In the spring of 1791 C.E., a former corset-maker from Norfolk published a book that sold a million copies and terrified the British government into threatening him with prosecution. Thomas Paine had already helped ignite the American Revolution with Common Sense. Now, responding to Edmund Burke’s defense of monarchy and aristocracy, he put forward something that felt almost unthinkable to the ruling classes of Europe: a systematic argument that every human being is born with rights that no king, charter, or parliament can grant or revoke.
Key arguments
- Rights of Man: Paine argued that rights originate in nature itself — they are not gifts from governments or charters, but are inherent to every person by virtue of being human.
- Hereditary government: Paine was among the first writers to argue not merely for reforming aristocratic rule but for abolishing it entirely — insisting that the wisdom to govern cannot be inherited.
- Social welfare: In the book’s closing chapters, Paine outlined a detailed proposal for government-funded education, support for the poor, and a progressive income tax — arguing that welfare was a right, not charity.
The argument that shook a continent
Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790 C.E., had sold 30,000 copies arguing that social stability depended on aristocratic governance and that lawful inheritance of power was the only safeguard against chaos. Paine demolished this claim with a simple counter: any right that can be legally granted can be legally revoked. What governments hand out, governments can take back. That makes it a privilege, not a right.
His alternative was equally radical. Rights, Paine argued, precede law. They precede governments. Government exists solely to protect what people already possess — and any government that fails to do so loses its legitimacy. “The end of all political associations,” he wrote, echoing the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, “is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man.”
The book appeared on March 16, 1791 C.E., three weeks late after its original publisher withdrew for fear of prosecution. Within a year it had reached reformers, Protestant dissenters, London craftsmen, and factory workers across the industrial north of England. Estimates put total sales as high as one million copies — an extraordinary figure for a political text in an era of widespread illiteracy and high book prices.
A welfare state before its time
It is easy to reduce Rights of Man to a tract about political revolution. But its final chapters are something else entirely: a proto-welfare state drafted in plain language a century before such ideas entered mainstream policy.
Paine proposed family allowances for children, state-funded schooling for the poor, pensions for the elderly, and a progressive tax on large estates to prevent hereditary wealth from concentrating power in the hands of a few. He was careful to distinguish this from charity. Welfare, in his framework, was not something the wealthy granted to the deserving poor — it was what a government owed every person as a matter of right. The full text, preserved by Yale’s Avalon Project, shows just how specific and detailed these proposals were.
Paine had spent evenings in France with Thomas Jefferson and possibly the Marquis de Lafayette, working through the principles of republican government. The transatlantic intellectual exchange was real — the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man share a philosophical core, and Paine sat at the intersection of both.
Lasting impact
The ideas in Rights of Man did not stay on the page. They moved through reform movements in Britain, France, and the new United States, and surfaced repeatedly in the debates that shaped representative democracy over the following two centuries. The concept that governments derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed — not from divine right or hereditary succession — is now so embedded in democratic theory that it can be easy to forget how dangerous it once sounded.
Paine was eventually tried for seditious libel in Britain in absentia, convicted, and forced to remain on the Continent. The book itself, available in full through Project Gutenberg, remains in continuous circulation. Its arguments about natural rights, the illegitimacy of hereditary power, and the state’s obligation to protect the poorest citizens echo in everything from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to contemporary debates about Indigenous land rights at COP30.
William Godwin, who helped with the book’s publication, wrote that “the seeds of revolution it contains are so vigorous in their stamina, that nothing can overpower them.” He was not wrong.
Blindspots and limits
Paine’s Rights of Man spoke of universal rights but was written within the assumptions of its era — its primary frame was the rights of men as male citizens, and it largely left unaddressed the question of women’s political rights, which his contemporary Mary Wollstonecraft would argue for directly in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman the following year. The book also engaged almost entirely with European and Euro-American political traditions, drawing on Enlightenment frameworks that themselves reflected the colonial hierarchies of the time. The millions of enslaved people whose labor underwrote the prosperity of both France and Britain — and whose freedom was conspicuously absent from most revolutionary rhetoric — were not centered in Paine’s welfare proposals or his theory of natural rights.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Rights of Man — Wikipedia
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Indigenous land rights gain global backing at COP30
- Marie-Louise Eta becomes the first female head coach in men’s top-flight European football
- The Good News for Humankind archive on human rights
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