An Analysis Of Thomas·Paine’s Legal Thoughts

During the last30years in the eighteenth century, two remarkable revolutions broke out:American Revolution and French Revolution, Thomas Paine, a British citizen, was involvedin these two revolutions in different extent. Thomas Paine is famous for his great pamphletCommon Sense, which presented arguments for North America’s independence from England.For a long time the research on Thomas Paine focuses on his political thoughts, in fact, thereare a lot of discussion about law in his works Common Sense and Right of man, especially inRight of man Thomas Paine systematically presented his Constitution thought, and his view oflaw often came out with the debate against other people or make a comparison betweenEnglish Constitution and French Constitution or Constitution of the United States. The subjectof my research is Thomas Paine’s legal thoughts; the thesis will mainly focus on Paine’sworks Common Sense and Right of man.On the basic of researching on the relevant information of Thomas Paine, the thesismakes great efforts to state as follows:In the introduction, it will describe the significance of the research on Thomas Paine andthe relevant theories, and it will describe the research methods and the innovations of thisthesis.The first part, we will introduce Thomas Paine’s lifetime, and the possible source of histhoughts. Paine was born in a common family and his father was a maker of corset, in1774,just the eve of American Revolution, Paine came to American colonies for a better life, wherehe astonishingly wrote the famous pamphlet Common Sense. After the outbreak of FrenchRevolution, Paine wrote Right of man to refute Edmund Burke’s counterrevolutionary workReflections on the Revolution in France and he was elected to the French NationalConvention, participating in the Constitution Committee that drafted the Girondinconstitutional project. But Paine was put into prison by Jacobins because he was consideredthe Girondin.In1802,Paine came back to United States, but a lot of Americans disliked himbecause his work The Age of Reason, which doubt the Bible and Christian Church. In1809.Paine died in New York. It’s difficult to figure out the real sources of Paine’s thoughts,as he rarely mention other scholars or thinkers in his works, and this thesis will suggest thatthe possible source will be the Isaac Newton’s cosmology, Quakerism and his life experience. In the second part, we will introduce the specific content of Paine’s legal thoughts.Firstly, Common Sense provide legal argumentation for the independence of America: theindependence of legislative power is the key point, the legislative power should just belong tothe people; Secondly, in Right of man, Paine refute the saying that “people should obey theformer generation’s law forever", and claim that people should have the legislative power forthemselves again,besides,Paine demonstrated the equality of people’s legal rights; Lastly,Paine put forward his constitution thought, as he define the constitution and make acomparation between British Constitution and French Constitution or Constitution of UnitedStates, and Paine made a conclusion that Britain did not have constitution.The third part is the analysis of Paine’s legal thoughts.Firstly,the characteristics of hislegal thoughts could be described as law is democratic and supreme,and his thoughts wasalways reflecting the changing times and very popular;Secondly,the influences of Paine’slegal thoughts, including American Revolution, French Revolution and Britishradicalism;Lastly,the limitations of Paine’s legal thoughts, as he did not exactly distinguish“law observance” and “law violation", and the analysis of British constitutionalism was a littlebit single-faceted.