The Political Economy of Thomas Paine

This chapter situates Paine’s economic thought initially in the context of his conflict with Edmund Burke, who famously rejected natural rights (even more vociferously than Hume and Smith). The chapter highlights the movement in Paine’s thought from his early career such as in Common Sense and Dissertations on Government in which he advocated a laissez-faire harmony of interests, toward his more mature natural rights theory in the Rights of Man I and II in which he argued for a system of public welfare, and finally in the historicized conception of natural rights in his later Agrarian Justice in which Paine advocated the creation of a National Fund supplied by an inheritance tax on land that would repair the socio-economic damage that inevitably occurs in any system of private property.