But it is a mistake to read Paine’s radicalism as proto-socialism, as some have. His merciless indictment of an aristocratic polity and society did serve the interests of the workers and touched their souls, but Paine’s radical egalitarianism also served, and was bound up with, the interests of bourgeois liberalism, the principal architect and beneficiary of the destruction of ‘chivalric nonsense’.

It detracts in no way from Paine’s radicalism and his egalitarianism to note their liberal sources. Such, indeed, were the terms a progressive and humanitarian assault on the old order had to take in his age. The limitations liberalism placed on his radicalism would become clearer in a later age. In his day there was no incompatibility between his democratic ideals and his defence of individualism, property and business enterprise. Bourgeois ideals in his mind were intimately linked to an egalitarian vision of society. The stratified society of privilege and rank would be levelled in a bourgeois world of competitive individualism – a world in which political and social place would be determined by talent, merit and hard work.

His political theory was vintage liberalism. Like Adam Smith and James Madison, and like liberal apologists to this day, Paine assumed that co-operation and fellowship were strangers to the political arena, a place of conflict and competition constituted by atomistic individualism. A nation, he wrote, ‘is composed of distinct, unconnected individuals, following various trades, employments and pursuits; continually meeting, crossing, uniting, opposing and separating from each other, as accident, interest, and circumstances shall direct’.14

Government had no positive agency to promote justice or virtue for these clashing individuals and interests. It was merely to preside as umpire over a world where individualism was the central value. Its sole justification was providing a stable and secure setting for the operation of a commercial society:

Every man wishes to pursue his occupation and to enjoy the fruits of his labour and the produce of his property in peace and safety and with it the least possible expense. When these things are accomplished, all the objects for which government ought to be established are answered.15

Paine was read by the artisans and the poor, but his natural friends were also the manufacturers, who were fast destroying traditional society. Paine the entrepreneur, the salesman forever hawking his iron bridge, had great respect for the Wedgwoods, the Arkwrights, the Watts, and their counterparts in America who chartered the Bank of Pennsylvania. These enterprising individuals stood outside government; indeed, their achievements occurred in spite of government:

It is from the enterprise and industry of the individuals and their numerous associations, in which, tritely speaking, government is neither pillow nor bolster, diat these improvements have proceeded. No man thought about the government, or who was in, or who was out, when he was planning or executing those things; and all he had to hope with respect to government, was that it would let him alone.16

Paine’s entrepreneurial friends were engaged in the same egalitarian crusade as he was. Like him, they sought a redistribution of wealth and power that would be based on equality of opportunity and that would enable individuals of real ability to replace those of ‘no-ability’. Paine’s most progressive writings, his Agrarian Justice and the justly celebrated Part Two of The Rights of Man, while advocating the redistribution of much wealth to the poor, still served the greater interest of individuals of ‘enterprise and industry’, relieving them of that most burdensome of weights, the poor rates. Relief would come to both the middle and lower classes; indeed in greater measure to the former. Equal conditions, equal results, were not his goal nor theirs. The end of ‘chivalric nonsense’ would bring not levelling but equal opportunity in a competitive individualistic society. ‘That property will ever be unequal is certain’, he wrote in 1795. This was neither unjust nor unfair, but simply a result of ‘industry, superiority of talents, dexterity of management, extreme frugality and fortunate opportunities’. His political creed was a simple one – pure liberalism at its most radical and progressive historical moment: ‘Establish the Rights of Man; enthrone equality… let there be no privileges, no distinctions of birth, no monopolies; make safe the liberty of industry and trade, the equal distribution of family inheritances.’17

‘Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil’, wrote Paine in Common Sense. With this formula Paine distils the essence of liberal social theory and in turn reveals the flaw that limits his and any radical vision operating within the confines of liberalism. From Locke through Paine and even unto Milton Friedman, the liberal sees civil society as peopled by self-reliant individuals. Such a society is benignly innocent, self-regulating and harmonious. Government is pernicious, the source of threats to individual freedom; it, along with its ally the established Church, is in essence tyrannical. Coercion and abuse are the fruits only of government, never of the social and economic institutions of civil society.

Poverty, for example, according to Paine, is a direct result of governmental interference with ‘the great laws of society’, the ‘laws of nature and reciprocal interest’. ‘How often is the natural propensity to society disturbed or destroyed by the operations of government?’ he asks. Instead of ‘consolidating society, it divided it; it deprived it of its natural cohesion, and engendered discontents and disorders, which otherwise would not have existed’. The ‘excess and inequality of taxation’ has but one effect: ‘A great mass of the community are thrown thereby into poverty and discontent.’ Governments thus create the poor; the economic institutions of civil society do not.