A Revolution in the State of Civilization: Democracy and Commercial Society in the Atlantic World of Thomas Paine

Abstract

At the age of fifty, after escaping the poverty of his English youth and participating in American independence as a founding father who would be repudiated, Paine sailed from New York Harbor to Paris on April 26, 1787. His pamphlet Rights of Man (1791-1792) threw a political bridge between the two sides of the Atlantic to support the replication of the American Revolution against the Old-World monarchies: ideally throwing a bridge involved innovating the European political vocabulary in light of the American experiment. The doctrine of natural equality and popular sovereignty, the democratic conception of the constitution and representative government, which he had elaborated overseas, were thus taken up and deepened. At the same time, the failure to replicate the revolution in Britain and the French revolutionary vicissitude showed that Europe was not America. While in Great Britain the revolutionary attempt to convene a convention to draft a constitution was immediately prevented, France seemed unable to end the revolution, draft a constitution and build a democracy based on representation. Even though in 1789 Abbot Sieyès had argued for the necessity of the representative system by declaring direct democracy impossible, the rejection of representation that Rousseau had theorized in 1762 with the Contract Social decisively influenced the French Revolution by leading to a continuous dispute between those who represented and those who were represented. The crisis of representation and the consequent impossibility of democracy constituted the problematic core of the French Revolution, in light of which Paine questioned what he had argued in Rights of Man in order to build a political bridge between the two sides of the Atlantic. In the pamphlet The Agrarian Justice (1797), Paine shifted the focus from politics to society to explain the failure to replicate the American Revolution in Europe considering the conceptual change that the notions of society, commerce, and civilization were undergoing as a result of the revolutionary event. Investigating society to understand politics served to build a new bridge across the Atlantic and overcome the historical and theoretical divide that distanced America and Europe.