Thomas Paine Collected Writings, Volume 2

A comprehensive scholarly edition of the writings and correspondence of Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine: Collected Writings is the first major new edition of Paine’s works, bringing together all his writings in six breathtaking volumes that dramatically revise our previous understanding of his activities as a writer and his importance as a democratic theorist in the age of revolutions. It includes about 180 new letters and some two hundred works newly attributed to Paine, with twenty-nine works previously regarded as Paine’s being deattributed. Drawing on pioneering computerized text analysis that makes possible for the first time attributions of anonymous and pseudonymous texts, this collection includes in volumes 5–6 newly identified pamphlets and newspaper and journal contributions, and suggests that Paine was extremely active as a Grub Street oppositional Whig writer in the decade prior to the American Revolution. Many writings from the period of his residence in France (1792–1802) and his subsequent return to the United States are also restored to his published output. Paine emerges as a much more consistent and serious democratic theorist than is often assumed, whose contributions to revolutionary debates in America, Britain, and France were unparalleled in their time.

This volume spans the years 1782 to 1793, a period in which Paine explored the theoretical foundations of the ideas and institutions he championed in Common Sense. The book includes the Letter to the Abbé Raynal, Dissertations on Government, Prospects on the Rubicon, and Rights of Man. It also reprints “Liberty Tree,” “The Death of General Wolfe,” and other poems, with commentary by the editors providing invaluable historical context.