Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Inventing an American Public: The Pennsylvania Magazine and Revolutionary American Political Discourse
- 2 “Could the Wolf Bleat Like the Lamb”: Paine's Critique of the Early American Public Sphere
- 3 Writing Revolutionary History
- 4 The Science of Revolution: Technological Metaphors and Scientific Methodology in Rights of Man and The Age of Reason
- 5 “Strong Friends and Violent Enemies”: The Historical Construction of Thomas Paine through the Nineteenth Century
- Epilogue: Paine and Nineteenth-Century American Literary History
- Works Cited
- Index
4 - The Science of Revolution: Technological Metaphors and Scientific Methodology in Rights of Man and The Age of Reason
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Inventing an American Public: The Pennsylvania Magazine and Revolutionary American Political Discourse
- 2 “Could the Wolf Bleat Like the Lamb”: Paine's Critique of the Early American Public Sphere
- 3 Writing Revolutionary History
- 4 The Science of Revolution: Technological Metaphors and Scientific Methodology in Rights of Man and The Age of Reason
- 5 “Strong Friends and Violent Enemies”: The Historical Construction of Thomas Paine through the Nineteenth Century
- Epilogue: Paine and Nineteenth-Century American Literary History
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Thomas Paine begins the Introduction to Part II of Rights of Man with an analogy comparing politics and mechanics:
What Archimedes said of the mechanical powers may be applied to reason and liberty: Had we, said he, a place to stand upon, we might raise the world.
The Revolution in America presented in politics what was only theory in mechanics. So deeply rooted were all the governments of the old world, and so effectually had the tyranny and the antiquity of the habit established itself over the mind, that no beginning could be made in Asia, Africa, or Europe to reform the political condition of man.
(CW I, 354)The American Revolution, according to the logic of Paine's mechanical analogy, provided the foundation necessary to reform the world's tyrannical governments. In America the theory had been sufficient because of the youth of the country, but the rest of the world had become so habituated to tyranny that other nations would require a more powerful form of persuasion if they were to reform their governments. Paine hoped Rights of Man would help promote those reforms by spreading the principles of freedom and democracy from the United States to the rest of the world. Using Archimedes's theory of leverage, Paine argues that the United States constitutes a fulcrum that can be used to bring about change elsewhere. What is needed now is a long enough lever, the missing part of Archimedes's formulation as presented by Paine.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution , pp. 114 - 148Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005