The Thomas Paine Reader - Common Sense, The American Crisis, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason, and Agrarian Justice. This item is unavailable.The Thomas Paine Reader - Common Sense, The American Crisis, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason, and Agrarian Justice

Collected here in this omnibus edition are Thomas Paine's most important books, along with his short essay Agrarian Justice. This edition has also restored the Third Part to The Age Of Reason. In January of 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense; the book inflamed its readers and ignited the American Revolution. In truth, the fires of dissent were already smoldering, but Paine's impassioned writing gave focus to the many disparate voices and united a country. Between 1776 and 1779, he wrote The American Crisis, in an effort to justify the American Revolution and to bolster the morale of the Continental Army. In The Rights of Man, Paine defends the representational form of government. He posits that all men are born with God-given rights that cannot be taken from them by any government. Thomas Paine was a devout deist. That is, he believed in God, not because of faith, but rather because of the rational empirical evidence that the natural world provides. The Age of Reason was Paine's treatise on religion.

Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was an English-born political writer, revolutionary, inventor, and advocate of republican government whose works influenced both the American and French Revolutions. After emigrating to Philadelphia in 1774, he published Common Sense, the enormously influential pamphlet that urged the American colonies to declare independence from Britain. During the Revolutionary War, his American Crisis essays encouraged resistance at moments when defeat appeared possible. Paine later traveled to Europe, supported the French Revolution, served in the French National Convention, and narrowly escaped execution during the Reign of Terror.Paine defended representative government, universal natural rights, religious liberty, progressive taxation, public assistance, and greater economic security for ordinary people. His major works include Common Sense, The American Crisis, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason, and Agrarian Justice. His attacks on monarchy and organized religion made him one of the most celebrated and reviled writers of his age, but his clear prose and uncompromising commitment to reason, liberty, and human equality secured his place among the foundational political thinkers of the modern democratic world.