Merchants, manufacturers and bankers, even magistrates and justices of the peace, are part of benign and wholesome civil society. Traditional republican doctrine is turned on its head; self-serving individuals further the common good, and public government serves its own selfish and corrupt interest. ‘The greedy hand of government’ is thrust ‘into every corner and crevice of industry’, to grasp ‘the spoil of the multitude’. Governments are evil incarnate. They engage in wars abroad and practise ‘oppression and usurpation’ at home. They ‘exhaust the property of the world’. Reversing the conventional identification of courts and the great with civility, and provincial manufacturers and artisans with vulgarity, Paine holds that governments work for the forces of barbarism, society for the forces of civilization. ‘Governments… pervert the abundance which civilized life produces to carry on the uncivilized part.’ Paine pushes aside what most take to be the political issues that divide people and finds not class war but a heroic and quintessentially liberal struggle between individuals and governments:

It is not whether this or that party shall be in or not, or Whig or Tory, or high or low shall prevail; but whether man shall inherit his rights, and universal civilization take place? Whether the fruits of his labours shall be enjoyed by himself, or consumed by the profligacy of government? Whether robbery shall be banished from courts, and wretchedness from countries?22

It was inconceivable to Paine and other liberals that civil society and its institutions, economic, familial or cultural, could be a source of coercion, of ‘oppression’ and ‘usurpation’. That concentrations of power and wealth in non-governmental institutions could be the source of inequality and poverty was incompatible with the liberal urge to indict political institutions and to seek progressive change through political reform. Threats to freedom come from the state, from churches and tyrants in the liberal world, not from factory owners, corporate power or financial manipulators.

Nowhere is this limitation of Paine’s vision more apparent than in his strident defence of the Bank of Pennsylvania, a defence that alienated him from many of his Jeffersonian friends in 1786. Paine rejected the fears of the bank’s radical critics, who charged that its directors would wield great economic power even to the point of controlling the state and the government. On the contrary, Paine answered, the bank illustrates the superiority of civil institutions over state institutions. Men in society have little need for government; they can supply their internal wants and needs by private co-operative activity. Non-governmental institutions like the bank by definition could not be oppressive; only taxing governments could. The bank came into being, he wrote, because government was inadequately financing the war: ‘A public spirit awakened itself with energy out of doors.’ The bank ‘facilitates the commerce of the country’. More significantly,

If merchants by this means or farmers by similar means among themselves can mutually aid and support each other, what has the government to do with it? What right has it to expect emolument from associated industry, more than from individual industry? It would be a strange sort of government that should make it illegal for people to assist each other, or pay a tribute for doing so.

The real threat to individual freedom here was not from any potential or real economic power of the bank and its directors, according to Paine. The enemy is government. Corporate groups must be free of government, Paine writes of the bank. They must not be dependent on government each year for renewal of their charters: ‘The citizens who compose those corporations are not free; the government holds an authority and influence over them in a manner different from what it does over other citizens, and by this means destroys that equality of freedom which is the bulwark of the republic.23

When he wanted to, Tom Paine could summon citizens to collective action with stirring phrases. In The American Crisis he had written that ‘these are the times that try men’s souls; the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country’. But common action and fraternity, for Paine, are found only in the angry response of a basically individualistic society to public oppression and injustice. When the stimulus of rebellion and war against tyrants and aristocrats is removed, equal individuals will pursue their own livelihoods, and seldom will they be moved to co-operate with one another for common purposes. Among equal citizens there is little or no sense of community; self-regulating society, yes, but no consciousness of solidarity, nor any real emotional feelings of unity. In society, there is little need for popular power; there are, after all, no collective goals.

Democratic egalitarian citizens for Paine are free, not powerful. Power was something governments had, and with it they taxed, coerced worship and gave jobs to incompetent second sons of elderly peers. Its abusive association with government permanently tainted ‘power’ for the individualist Paine and for liberals like him. America was the beacon of light in an otherwise dark world because its equal citizens were free, not because its people had power. Americans did not tax, establish churches or give away public jobs. That power might serve less abusive ends could not occur to individualistic liberals like Paine, for a free people were not united in pursuing communal ends, nor were they even interested in community itself. Such a linkage of power, community and freedom could come only with democratic theorists like Rousseau, less wedded to an individualistic vision of society.