E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left

The Free-born Englishman

When reform agitation resumed in 1816, it was not possible, either in London or in the industrial North or Midlands, to employ a “Church and King” mob to terrorise the Radicals. From time to time, between 1815 and 1850, Radicals, Owenites, or Chartists complained of the apathy of the people. But—if we leave out of account the usual election tumults—it is generally true that reformers were shielded by the support of working-class communities. At election times in the large towns, the open vote by show of hands on the “hustings” which preceded the poll usually went overwhelmingly for the most radical candidate. The reformers ceased to fear “the mob,” while the authorities were forced to build barracks and take precautions against the “revolutionary crowd.” This is one of those facts of history so big that it is easily overlooked, or assumed without question; and yet it indicates a major shift in emphasis in the inarticulate, “sub-political” attitudes of the masses. We must look in many directions to find reasons for this change—the Jacobin propaganda of the 1790s, the painful experiences of the Napoleonic Wars, effects of industrialisation, the growing discredit of the monarchy (culminating in the Queen Caroline agitation of 1820), increasing popular alienation from the established Church, the educative propaganda of Cobbett and of the cheap Radical press after 1815, the ambiguous influence of the Irish immigration (which—while a source of new tumults—was never a source for tame “Church and King” mobs).

The shift in emphasis is perhaps related to popular notions of “independence,” patriotism, and the Englishman”s “birthright.” The Gordon Rioters of 1780 and the “Church and King” rioters who destroyed the houses of wealthy dissenters in Birmingham in 1791 had this in common: they felt themselves, in some obscure way, to be defending the “Constitution” against alien elements who threatened their “birthright.” They had been taught for so long that the Revolution settlement, embodied in the Constitution of King, Lords and Commons, was the guarantee of British independence and liberties that a kind of reflex had been engendered—Constitution=Liberty—upon which the unscrupulous might play. And yet it is likely that the very rioters who destroyed Dr. Priestley’s precious library and laboratory were proud to regard themselves as “free-born Englishmen.” Patriotism, nationalism, even bigotry and repression, were all clothed in the rhetoric of liberty. Even Old Corruption extolled British liberties; not national honour, or power, but freedom was the coinage of patrician, demagogue and radical alike. In the name of freedom Burke denounced, and Paine championed, the French Revolution: with the opening of the French wars (1793), patriotism and liberty occupied every poetaster:

Thus Britons guard their ancient fame,

Assert their empire o’er the sea,

And to the envying world proclaim,

One nation still is brave and free—

Resolv’d to conquer or to die,

True to their KING, their LAWS, their LIBERTY.

The invasion scare of 1802–3 resulted in a torrent of broadsheets and ballads on such themes, which form a fitting background for Wordsworth’s smug and sonorous patriotic sonnets:

It is not to be thought of that the Flood

Of British freedom, which, to the open sea

Of the world’s praise, from dark antiquity

Hath flowed, “with pomp of waters, unwithstood.”

“Not to be thought of,” and yet, at this very time, freedom of the press, of public meeting, of trade union organisation, of political organisation and of election, were either severely limited or in abeyance. What, then, did the common Englishman’s “birthright” consist in? “Security of property,” answered Mary Wollstonecraft in her Rights of Men: “Behold . . . the definition of English liberty.” And yet the rhetoric of liberty meant much more—first of all, of course, freedom from foreign domination. And, within this enveloping haze of patriotic self-congratulation, there were other less distinct notions which Old Corruption felt bound to flatter and yet which were to prove dangerous to it in the long run. Freedom from absolutism (the constitutional monarchy), freedom from arbitrary arrest, trial by jury, equality before the law, the freedom of the home from arbitrary entrance and search, some limited liberty of thought, of speech, and of conscience, the vicarious participation in liberty (or in its semblance) afforded by the right of parliamentary opposition and by elections and election tumults (although the people had no vote they had the right to parade, huzza and jeer on the hustings), as well as freedom to travel, trade, and sell one’s own labour. Nor were any of these freedoms insignificant; taken together, they add up to a “moral consensus” in which authority at times shared, and of which at all times it was bound to take account.

