The rhetoric that drove the decade or so of the founding of the American republic reflected historically unprecedented statecraft. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, The Federalist Papers, and Thomas Paine's two firebrand revolutionary texts--Common Sense and The American Crisis series of pamphlets--reflected in multiple ways the crowning achievement, in the Americas, of Enlightenment political and social thought emanating from Europe. Paine's two texts, published in 1776, were widely disseminated and highly influential on public opinion, and knowledge of how those and other texts came into being is essential to establishing the context for analysis of Age of Reason.
Paine's texts were not documents of governance but rather in the nature of public-relations support for the Revolution. As a native-born Englishman (1736), he was completely aware of the class and economic cleavages between England's aristocracy and virtually everyone else. Even though he was an inventor and craftsman of sorts--most famously a staymaker--he appears to have managed to abandon the military and civil service and several trades in succession, making an actual success of none and becoming involved in litigation and pamphleteering. When he and his second wife separated in 1774, he left England and traveled to America. He was 39. Based in Philadelphia, he became an enthusiastic revolutionary partisan and pamphleteer--hence Common Sense and American Crisis.
As revolution in France gathered momentum in 1789, Paine traveled to Paris, where he became increasingly enthusiastic about--and involved in--revolutionary politics. His publication in 1792 of Rights of Man answered MP Edmund Burke's denunciation of the French Revolution; it was written and published in London, and Paine was tried (in absentia, as he had absconded to Paris) for sedition. As a member of the French Convention, a revolutionary governance committee, he a...