Claiming Paine: the contested legacy of the most controversial founding father.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine
• Position: Thomas Paine and the Promise of America - Book review

Thomas Paine and the Promise of America, by Harvey J. Kaye, New York: Hill and Wang, 326 pages, $15

"EVERY SPOT in the world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted around the globe," lamented Thomas Paine in Common Sense, the tract that sparked the Declaration of Independence and gave purpose and direction to the American Revolution. "The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind.... We have it in our power to begin the world over again. The birth-day of a new world is at hand."

Within just a few months in 1763, Paine's pamphlet sold 150,000 copies. The equivalent sales today would be somewhere in the range of 15 million, making Paine, proportionally, America's biggest bestselling author ever--bigger than Malcolm Gladwell, Thomas Friedman, and Steven Levitt combined.

Perhaps in the hope of jumping on Paine's best-selling bandwagon 250 years later, several new books about him have recently appeared in stores. Among them: The Trouble With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine, by Paul Collins; Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations, by Craig Nelson; even a tiny book by Christopher Hitchens called Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man": A Biography. Like much of the writing about Paine during his life and since his death, each tries to enlist him for a cause, disown him, or otherwise sort out which political tradition can rightly claim this obscure Founder. Of the new books, the most thorough and opinionated is the historian Harvey J. Kaye's Thomas Paine and the Promise of America, which claims Paine for the American left.

Like previous attempts to claim Paine, Kaye's book elides over the true breadth of Paine's appeal. The man's fans stretch from progressives who love his penchant for income redistribution schemes to conservatives who appreciate his affection for entrepreneurs.

Paine (1737-1809) was a mercurial figure, cropping up with a well-timed pamphlet at most of the major events of the revolutionary era, on both sides of the Atlantic. He left his native England in 1774 after a string of romantic and economic failures. He arrived in America desperately ill with typhoid, and was saved only by a letter of recommendation from Ben Franklin, as a result of which Franklin's doctor picked him up bodily from his ship cabin and carried him onto American soil. He rallied quickly and soon found himself at the center of a brewing American rebellion, at which point he made his debut as the pamphleteer of revolution with Common Sense.

Paine went on to pen several more world-shaping works, including The Crisis (1776), a rallying cry in the darkest days of the Revolutionary War ("these are the times that try men's souls"); Rights of Man (1791), a pro-revolution reply to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France; and The Age of Reason (1794), a deist manifesto. After jumpstarting America's rebellion, his writings helped foment the French Revolution. He was granted honorary French citizenship for his efforts, though he later narrowly escaped beheading during the Terror. "A share in two revolutions," he wrote at the time, "is living to some purpose."

Paine even tried to bring the revolutionary impulse to his native England. After his success in France, he returned home to rally friends of republican democracy and religious dissenters to a common cause. The venture wasn't...