Indefinite as such a notion of “moral consensus” may be, this question of the limits beyond which the Englishman was not prepared to be “pushed around,” and the limits beyond which authority did not dare to go, is crucial to an understanding of this period. The stance of the common Englishman was not so much democratic, in any positive sense, as anti-authoritarian. He felt himself to be an individualist, with few affirmative rights, but protected by the laws against the intrusion of arbitrary power. And this indeed was the central paradox of the 18th century, in both intellectual and practical terms: constitutionalism was the “illusion of the epoch.” Political theory, of traditionalists and reformers alike, was transfixed within the whiggish limits established by the 1688 settlement, by Locke, by Blackstone, in much the same way as the most diverse groups in the Soviet world today must argue out their differences within the terms and conventions of traditional Marxism. For Locke, the chief ends of government were the maintenance of civil peace, and the security of the person and of property. Such a theory, diluted by self-interest and prejudice, might provide the propertied classes with a sanction for the most bloody code penalising offenders against property; but it provided no sanction for arbitrary authority, intruding upon personal or property rights, and uncontrolled by the rule of law. Hence the paradox, which surprised many foreign observers, of a bloody penal code alongside a liberal and, at times, meticulous administration and interpretation of the laws. The 18th century was indeed a great century for constitutional theorists, judges, and lawyers. The poor man might often feel little protection when caught up in the law’s toils. But the jury system did afford a measure of protection, as Hardy, Horne Tooke, Thelwall and Binne discovered. Wilkes was able to defy King, Parliament and administration—and to establish important new precedents—by using alternatively the law courts and the “mob.” There was no droit administratif, no right of arbitrary arrest or search. Even in the 1790s, each attempt to introduce a “continental” spy system, each suspension of habeas corpus, each attempt to pack juries, aroused an outcry beyond the reformers’ own ranks. If any—faced by the records of Tyburn and of repression—are inclined to question the value of these limits, they should contrast the trial of Hardy and his colleagues with the treatment of Muir, Gerrald, Skirving and Palmer in 1793–4 in the Scottish courts.

This constitutionalism coloured the less articulate responses of the “free-born Englishman.” He claimed few rights except that of being left alone. No institution was as much hated, in the 18th century, as the press-gang. A standing army was distrusted, and few of Pitt’s repressive measures aroused as much discontent as the erection of barracks near the industrial towns. The profession of a soldier was held to be dishonourable. “In arbitrary Monarchies,” wrote one pamphleteer in 1793,

where the Despot who reigns can say to his wretched subjects, “Eat straw,” and they eat straw, no wonder that they can raise Armies of human Butchers, to destroy their fellow creatures; but, in a country like Great Britain, which at least is pretended to be free, it becomes a matter of no small surprise that so many thousands of men should deliberately renounce the privileges and blessings attendant on Freemen, and voluntarily sell themselves to the most humiliating and degrading Slavery, for the miserable pittance of sixpence a day.

Resistance to an effective police force continued well into the 19th century. Moreover, not only freedom from intrusion but also equality before the law was a source of popular congratulation. Sensational reading matter, such as the New Newgate Calendar; or Malefactor’s Bloody Register, recorded with satisfaction instances of the noble and titled brought to. Tyburn. Local annalists recorded smugly such cases as that of Leeds’ “domineering villanous lord of the manor” who was executed in 1748 for killing one of his own tenants in a fit of temper. And, in hostility to the powers of any central authority, we have a curious blend of popular and parochial defensiveness. Local rights and customs were cherished against the encroachment of the State by gentry and common people alike; hostility to “the Thing” and to “Bashaws” contributed much to the Tory-Radical strain which runs through from Cobbett to Oastler, and which reached its climax in the resistance to the Poor Law of 1834.

