Nov 28 2008
THE COMMODIFICATION OF REVOLUTION part 30 American Rev
Before Paine, the monarchy and hereditary authority had rarely been questioned. Republican government was not even an issue brought up. Paine dismissed the English constitution, which had been guiding revolutionary thought until this point, and instead replaced it with the notion “that balanced government was essential to liberty.”* Paine helped create “the secular language of revolution.”** Common Sense called for independence in a manner more boldly than had ever been spoken of before. To Paine, “war was inevitable.”*** The only way to achieve freedom was through a bloody war with England.
Paine articulated his argument which allowed him to reach hundreds of thousands of people. He wrote in language that almost anyone could understand. He did not reference obscure or even well known works of great literature in the pedantic manner of pamphleteers prior to himself.**** “Politics, Paine insisted, could and must be reduced to easily comprehensible first principles…And the first axiom of Paine’s politics was simply the possibility of change.”***** Paine’s writings reached the masses in a manner unmatched at that time. “Common Sense went through twenty-five editions…in the single year 1776.”******
* Eric Foner, Tom Paine & Revolutionary America, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 75-76.
** Ibid., xv.
*** Ibid., 77.
**** Wood, 55-56.
***** E. Foner, 85.
****** Ibid., 79.
