I was surprised – and pleased – to learn yesterday that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a new entry up on Thomas Paine.

The entry came as a surprise because, with relatively few exceptions, Paine’s thought hasn’t received much attention from academic philosophers. As the entry itself notes:

[Paine] was a controversialist—what he wrote invariably provoked controversy and was intended to do so. As such, one needs a reasonably capacious understanding of ‘philosophy’ to count him as a philosopher. He was a pamphleteer, a journalist, a propagandist, a polemicist. Nonetheless, he also settled on a number of basic principles that have subsequently become central to much liberal-democratic culture. Few of these are original to Paine, but his drawing together of them, and his bringing them before a wide popular audience, at this key historical moment when the people emerge as a consistent and increasingly independent force on the political stages of Europe and North America, has ensured that his works remain widely read and are seen as of enduring value.

One of Paine’s most important ideas, and certainly his most important idea from a libertarian perspective, was his distinction between society and government.

‘Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices’ (CW I, 4). [CW refers to The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, P.S. Foner (ed.), 1945.] As with many Paine claims, this seems simple, intuitive, and attractive. Our interests unite us, and it is only when we overstep the legitimate bounds of those interests, or push them to the detriment of others, that we need constraint. But when we do that, we ought to know better, and as such Government can appropriately be regarded as constraining our vices. What is less clear is how far we must assume vice (and thereby government). ‘Society is every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.’

Common Sense is, of course, Paine’s best-known work. But his later two-part book, The Rights of Man, contains a far more sophisticated discussion of the idea of natural rights on which his earlier work largely depends. For instance, Paine distinguishes

between natural rights, where we necessarily have the power to execute the right (as in the right of conscience), as against rights where we need the arm of society to secure the right (as in property)… In a letter to Jefferson written in 1788/9 Paine draws a distinction between ‘rights they could individually exercise fully and perfectly, and those they could not’ (CW II, 1298). In the reply to Burke this is used to show that every civil right grows out of a natural right or ‘is a natural right exchanged)’; that the civil power is made up of the aggregate of that class of the natural rights of man, which becomes defective in the individual in point of power; and that the power produced from the aggregate of natural rights, imperfect in power in the individual’, cannot be applied to invade the natural rights which are retained by the individual…’ (CW I, 276).

But while libertarians have generally applauded the Paine’s emphasis on natural rights and limited governments, the entry notes that Paine has also come to be “seen by many as a key figure in the emergence of claims for the state’s responsibilities for welfare and educational provision.” Part of the reason for this reputation is the somewhat puzzling final chapter of The Rights of Man, in which Paine

develops a series of welfare proposals that seem to have no underlying principle of justice, but are proffered wholly as a way of redirecting spending. He advocates that poor relief be removed as a local tax and replaced by central provision from government coffers; that pensions be offered for those advanced in age, starting at 50, and in full form at 60; that provision be made for the education of the poor; that maternity be benefit be granted to all women immediately after the birth of a child; that a fund be established for the burial of those who die away from home; and that arrangements be made for the many young people who travel to the metropolis in search of a livelihood to provide initial accommodation and support until they find work.

Paine’s support for various welfare measures would eventually receive a much more principled grounding in his  pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, in which Paine articulated a theory of property that seems to place him in the camp of contemporary left-libertarians like Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner.

The ad hoc turn to welfare in the second part of Rights of Man (1792) finds some compensation in the short pamphlet, Agrarian Justice (1795-6), that Paine wrote after his release from prison in response to the unrest in 1795 in Paris as protests spread against the economic hardship suffered in the capital, stimulating culminating in Babeuf’s conspiracy of equals [MZ: link mine]. Unlike the final chapter of Rights of Man, Agrarian Justice provides a principled defense for welfare provision, rooted in a conception of the original equality of man and the equal right to a subsistence from the earth. He acknowledges that there are benefits to allowing private property in land and its cultivation, but argues that every proprietor owes the community a ground-rent for the land he holds, which should be used as a right of inheritance for all, paying the sum of £15 as a compensation for the loss of natural inheritance at the age of twenty-one and an annual grant to the aged. These payments are a matter of right, not of charity. A claim against the common stock that all may make, on the ground that ‘no person ought to be in a worse condition when born under what is called a state of civilization, than he would have been had he been born in a state of nature…’ (I, 613). The money is to be raised from progressive taxation in inherited wealth and will contribute to its more equal distribution.

There’s much more in the entry, and even more at the Online Library of Liberty page on Thomas Paine, including HTML, PDF, and Kindle versions of the Complete Writings, and a choice selection of quotations, including this gem on the true origins of governments:

It is impossible that such governments as have hitherto existed in the world, could have commenced by any other means than a total violation of every principle sacred and moral. The obscurity in which the origin of all the present old governments is buried, implies the iniquity and disgrace with which they began. The origin of the present government of America and France will ever be remembered, because it is honourable to record it; but with respect to the rest. even Flattery has consigned them to the tomb of time, without an inscription.It could have been no difficult thing in the early and solitary ages of the world, while the chief employment of men was that of attending flocks and herds, for a banditti of ruffians to overrun a country, and lay it under contributions. Their power being thus established, the chief of the band contrived to lose the name of Robber in that of Monarch; and hence the origin of Monarchy and Kings.