This notion of the rule of law as the effective defence of the citizen against arbitrary authority was accepted by even the extreme reformers. The London Corresponding Society, in an Address of 1793 sought to define the difference in status between the English commoner and the commoner in pre-revolutionary France: “Our persons were protected by the laws, while their lives were at the mercy of every titled individual. . . . We were MEN while they were SLAVES.” But this defensive ideology nourished, of course, far larger claims to positive rights. Wilkes had known well how to strike this chord—the champion defending his individual rights passed imperceptibly into the free-born citizen challenging King and Ministers and claiming rights for which there was no precedent. In 1776 Wilkes went so far as to plead in the House of Commons for the political rights of “the meanest mechanic, the poorest peasant and day labourer,” who—

has important rights respecting his personal liberty, that of his wife and children, his property however inconsiderable, his wages . . . which are in many trades and manufacturers regulated by the power of Parliament. . . . Some share therefore in the power of making those laws which deeply interest them . . . should be reserved even to this inferior but most useful set of men.

The argument is still that of Ireton (or Burke) but property-rights are interpreted in a far more liberal sense; and Wilkes rounded it off with the customary appeal to tradition and precedent: “Without a true representation of the Commons our constitution is essentially defective . . . and all other remedies to recover the pristine purity of the form of government established by our ancestors would be ineffectual.”

“Pristine purity,” “our ancestors”—these are key phrases, and for 20 years arguments among reformers turned upon nice interpretations of these terms. Which model was pure and pristine, to which ancestors should reformers refer? To the founding fathers of the United States, breaking free from the trammels of precedent, it seemed sufficient to find certain truths “self-evident.” But to Major John Cartwright (1740–1824) publishing his pamphlet Take Your Choice in the same year as the Declaration of Independence (1776), it seemed necessary to shore up his case for annual parliaments, equal electoral districts, payment of members, and adult manhood suffrage, with reference to Saxon precedent. The “good, grey major” defined as early as this the main claims of advanced political reformers, from 1776 to the Chartists and beyond. And from these claims he never swerved. Incorruptible, incapable of compromise, eccentric and courageous, the Major pursued his single-minded course, issuing letters, appeals, and pamphlets, from his seat in Boston, Lincs, surviving trials, tumults, dissension and repression. It was he who sallied forth after the Napoleonic Wars, to found the first reform societies of a new era, the Hampden Clubs. But although the Major’s principles and proposals outlived his own long lifetime, his arguments did not.

In a moment, we shall see why. (The answer, in two words, is Tom Paine.) But we should first note that in the 20 years before the French Revolution a new dimension was in practice being added to the accepted procedures of the constitution. The Press had already established indefinite rights independent of King, Lords and Commons; and the agitation surrounding Wilkes’ North Briton revealed both the precariousness of these rights and the sensitivity of a large public in their defence. But the second half of the 18th century sees also the rise of the Platform—the “extra-parliamentary” pressure group, campaigning for more or less limited aims, mobilising opinion “without doors” by means of publications, great meetings, and petitions. A new cog was added to the complicated machinery of constitution; Erskine and Wyvill, using the familiar mechanical imagery of checks and balances, called for “Clock-Work Regularity in the movements of the People.” Major John Cartwright went further—the more fuss stirred up, for the most far-reaching demands, among all classes of people, the better:

On the old maxim of teaching a young archer to shoot at the moon [he wrote to Wyvill] in order that he may acquire the power of throwing his arrow far enough for practical purposes, I have always thought that a free discussion of the principle of Universal Suffrage the most likely means of obtaining any Reform at all worth contending for.

For the Major—although he couched his arguments in terms of precedent and tradition—believed in methods of agitation among “members unlimited.” In the dark winter of repression, 1797–9, the gallant squire of Boston issued a reproof to the caution of the pusillanimous North Yorkshire reformer. “I am but little afraid of your Yeomanry,” he wrote to Wyvill, “but your Gentlemen I dread. . . . It is fortunate for me that hitherto all the Gentlemen, except one, have been on the other side. My efforts, therefore, have not been maimed by their counsels, and I have on all occasions spoken out,

I feel as if nothing but strong cordials, and the most powerful stimulants, can awaken the People to any thing energetic. . . . Unless our appeals convince all understandings, and the truths we utter irresistibly seize on the heart, we shall do nothing. . . . If you should, in order to get on at all, be compelled to propose mere expedients short of such energetic appeals, I hope in God you will be rescued from the situation by some strong-minded men at your Meeting.

