Editor's Spotlight
If you read only six pieces of Paine, read these six. Each is the most consequential work of its kind: the pamphlet that started a revolution, the essay that saved one, the book that argued for a new political vocabulary, the book that tore at established religion, the proposal that anticipated the welfare state, and the indictment that broke a friendship between the most famous American and the most consequential pamphleteer of the age.
1
Common sense
The forty-eight-page pamphlet that, in three months, made independence unavoidable. The most-read political tract in American history; cite it as the founding document the founding documents were written under.
2
The american crisis 1
Written on a drumhead during the December 1776 retreat, read aloud to the Continental Army on the night before the Trenton crossing. Six pages. The first sentence is the most famous opening in American political writing.
3
Rights of man
Paine's answer to Burke. The argument for written constitutions, popular sovereignty, and elected magistracy, made in a voice that reached two hundred thousand English-language readers in eighteen months. Part Two is the more political; Part One is the more philosophical.
4
The age of reason
Composed in part in the Luxembourg Prison cell, finished after Paine's release. The case against revealed religion and for a deist natural-religion reading of the universe. The book that earned Paine the slur this site is named for.
5
Agrarian justice
Twenty-three pages, written in the winter of 1795-96. The first proposal in any language for a universal capital endowment at age 21 plus a universal old-age pension, financed by an inheritance tax on landed property. The eighteenth-century blueprint for what the twenty-first century calls Universal Basic Income.
6
Letter to george washington
The most disputed piece in the canon. Thirty thousand words indicting Washington for failing to secure Paine's release from the Luxembourg in 1793-94. We print it whole, unabridged. Read it after the Memorial to Monroe and Forgetfulness to see the rhetorical escalation.
If these six leave you wanting more, the Reading Paths are six curated sequences (First-time reader, Pamphleteer, Constitutional theorist, Freethinker, Economist & reformer, Paris years) that take you through the rest of the canon by theme.