personal model -- the printer’s apprentice who became a continent. Franklin met Paine in London in 1774 and recognized in him the talent he himself had been: an autodidact, a working journalist, a natural philosopher with a useful pen. The letters of introduction Franklin wrote opened Philadelphia, and Paine kept Franklin’s ironic prose tone in his head for the rest of his life. The full story is on the connections page.
The BibleThe King James Bible
1611 · English
Paine’s closest study, even when he was attacking it. Half of The Age of Reason Part II is a book-by-book examination of the Old Testament, conducted (Paine notes more than once) without a copy of the Bible in his cell -- he was working from memory. The cadences are Authorized; the conclusions are not. No anti-scriptural writer of the eighteenth century knew the text better.