Nevertheless, as Christopher Hill has shown in his study of the theory of the “Norman Yoke,” these elaborate and often specious constitutional controversies were of real significance. Even the forms of antiquarian argument can conceal important differences in political emphasis. From the anonymous Historical Essay on the English Constitution (1771) to the early 1790s, the more advanced reformers were marked out by their fondness for citing Saxon precedent. Long before this Tom Paine had published his Common Sense (1776) whose arguments were scarcely conducive to the appeal to precedent:

A French bastard landing with an armed banditti and establishing himself King of England, against the consent of the natives, is, in plain terms, a very paltry, rascally original. It certainly hath no divinity in it. . . . The plain truth is that the antiquity of English monarchy will not bear looking into.

But this was published on American soil; and, as we shall see, it was only after the French Revolution and the publication of Rights of Man that such iconoclasm was heard in England: “If the succession runs in the line of the Conqueror, the nation runs in the line of being conquered, and ought to rescue itself from this reproach.” Meanwhile, the theory of the “Norman Yoke” showed astonishing vitality; and even had a revival, in Jacobin circles, after 1793, when Paine was driven into exile and his Rights of Man was banned as seditious libel.

This was, in part, a matter of expediency. Paine’s prosecution revealed the limits of freedom permitted within the conventions of constitutionalism. To deny altogether the appeal to “pristine purity” and “our ancestors” was actively dangerous. When Henry Yorke, the Sheffield reformer, was on trial in 1795, his defence turned upon this point: “In almost every speech I took essential pains in controverting the doctrines of Thomas Paine, who denied the existence of our constitution. . . . I constantly asserted, on the contrary, that we had a good constitution,” “that magnanimous government which we derived from our Saxon fathers, and from the prodigious mind of the immortal Alfred.” Even John Baxter, whose “Saxons” were Jacobins and sans-culottes to a man, felt it expedient to dissociate himself from Paine’s total lack of reverence: “Much as we respect the opinions of Mr. Thomas Paine . . . we cannot agree with him, that we have no constitution; his mistake seems to arise from having carried his views no further than the Norman Conquest.”

But it was more than expediency. According to legend, Saxon precedent provided precedents for a constitutional monarchy, a free Parliament based on universal manhood suffrage, and the rule of law. In coming forward as “Patriots” and constitutionalists, men like Major Cartwright and Baxter were attempting to take over the rhetoric of the age. It seemed that if matters were to be posed as bluntly as Paine had posed them in Common Sense, then reformers would be forced to disengage from the constitutional debate altogether, and rest their claims upon reason, conscience, self-interest, “self-evident” truths. For many 18th-century Englishmen whose minds were nurtured in a constitutionalist culture the idea was shocking, unnerving, and, in its implications, dangerous.

And yet it was necessary that this rhetoric should be broken through, because—even when tricked out in Baxter’s improbable Saxon terms—it implied the absolute sanctity of certain conventions: respect for the institution of monarchy, for the hereditary principle, for the traditional rights of the great landowners and the Established Church, and for the representation, not of human rights, but of property rights. Once enmeshed in constitutionalist arguments—even when these were used to advance the claims of manhood suffrage—reformers became caught up in the trivia of piecemeal constitutional restoration. For a plebeian radical movement to arise it was essential to escape from these categories altogether and to set forward far wider democratic claims. In the years between 1770 and 1790 we can observe a dialectical paradox through which the rhetoric of constitutionalism contributed to its own destruction or transcendence. Just as students in the Communist world today who read Lenin find in his writings a devastating criticism of aspects of Soviet reality, so those in the 18th century who read Locke or Blackstone’s commentaries, found in them a devastating criticism of the workings of faction and interest in the unreformed House of Commons. The first reaction was to criticise the practice in the light of the theory; the second, more delayed, reaction was to bring the theory itself into discredit. And it was at this point that Paine entered, with the Rights of Man.

