Volume 36, Number 6 · April 13, 1989
The Pleasures of Paine
By Edmund S. Morgan
Thomas Paine
by A.J. Ayer
Atheneum, 195 pp., $19.95
Thomas Paine, so celebrated and so despised as he traveled through the critical events of his time, has long appealed to biographers. Paine was present at the creation both of the United States and of the French Republic. His eloquence, in the pamphlet Common Sense, propelled the American colonists toward independence. A little later, when the American army faced collapse, he rallied support for it in the series of articles that began with the ever memorable 'These are the times that try men's souls.' After independence was won he moved on to France and poured out a torrent of words in defense of the revolution there. Wherever he found oppression he took it upon himself to attack it. In a famous, if perhaps apocryphal, conversation, when Benjamin Franklin is reputed to have said to him, 'Where liberty is, there is my country,' Paine appropriately replied, 'Where liberty is not, there is mine.'
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