Books

PAINE, Thomas. Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke's Attack on the French Revolution. Fourth Edition. BOUND WITH: Rights of Man. Part the Second. Combining Principle and Practice. The Second Edition. London: Printed for J.S. Jordan, 1791, 1792. Octavo, 19th-century three-quarter calf, marbled boards; pp. [iii-vii], viii-x, [7]-171, [2]; [i-v], vi, [vii], viii-xv, [xvi], [1], 2-174, [175], 176-178. $12,500. Rare fourth edition of Part I and second edition of Part II of Rights of Man, each published shortly after the first editions by J.S. Jordan, who published Part I after the original edition was suppressed and was arrested for publishing Part II. One of Paine's most important, influential, and bestselling works, Rights of Man resulted in the prosecution in England of Paine, his publishers, and booksellers, forcing Paine to flee to France. Hoping Rights of Man "would do for England what his Common Sense had done for America," Paine answered Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution with his "celebrated answer, The Rights of Man" (Gimbel-Yale 59). Written "with a force and clarity unequalled even by Burke, Paine laid down those principles of fundamental human rights which must stand, no matter what excesses are committed to obtain them. The government tried to suppress it, but it circulated the more briskly. [Rights of Man is] the textbook of radical thought and the clearest of all expositions of the basic principles of democracy" (PMM 241). In this revolutionary work, "Paine's attack on monarchy went farther than he had attempted on Common Sense or the Crisis series. Rights of Man was one of the most ardent and clear defenses of human rights, liberty and equality in any language. Like Locke, Paine wrote that people have rights naturally, and as they joined together to form society and then government, they transformed a number of their natural rights into civil rights. Rights of free speech, opinion, conscience, association (in America those rights became embodied in the first amendment to the Constitution in the same year the first part of the Rights of Man appeared) were all part of the natural rights which a properly constituted government must protect" (Fruchtman, 225). Paine's friends, Franklin, Jefferson, Washington and other Founding Fathers, it was Jefferson, in particular, who "evidently appreciated what America owed Paine and surely sensed how Paine's thinking had shaped his own. It was not only the Declaration of Independence that reflected Paine's influence. Jefferson's later work did as well. Jefferson understood how much the Republican movement had depended on Paine's pen and the diverse folk inspired by it. In the spring of 1791 Jefferson had hailed the first part of Rights of Man" (Kaye, 92). In early 1792, when Paine sent him a first edition of Part the Second, Jefferson responded by writing a letter to Paine in praise. In it, Jefferson spoke of his distress at the rise in America of some who were "panting after an English constitution. itching for crowns, coronets & mitres, but our people, my good friend, are firm and unanimous in their principles of republicanism, & there is no better proof of that than they love what you write and read it with delight. go on then doing with your pen what in other times was done with the sword; show that reformation is more practicable by operating on the mind than on the body of man, and be assured that it has not a more sincere votary, nor you're a more ardent well-wisher than, Dear Sir Your friend & svt Th: Jefferson" (Sowerby 2826). Part I of Rights of Man was dedicated to George Washington and the first edition was to be published on his birthday, February 22, 1791, but publisher Joseph Johnson suppressed it because of intimidation by government agents. "Fearing the book police, and unnerved by the prospect of arrest and bankruptcy, Johnson suppressed the book on the very day of its scheduled publication. Alarmed by the prospect that the work would be seized.

Thomas Paine's 'The Rights of Man' is a foundational work advocating for universal human rights and a robust critique of aristocracy and monarchy, published in response to the French Revolution.