The French Revolution had set a new “precedent”: a new constitution had been drawn up, in the light of reason and from first principles—which threw “the meagre, stale, forbidding ways of custom, law, and statute” into the shadows. And it was not Paine, but Burke, who effected the first major evacuation of the grounds of constitutional argument. The French example, on one hand, and the industrious reformers quarrying for pre-1688 or pre-Norman precedent, on the other, had made the old ground untenable. In his Reflections on the French Revolution Burke supplemented the authority of precedent by that of wisdom and experience, and the reverence for the constitution by reverence for tradition—that “partnership . . . between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” The theory of checks and balances upon the exercise of specific powers is translated into the moody notion of checks and balances upon the imperfections of man’s nature:

The science of constructing a commonwealth . . . is not to be taught a priori. . . . The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity: and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man’s nature, or to the quality of his affairs. . . . The rights of men in governments are . . . often in balances between differences of good; in compromises sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil.

Radical reformers “are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgotten his nature.” “By their violent haste and their defiance of the process of nature, they are delivered over blindly to every projector and adventurer, to every alchymist and empiric.”

The argument is deduced from man’s moral nature in general; but we repeatedly glimpse sight of the fact that it was not the moral nature of a corrupt aristocracy which alarmed Burke so much as the nature of the populace, “the swinish multitude.” Burke’s great historical sense was thought to imply a “process of nature” so complex and procrastinating that any innovation was full of unseen dangers—a process in which the common people might have no part. If Tom Paine was wrong to dismiss Burke’s cautions (for his Rights of Man was written in reply to Burke), he was right to expose the inertia of class interests which underlay his special pleading. Academic judgement has dealt strangely with the two men. Burke’s reputation as a political philosopher has been inflated, very much so in recent years. Paine has often been dismissed as a mere populariser. In truth, neither writer was systematic enough to rank as a major political theorist. Both were publicists of genius, both are less remarkable for what they say than for the tone in which it is said. Paine lacks any depth of reading, any sense of cultural security, and is betrayed by his arrogant and impetuous temper into writing passages of a mediocrity which the academic mind still winces at and lays aside with a sigh. But the popular mind remembers Burke less for his insight than for his epochal indiscretion—“the swinish multitude”—the giveaway phrase which revealed another kind of insensitivity of which Paine was incapable, a blemish which vitiates the composure of 18th-century polite culture. In all the angry popular pamphleteering which followed it might almost seem that the issues could be defined in five words: Burke’s two-word epithet on the one hand, Paine’s three-word banner on the other. With dreary invention the popular pamphleteers performed satirical variations upon Burke’s theme: Hog’s Wash, Pig’s Meat, Politics for the People: A Salmagundy for Swine (with contributions from “Brother Grunter,” “Porculus” and ad nauseam) were the titles of the pamphlets and periodicals. The stye, the swineherds, the bacon—so it goes on. “Whilst ye are . . . gorging yourselves at troughs filled with the daintiest wash; we, with our numerous train of porkers, are employed, from the rising to the setting sun, to obtain the means of subsistence, by . . . picking up a few acorns,” runs an Address to the Hon. Edmund Burke from the Swinish Multitude (1793). No other words have ever made the “free-born Englishman” so angry—nor so ponderous in reply.

Since the Rights of Man is a foundation text of the English working-class movement, we must look at its arguments and tone more closely. Paine wrote on English soil, but as an American with an international reputation who had lived for close on 15 years in the bracing climate of experiment and constitutional iconoclasm. “I wished to know,” he wrote in the Preface to the Second Part, “the manner in which a work, written in a style of thinking and expression different to what had been customary in England, would be received.” From the outset he rejected the framework of constitutional argument: “I am contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed away, and controlled and contracted for, by the manuscript-assumed authority of the dead.” Burke wished to “consign over the rights of posterity for ever, on the authority of a mouldy parchment,” while Paine asserted that each successive generation was competent to define its rights and form of government anew.

As for the English Constitution, no such thing existed. At the most, it was a “sepulchre of precedents,” a kind of “Political Popery”; and “government by precedent, without any regard to the principle of the precedent, is one of the vilest systems that can be set up.” All Governments, except those in France and America, derived their authority from conquest and superstition: their foundation lay upon “arbitrary power.” And Paine reserved his particular invective for the superstitious regard in which the means for the continuation of this power was secured—the hereditary principle. “A banditti of ruffians 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.” As for the right of inheritance, “to inherit a Government, is to inherit the People, as if they were flocks and herds.” “Kings succeed each other, not as rationals, but as animals. . . . It requires some talents to be a common mechanic; but to be a King, requires only the animal figure of a man—a sort of breathing automaton.”

