Thomas Paine

The Thomas Paine Reader

Collected here in this omnibus edition are Thomas Paine's most important books, along with his short essay Agrarian Justice. This edition has also restored the Third Part to The Age Of Reason. In January of 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense; the book inflamed its readers and ignited the American Revolution. In truth, the fires of dissent were already smoldering, but Paine's impassioned writing gave focus to the many disparate voices and united a country. Between 1776 and 1779, he wrote The American Crisis, in an effort to justify the American Revolution and to bolster the morale of the Continental Army. In The Rights of Man, Paine defends the representational form of government. He posits that all men are born with God-given rights that cannot be taken from them by any government. Thomas Paine was a devout deist. That is, he believed in God, not because of faith, but rather because of the rational empirical evidence that the natural world provides. The Age of Reason was Paine's treatise on religion.