Thomas Paine

In Amusing Ourselves To Death, Thomas Paine is the central exhibit for Neil Postman’s argument about Colonial print culture and the “Empire of Reason.” Common Sense, published 10 January 1776, sold more than 100,000 copies by March of that year — a proportion of the population that Postman calculates would require eight-million-copy sales in 1985 to match. Postman notes that Paine, despite less formal schooling than Shakespeare and origins in the lowest laboring class, wrote political philosophy the equal of Voltaire and Rousseau, and counts him among the “Empire of Reason” forebears (with Franklin, Jefferson, and Madison) whose typographic, propositional culture trained a reading public in analytic thought. He also observes that The Age of Reason cost Paine his standing in the Founding Fathers’ pantheon, leaving him ambiguously treated in American history.

In The Assault on Reason, Al Gore quotes Paine on the rule of law as the foundation of free government: “as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king and there ought to be no other.” Both books recruit Paine as an emblem of the reasoning, print-grounded political culture they argue has been eroded.

Context: Thomas Paine (1737–1809) was an English-born American political writer and revolutionary whose pamphlets Common Sense and The American Crisis galvanized the American Revolution; his later deist work The Age of Reason drew lasting controversy.

Where this appears

• Amusing Ourselves To Death — Common Sense’s 100,000 copies and The Age of Reason anchor the Colonial print-culture and “Empire of Reason” argument
• The Assault on Reason — quoted on “the law ought to be king” as a touchstone of reasoned free government