The time is not very far distant when England will laugh at itself for sending to Holland, Hanover, Zell, or Brunswick for men, at the expence of a million a year, who understood neither her laws, her language, nor her interest, and whose capacities would scarcely have fitted them for the office of a parish constable.

The hereditary system in general was consigned to the same oblivion: “An hereditary governor is as inconsistent as an hereditary author.”

All this was blasphemy. Even the sacred Bill of Rights Paine found to be “a bill of wrongs and of insult.” It is not that Paine was the first man to think in this way: many 18th-century Englishmen must have held these thoughts privately. He was the first to dare to express himself with such irreverence; and he destroyed with one book century-old taboos. But Paine did very much more than this. In the first place he suggested—although in a confused, ambiguous manner—a theory of the State and of class power. In Common Sense he had followed Locke in seeing Government as a “necessary evil.” In the 1790s the ambiguities of Locke seem to fall into two halves, one Burke, the other Paine. Where Burke assumes Government and examines its operation in the light of experience and tradition, Paine speaks for the governed, and assumes that the authority of Government derives from conquest and inherited power in a class-divided society. The classes are roughly defined—“There are two distinct classes of men in the nation, those who pay taxes, and those who receive and live upon taxes”—and as for the Constitution, it is a good one for—“courtiers, placemen, pensioners, borough-holders, and the leaders of the Parties . . . ; but it is a bad Constitution for at least ninety-nine parts of the nation out of a hundred.”

From this also, the war of the propertied and the unpropertied: “When the rich plunder the poor of his rights, it becomes an example to the poor to plunder the rich of his property.” By this argument, Government appears as Court parasitism: taxes are a form of robbery, for sinecurists and for wars of conquest: while “the whole of the Civil Government is executed by the People of every town and country, by means of parish officers, magistrates, quarterly sessions, juries, and assize, without any trouble to what is called the Government.” So that—at this point—we are close to a theory of anarchism. What is required is less the reform than the abolition of Government: “The instant formal Government is abolished, society begins to act.”

On the other hand, “society,” acting through a representative system as a Government, opened up new possibilities which suddenly caught fire in Paine’s mind while writing the crucial fifth chapter of the Second Part of Rights of Man. Here, after extolling Commerce and industrial enterprise, clouting colonial domination (and—later—proposing international arbitration in place of war), hitting out at the penal code (“legal barbarity”), denouncing closed Charters, Corporations, and monopolies, exclaiming against the burden of taxation, he came to rest for a moment on the sins of the landed aristocracy:

Why . . . does Mr. Burke talk of this House of Peers, as the pillar of the landed interest? Were that pillar to sink into the earth, the same landed property would continue, and the same ploughing, sowing, and reaping would go on. The Aristocracy are not the farmers who work the land . . . but are the mere consumers of the rent.

And this led him on to far-reaching impressionistic proposals for cutting the costs of Government, army and navy; remitting taxes and poor rates; raising additional taxation by means of a graduated income-tax (rising to 20 shillings in the pound at £23,000 p.a.); and paying out the moneys raised or saved in sums to alleviate the position of the poor. He proposed family allowances; public funds to enable general education of all children; old-age pensions—“not as a matter of grace and favour, but of right” (for the recipients would receive back only a portion of what they had contributed in taxation); a maternity benefit, a benefit for newly wedded couples, a benefit for funerals for the necessitous: and the building in London of combined lodging-houses and workshops to assist immigrants and unemployed.

By the operation of this plan, the poor laws, those instruments of civil torture, will be superseded. . . . The dying poor will not be dragged from place to place to breathe their last, as a reprisal of parish upon parish. Widows will have a maintenance for their children . . . and children will no longer be considered as encreasing the distresses of their parents. . . . The number of petty crimes, the offspring of distress and poverty, will be lessened. The poor, as well as the rich, will then be interested in the support of Government, and the cause and apprehension of riots and tumults will cease. Ye who sit in ease, and solace yourselves in plenty . . . have ye thought of these things?

