Revolutionary road

THOMAS PAINE is the most important political thinker America has produced, a former British excise officer who emigrated to Philadelphia in 1774 and within 14 months had published the pamphlet “Common Sense.” Yet Paine was not just an American insurrectionist but a true believer who thought the lessons of revolution could be applied across the globe.

“The great achievement of Paine,” Christopher Hitchens notes in “Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man” (Atlantic Monthly Press: 158 pp., $19.95), “was to have introduced the discussion of human rights, and of their concomitant in democracy, to a large and often newly literate popular audience. Prior to this, discussion about ‘rights’ had been limited to ‘natural’ or ‘civil’ rights, and had been limited further to debates between philosophers.” If such a discussion sprouted in “Common Sense,” it bloomed, Hitchens suggests, with “The Declaration of the Rights of Man.”

Hitchens’ book is brief but potent, mixing biography, criticism and philosophy. At its center is his understanding of how committed Paine was to the cause. “The whole ‘project’ of ‘Rights of Man,’ ” Hitchens writes, “. . . was in the first instance an attempt to marry the ideas of the American and French Revolutions, and in the second instance an attempt to disseminate these ideas in Britain. For Paine, these objectives were essentially three facets of the same symbol.” His book was also a rebuke to Edmund Burke, whose “Reflections on the Revolution in France” presented a more reactionary point of view.

Paine paid a steep price for his beliefs: He was imprisoned in France after the Revolution, later forced to leave England for his anti-religious writings and essentially shunned upon his return to the United States. And yet, this unwillingness to compromise is precisely why he remains essential, “part of the arsenal,” Hitchens insists here, “on which we shall need to depend.”

David L. Ulin

david.ulin@latimes.com