Tom Paine's subscription to a plain style, commonsense, and a literal form of reason enables him to mount a considerable assault not only on the forms and abuses of monarchical and aristocratic power, but also on their attendant aesthetic culture and even on the category of imagination itself. Paine's attack on virtually all forms of artifice pushes aesthetics to the very brink. His literalism is posed against the divided world of imagination – that mediating and most mediated of faculties. In Paine's utopian and Rousseauvian realm of transparent truth there would be no need of such a faculty. It is almost as if aesthetics are subsumed entirely under the guise of ridding the world of political and metaphysical errors. The muted version of the rational sublime which operates in Paine's writings is contained within the singleness and transparency of his very own version of happiness in the glad day of revolution. And in this attack on artifice Paine reserves a special place for Burke's Reflections as the text which most powerfully uses the leisured and refined aesthetic of aristocratic culture as the tool of counter-revolutionary propaganda. In his own contributions to the revolutionary debates of the 1790s Paine must engage promiscuously with his adversary's text and risk embroiling himself in it. Burke sought to make a civic virtue and a consolidated civic identity out of a moral imagination. Where he sought to exploit this faculty's compliment to men's freedom, Paine's purpose is ruthlessly iconoclastic.