David Frum

He draws a distinction between government and society and regards society as a positive good, government as a necessary evil.

And then for a book that is going to be about declaring American independence from Britain, he begins not with the American-British relationship, but with a general attack on the concept of monarchy.

He begins with a case for revolution that would be as binding and applicable in England and the United Kingdom as in the United States.

And only after he makes his case against monarchy does he make a case for American independence.

So this is a book that is a revolutionary manifesto, not just for Americans, but for people anywhere that the English language is spoken.

It also was a book that went maybe farther than many Americans would later wish.

Thomas Paine would end up re-emigrating from the United States and find himself in a jail in revolutionary France because his thoughts were so at variance with his own society when his own society, after the Revolutionary War ended, tried to put the revolution back in a box.

Thomas Paine was not a man to be put in a box.

His attack on any unjustifiable form of inequality is one that had enduring implications for a society that found itself, after it gained independence, still in many ways a society bound by many forms of inequality, racial most obvious, free versus slave, but others too.

It would take the United States a very long time to become the country that Thomas Paine imagined and urged in January of 1776.

That, I suppose, is why we go on reading this book.

We quote it too, but we quote it, as so often is the case, often without understanding.

It's only a few dozen pages long, I think 48 pages.

It's worth rediscovering for yourself and reminding yourself of what a radical proposition it was in 1776 to imagine not just the United States free of English rule.

Many distant countries had broken away from their founding countries.

but a society that would become a new kind of society altogether, society based on both liberty and equality, ideas always intention, ideas that maybe Thomas Paine did not think through entirely.

He was a writer and a polemicist much more than he was a philosopher.

But he put these concepts in motion in ways that speak to us still and that are worth rediscovering on this 250th anniversary of the publication of Common Sense by Thomas Paine.

Thank you so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show.

Thanks to all who watch and listen to this program.