bloodygranuaile

Somehow over the last couple weeks I got myself into reading the Oxford World Classics edition of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings. It started when I decided that I had to read “Agrarian Justice” for the same stupid DSA presentation that I made myself read four other books for. “Agrarian Justice” is only 40 pages, out of a nearly 500-page book, so I could have left it there. But then I went back to the beginning to read “Common Sense,” and then I felt like I had already spent enough time reading that I should read the whole book so I could count it as A Book for my Goodreads. So then I had to read all 500 pages, at which point, it promptly began to feel like a chore instead of a fun thing. I’ve also now read like six political nonfiction books in a row and I really should have read something fun instead because now I’m looking at having less than four weeks to also read the 500-page Naomi Klein book on climate change that I suggested and I feel like I’m going to cry. HELP I NEED A BREAK. I’m at MurderBooze and I can’t make myself write and I can’t make myself do anything and I still managed to make myself finish this book and I don’t even feel good about it even though it’s the only thing on my enormous to-do list I have done all weekend. I didn’t even make breakfast this morning like I signed up to do.

Anyway, this is supposed to be a book review and not a chronicle of my current emotional breakdown, so here goes.

::stares at wall::

Honestly, as far as 18th-century political treatises go, most of it’s quite readable. There’s a lot of stuff about specific tax policies and naval resources and whatnot where the specifics are quite dated, and I skipped over most of the tables of proposed revenues and expenditures that he puts forth because it’s more than 200 years later and I do not care, but there are a lot of jokes at the expense of conservatives at the time that are still mildly amusing. “Common Sense” is still pretty stirring and contains a lot more in the way of actual arguments put forth than anything that’s ever had the phrase “common sense” appended to it in the intervening 250-odd years; either Paine is a very singular writer or the phrase had not yet acquired the meaning of “I adamantly refuse to put forth an argument for my beliefs” that it currently has. One interesting argument that Paine puts forth in that one is that the 13 colonies together constituted a country that was, like, the proper size to have a revolution, because if it were much larger it would be ungovernably large and it would be basically too hard for it to make functional decisions. I think he might have been on to something.

“Rights of Man” had some interesting stuff about, well, the rights of man, but most of it actually consisted of either insulting Edmund Burke or proposing tax policies. The dunking on Burke was quite satisfying but the tax policies were less fun than the ones put forth in “Agrarian Justice,” which, although it was the last piece in the book, was the one I read first. “Rights of Man” takes up about half the book, and unfortunately was for me the least interesting to read. There are some short works, including two of the “American Crisis” installments and an interesting piece called “Letter Addressed to the Addressers,” which seems to concern Paine’s libel case that resulted in “Rights of Man” being banned in England.

“Agrarian Justice” is the piece I got the most out of, though, and I do think I could well have just read that one. In it, Paine puts forth not just a plan for Social Security that would only be implemented 150 years later, but he also puts forth a plan to give everyone a lump sum payout upon reaching the age of majority so they could establish themselves within civilization. This does seem to me to be a smarter economic move than ensuring that everyone reaches the age of majority one year’s salary in debt in order to establish themselves, but I digress. Paine also puts forth a thought-provoking political theory that the earth is everyone’s natural heritage, and that the system of landed capital therefore robs everyone who isn’t a landowner out of their natural inheritance, and that landowners should pay a “ground-rent” as reparations to everyone else, to manage the difference between the value added to the land by the labor of cultivating it, and the value of the land that occurs because the land exists without anyone creating it.

Much ink has been spilled recently about how the guys behind the American Revolution were largely rich white dudes who didn’t want to pay their taxes, and this is in large part true, but I think it’s worth reminding ourselves that that’s not all there was to it and there really was a lot of new thought and revolutionary ideals that went into the American and French revolutions. Paine in particular was not a rich landowner or a fancy lawyer, and who was willing to go out and get into all sorts of trouble for his beliefs, including a yearlong stint in a Luxembourg prison and getting personally banned from France. His writings are a fascinating look into an early form of left-liberalism that the conservatives who try to cast him as some sort of right-libertarian (probably because they want to be able to yell “It’s just common sense!” instead of defending their arguments) would likely be horrified to find if they ever read any of his stuff besides the first two lines of “American Crisis 1.”

Anyway, the important thing here is that now I can finally give the damn book back to the library. Hurrah!