This is Paine at his strongest. The success of the First Part of Rights of Man was great, but the success of the Second Part was phenomenal. It was this part—and especially such sections as these—which effected a bridge between the older radicalism of the Whig “commonwealthsman” and the radicalism of Sheffield cutlers, Norwich weavers and London artisans.

Reform was related, by these proposals, to their daily experience of economic hardship. However specious some of Paine’s financial calculations may have been, the proposals gave a new constructive cast to the whole reform agitation. Cartwright formulated the specific demands for manhood suffrage which were to be the basis for a hundred years of agitation (and Mary Wollstonecraft, with her Rights of Women, initiated for the second sex an even longer era of struggle). Paine, in this chapter, set a course towards the social legislation of Liberal and Labour administrations in this century.

Few of Paine’s ideas were original, except perhaps in this “social” chapter. “Men who give themselves to their Energetic Genius in the manner that Paine does are no Examiners”—the comment is William Blake’s. What he gave to English people was a new rhetoric of radical egalitarianism, which touched the deepest responses of the “free-born Englishman” and which penetrated the “sub-political” attitudes of the urban working people. Cobbett was not a true Painite, and Owen and the early Socialists contributed a new strand altogether; but the Paine tradition runs strongly through the popular journalism of the 19th century—Wooler, Carlyle, Hetherington, Lovett, Holyoake, Bradlaugh, Reynold’s News. It is strongly challenged in the 1880’s but the tradition and the rhetoric are still alive in Blatchford and in the popular appeal of Lloyd George. We can almost say that Paine established a new framework within which radicalism was confined for nearly a hundred years, as clear and as well-defined as the constitutionalism which it replaced.

What was this framework? Contempt for monarchical and hereditary principles, we have seen:

I disapprove of monarchical and aristocratical governments, however modified. Hereditary distinctions, and privileged order of every species . . . must necessarily counteract the progress of human improvement. Hence it follows that I am not among the admirers of the British Constitution.

The words happen to be Wordsworth’s—in 1793. And Wordsworth’s also the retrospective lines which recapture more than any other the optimism of these revolutionary years when—walking with Beaupuy—he encountered a “hunger-bitten” peasant girl:

. . . and at the sight of my friend

In agitation said, “Tis against that

That we are fighting,” I with him believed

That a benignant spirit was abroad

Which might not be withstood, that poverty

Abject as this would in a little time

Be found no more, that we should see the earth

Unthwarted in her wish to recompense

The meek, the lowly, patient child of toil,

All institutes for ever blotted out

That legalised exclusion, empty pomp

Abolished, sensual state and cruel power,

Whether by edict of the one or few;

And finally, as sum and crown of all,

Should see the people having a strong hand

In framing their own laws; whence better days

To all mankind.

This optimism (which Wordsworth was soon to lose) radicalism clung to tenaciously, founding it upon premises which Paine did not stop to examine: unbounded faith in representative institutions; in the power of reason; in (Paine’s words) “a mass of sense lying in a dormant state” among the common people, and in the belief that “Man, were he not corrupted by Governments, is naturally the friend of Man, and that human nature is not of itself vicious.” And all this expressed in an intransigent, brash, even cocksure tone, with the self-educated man’s distrust of tradition and institutes of learning (“He knew by heart all his own writings and knew nothing else,” was the comment of one of Paine’s acquaintances), and a tendency to avoid complex theoretical problems with a dash of empiricism and an appeal to “Common Sense.”

