The Rights of Man

Rights of Man caused an unprecedented sensation in Great Britain because it challenged a century-old political consensus regarding the British constitution. The meaning and significance of constitutionalism in English and British history, therefore, establishes the immediate context for Paine’s revolutionary arguments.

The 18th-century British constitution was almost entirely unwritten. As it evolved through the centuries, this constitution came to reflect certain broad principles, such as limited monarchy and the rule of law, which 18th-century Britons championed as the foundations of their liberty. Since it was never compiled into a single document, the 18th-century British constitution is best understood as a set of institutional arrangements that correlate with the era’s prevailing social hierarchy. In short, the British constitution attempted to strike a balance among Aristotle’s three forms of government—monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—any one of which, taken to its extreme, would produce tyranny. 

In 18th-century Britain, these three forms also represented divinely-ordained divisions within society: the one, the few, and the many. The king or queen (the one) stood for monarchy. In Parliament, the House of Lords (the few) stood for aristocracy and the House of Commons (the many) for democracy. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689 secured Parliament’s role as supreme legislature and provided a permanent check on monarchical ambition, British constitutionalists spent the next century celebrating their balanced government, which they believed protected them from tyranny by preventing any one of the three social orders from wielding too much power. 

To appreciate Paine’s impact, it is crucial to understand that Britain’s 18th-century constitution presumed social inequality and that its much-celebrated balance was predicated on that assumption. In Rights of Man, by contrast, Paine argues for basic human equality. If equality, not hierarchy, is the rule of nature, then monarchies and aristocracies have no natural basis, and if the undivided people constitute citizens rather than subjects, then the entire British government amounts to a fraud. Paine’s radical arguments were therefore seen as a direct challenge to both the traditional conception of the British constitution and to the hierarchies and privileges of the social order.