Author(s): Christopher Hitchens

Contemporary Thought

Thomas Paine was one of the greatest advocates of freedom in history, and his Declaration of the Rights of Man, first published in 1791, is the key to his reputation. Inspired by his outrage at Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution, Paine's text is a passionate defense of man's inalienable rights. Since its publication, Rights of Man has been celebrated, criticized, maligned, suppressed, and co-opted, but in Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, the polemicist and commentator Christopher Hitchens marvels at its forethought and revels in its contentiousness. Hitchens is a political descendant of the great pamphleteer, and in this engaging work he demonstrates how Thomas Paine's book forms the philosophical cornerstone of the United States of America, and how, "in a time when both rights and reason are under attack, the life and writing of Thomas Paine will always be part of the arsenal on which we shall need to depend."