This, with its strengths and weaknesses, contributed much to working-class radicalism. But Paine’s writings were in no special sense aimed at the working people, as distinct from farmers, tradesmen and professional men. His was a doctrine suited to agitation among “members unlimited”; but he did not challenge the doctrines of capitalist enterprise and of laissez-faire. His own affiliations were most obviously with the unrepresented manufacturing and commercial classes; with men like Thomas Walker, partner in his bridge-building enterprise, and leading Manchester reformer; with the Constitutional Society rather than the L.C.S. His proposals for a graduated income tax anticipate more far-reaching notions of property redistribution; but it is clear that they were aimed at the landed aristocracy, where the hereditary principle involved in the custom of primogeniture gave him offence. In terms of political democracy he wished to level all inherited distinctions and privileges; but he gave no countenance to economic levelling. In political society every man must have equal rights as a citizen: in economic society he must naturally remain employer or employed, and the State should not interfere with the capital of the one or the wages of the other. The Rights of Man and the Wealth of Nations should supplement and nourish each other. And in this also the main tradition of the 19th-century working-class radicalism took its cast from Paine. There were times, at the Owenite and Chartist climaxes, when other traditions seemed to become dominant. But after each relapse, the substratum of Painite assumptions seemed to remain intact. The aristocracy were the main target; their property might be threatened—even as far as Land Nationalisation or Henry George’s Single Tax—and their rents regarded as a feudal exaction dating from “a French bastard” and his “armed banditti”; but—however hard trade unionists might fight against their employers—industrial capital was assumed to be the fruits of enterprise and beyond reach of political intrusion. Until the 1880s, it was—by and large—within this framework that working class radicalism remained transfixed.

It is true that there is in Paine a glibness and literalness of mind which was reproduced by bis English Jacobin followers in the 1790s and which—with the more sophisticated optimism of William Godwin—was bitterly rejected and caricatured by disenchanted reformers when French revolutionary Convention passed, by way of Terror, into Bonapartism. The critique and the caricature, expressed with the combined genius of Burke, Wordsworth, Coleridge, have dominated the judgments of many contemporary scholars, themselves exposed to similar experiences of revolutionary disenchantment in the past 25 years. And more recently, in a projection backwards of Cold War apologetics, the men of the Enlightenment, for whom Paine was the outstanding English publicist, are seen as rootless, disoriented intellectuals, whose naive faith in human perfectibility and disregard for traditional sanctities and for the institutional continuity of the “social organism” opened the way to “totalitarianism.”

Against this new historical myth it is necessary to repeat once again the simplest truths. Paine and his English followers did not preach the extermination of their opponents, but they did preach against Tyburn and the sanguinary penal code. Paine himself was brought under the shadow of the guillotine for pleading for the life of the French King. The English Jacobins pleaded for internationalism, for arbitration in place of war, for the toleration of dissenters, Catholics and free-thinkers, for the discernment of human virtue in “heathen, Turk or Jew.” They sought, by education and agitation, to transform “the mob” (in Paine’s words) from “followers of the camp” to followers of “the standard of liberty.”

They spoke also for the democracy of representative institutions, and against the oligarchy of property. Nor is there the least reason to suppose that without their agitation the middle and working classes would have been graciously admitted to a share in power according to some self-acting principle of institutional and organic continuity. On the contrary, the evidence runs the other way. We cannot say what the consequences would have been if Paine’s followers had effected a revolution in this country; but we can say that it was Burke who said that the Rights of Man called for the “refutation . . . of criminal justice,” and that it was the adherents of God and King and Law who employed repression, Botany Bay, and imprisonment against the “totalitarians.” Finally, it is extraordinary that after 160 years it is still possible to find historians referring in a facile way to the French “Terror,” as if it was the spontaneous generation of false philosophical and moral principles, and was unrelated to the threat of counter-revolution and conquest at the hands of a European reaction in which English diplomacy and the English Navy played a leading part.

This is not to dismiss the charges against some English Jacobins, of doctrinaire notions and shallow moral experimentalism, whose most notable expression is in Book III of Wordsworth’s Excursion. These have often been the vices of the “Left.” Paine had little historical sense, his view of human nature was facile, and his optimism (“I do not believe that Monarchy and Aristocracy will continue seven years longer in any of the enlightened countries in Europe”) is of a kind which the 20th-century mind finds tedious. But so great has been the reaction in our own time against Whig or Marxist interpretations of history, that some scholars have propagated an absurd substitution of historical roles: the persecuted are seen as forerunners of oppression, and the oppressors as victims of persecution. And so we have been forced to go over these elementary truths. It was Paine who put his faith in the free operation of opinion in the “open society”: “Mankind are not now to be told they shall not think, or they shall not read.” Paine also who saw that in the constitutional debates of the 18th century “the Nation was always left out of the question.” By bringing the Nation into the question, he was bound to set in motion forces which he could neither control nor foresee. That is what democracy is about.