"I attribute its success to two things," Jack Fructman, Jr., author of The Political Philosophy of Thomas Paine and Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom, explains. "They recognized themselves in that argument,” Kaye says. Instead, Paine urged Americans to embrace "common sense," and trust their own feelings about what was right and just and how the country should be run, just as they did with other everyday decisions. Just as importantly, Paine understood that philosophical abstractions weren't as powerful as emotion and experience. "Paine wrote to his peers, in a language everyone could understand." "He knew people weren’t thinking in the abstract," Kaye explains.
Unlike other American leaders who were well-educated landed gentry, Paine could reach into his own humble background to find his voice. But it wasn’t just his arguments that appealed to people. Jefferson considered Paine to be the best writer of the Revolution, according to Kaye. Why Did Paine’s Pamphlet Become So Influential? "A firm bargain and a right reckoning make long friends," he argued. Paine envisioned that the new nation would have a strong central government, with a constitution that protected individual rights, including freedom of religion. A strong central government was needed.His failed efforts to lobby Parliament left him with a dim view of the British system of government. He managed to land a government job as an excise tax collector, but was fired twice, the second time after leading an unsuccessful campaign to get higher wages for him and his colleagues. He did a brief stint as a sailor on a privateer ship at age 20, and tried and failed to start a craftsman business. Born in 1737 in England to a financially struggling family, he had to quit school at age 13 to labor as an apprentice in his father’s corset shop. Paine’s provocative pamphlet was the first real success in his life. Who Was Thomas Paine and Why Did He Write 'Common Sense'? And even after the victory over the British, Paine’s influence persisted, and some of his ideas found their way into the U.S. By promoting the idea of American exceptionalism and the need to form a new nation to realize its promise, Paine’s pamphlet not only attracted public support for the Revolution, but put the rebellion’s leaders under pressure to declare independence.
0 kommentar(er)
