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Article: Tom Paine: A Political Life.
- Article from:
- The New Leader
- Article date:
- May 8, 1995
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1995 American Labor Conference on International Affairs. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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In The Old Regime and French Revolution Tocqueville denounces "Revolutionaries of a hitherto unknown breed," who in the 1790s propounded novel doctrines in both politics and religion. Subsequently, he says, they "made good and proliferated in all parts of the civilized world, everywhere retaining the same characteristics." The very sort of man he had in mind was Tom Paine, author of the four most widely read pamphlets of his day: Common Sense, The Crisis, Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason. If he was not, as John Keane maintains in Tom Paine: A Political Life (Little, Brown, 644 pp., $27.95), "the greatest political figure of his generation," he was a major participant in ...