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A syllabus is easier to finish than an archive. Each path below is a sequence on one theme, ordered to build understanding step by step. A path a month; the canon by year's end.
Five works, in order. The minimum case for understanding why Paine matters: the pamphlet that started a revolution, the essay that saved one, the book that launched another, the book that broke the priesthood's monopoly on morality, and the proposal that anticipated the welfare state by 150 years.
Common Sense and the nine surviving Crisis papers Conway prints. Read across an evening each: this is what military stationery and tavern broadsheets sounded like in the years when the United States was being argued into existence.
Paine's most systematic political writing, in argument-building order. Begin with the answer to Burke; end with the proof that hereditary government is rationally indefensible. The case for written constitutions, popular sovereignty, and elected magistracy.
Written half from a Paris hotel, half from the Luxembourg prison cell, the Age of Reason was the book that earned Paine the slur this site is named for. The argument: deism is what reason produces when it is allowed to range over the actual evidence of the world. Read the two parts in sequence, then the late-life refinements.
Long before economics had a name, Paine wrote the first proposal for a universal old-age pension and a universal stake-grant at majority. He wrote against slavery, against state-issued paper money, and against the moral economy of monarchy. The case for a republic that pays its dues to its citizens.
From the morning he and du Chastellet pasted the Republican Proclamation on the Tuileries to the night Robespierre fell and the Luxembourg gates opened. Read these in date order: it is the most documented stretch of Paine's life and a near-day-by-day account of how a revolution turns on its own.
Each path is a suggestion, not a syllabus you must obey. Skip; reread; reorder. The point is that the canon should feel surveyable. If you finish all six, you have read every major piece Paine published.