The New York Times book review section has a review of Harvey Kaye’s “Thomas Paine and the Promise of America” by Joseph Ellis (some NY Times content may not be available to non-subscribers). After setting out Paine’s influence on the American left, Ellis writes:
Oddly enough, however, over the past 30 years Paine’s chief fans have appeared within the conservative wing of the Republican Party, making Paine, like Jefferson, the proverbial man for all seasons. Though weird, and surely not the legacy Kaye has in mind, the Goldwater-Reagan-Gingrich persuasion has a plausible claim on the libertarian side of the Paine legacy, which is deeply suspicious of all forms of consolidated political power and views government as ”them” rather than ”us.” Paul Wolfowitz would also be able to cite Paine in support of George W. Bush’s Iraq policy, since Paine believed that democratic values were both universal and self-enacting. History makes strange bedfellows.
WHICH is to say that ”the promise of America” that Paine glimpsed so lyrically at the start cannot be easily translated into our 21st-century idiom without distorting the intellectual integrity of its 18th-century origins. Paine, like Jefferson, was a product of the Enlightenment who sincerely believed there was a natural order of perfect freedom and equality that had been hijacked by medieval kings and priests. If only, as Diderot put it, the last king could be strangled with the entrails of the last priest, the natural order would be restored, naturally. . . .
What a reincarnated Paine would say about our altered political and intellectual landscape is impossible to know. Kaye hears his voice more clearly and unambiguously than I do, a clarity of conviction that I envy. My more muddled position is that bringing Paine’s words and ideas into our world is like trying to plant cut flowers.
In his description Ellis grudgingly captures part of the vision of the neoconservatives to spread liberty around the world, but seems to find it, as he finds “Paine’s optimistic assumptions,” “naive in the extreme.”
UPDATE: Irfan A. Khawaja at HNN discusses this same passage and assesses the place of Paine’s ideas in the Lockean tradition.
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