Abstract
Reviewed by : R. J. W. Mills, Queen Mary, University of London, UK
Clark has done much to (re)invigorate eighteenth-century British history scholarship, and his new tome Thomas Paine will surely raise interest. Here he avers that Paine’s status as a radical hero of early twenty-first century progressivism is built upon a series of myths and misunderstandings that it is necessary to revise along more accurate historical lines. The resulting analysis does not serve as a biography of Paine, but as a series of qualifications about current myths regarding his political thought, activity and significance. The existing heroic-man approach to Paine as inaugurator of revolution, framer of modernity and contributor to perennial political questions bears no relation to the complexity and chaos of the past and Paine’s role in it. He was influential not because he was original but because ‘he brilliantly mobilized anglophone political languages already widely familiar’ (1). The ‘professional historiographical scepticism’ (vii) applied in these acts of avowedly deflationary historical contextualization is not meant to disparage Paine, but to better understand him historically. Clark is silent on whether his criticisms are meant to disparage the self-appointed ‘Guardians of the Sacred Flame’ (vi) that is the Paine myth.
Thomas Paine consists of three parts. The first offers an overview of eighteenth-century Anglophone political discourses and the extent to which Paine utilized them. Paine’s political and religious thinking was not only framed by pre-1750s English political debate, religious freethinking and Newtonian natural philosophy, but in many respects never really changed over the next half century. Paine was not a natural rights theorist nor a democrat, nor a ‘cultural class warrior’ (87), nor did his ‘social security system’ suggest ‘revolutionary change’ (89). He was silent on the issues of female emancipation and slavery, and while avowedly cosmopolitan, had only a ‘specifically English frame of reference’ (99). In sum, Paine was ‘some way short of being an instinctive campaigner against all forms of what later became widely identified as oppression and injustice’ (106). Clark’s ticking off his checklist of progressive myths in need of debunking involves historically sound scholarship but will be tiresome to readers not ideologically invested in the meaning of Paine.
Taking up the bulk of the volume, Part II examines Paine’s role in the American and French Revolutions, primarily through contextualizing his famous political and religious writings. A key thread here is Clark’s claims that Paine was ‘lastingly unaware’ (135, cf. 229) of key aspects of both Revolutions. Paine ‘stumbled by accident into the American Revolution’ (122), while America remained an ‘abstraction in Paine’s mind’ (166). The ideas underpinning Common Sense were indebted primarily to the ‘idioms of England’s “Patriot” opposition to the early eighteenth-century Hanoverian regime’ (143), not republicanism or natural rights theory. Further chipping away from the Paine façade is Clark’s doubting that the print run figures of Common Sense reached anywhere close to the 150,000 boasted of by Paine. Clark’s work of careful, deflationary and repetitive qualification of Paine’s modernity and significance then moves on to his supposed role in France. Both parts of Rights of Man are best understood in an English rather than a French historical context, with Paine viewed as someone who now placed ‘highly effective rhetorical emphasis’ on existing natural rights language (232). Noticeably, Part the First of Rights of Man is mainly about the Glorious Revolution, with the discussion about revolutionary events in France and the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man being, Clark agues, interpolations (240–1). Paine’s Age of Reason reflected a personal deism that resulted not from the fires of revolutionary France but from ‘long-standing convictions’ first formed in the 1750s (332). Paine was a theist ‘fixated’ about revelation (349).
Paine’s career ends not in changing the world for the better but in failure. In Part III Clark uses Paine’s Dissertation on First-Principles of Government (1795) and his Letter to George Washington (1797) to explore how revolutionary America and France both quickly deemed Paine an irrelevance and quickly moved away from Paine’s political ideas. After a brief surge of popularity amongst British Jacobins, Paine’s memory was kept going in nineteenth-century Britain ‘less by his followers … than by those who most denounced him’ (406). Clark’s Thomas Paine is a thorough, impressively researched work that makes historiographically significant claims. It should provoke thought, research and some consternation. While its claims can be described as fresh, its prose and presentation cannot – and it is on these latter grounds that Thomas Paine can be most criticized. The systematic refutation of exaggerated and inaccurate claims about Paine’s purported radicalism and modernity make for a stuttering, bitty and repetitive read. Clark allows himself too many pompous purple passages, whereas his writing is best when he is not trying so hard. Dissatisfying also is Clark’s reticence to name authors of the mythologies he is critiquing (e.g. 205–6, 209–10), meaning the reader cannot easily corroborate Clark’s claims nor rid themselves of the sense he is engaged in his own myth-creation. Ultimately, Thomas Paine is a very important contribution to Paine scholarship, but it is not one anyone will likely enjoy reading.