Summary Of Continental Mind By Thomas Paine

Common Sense, the revolutionary era document by Thomas Paine, can be said to be one of the main components that helped guide the minds and hearts of the people into a push for revolution. The essay itself is an indictment of the King and the wrongs done to the colonies by the Britain’s monarchy. Paine also wishes to help show the colonists that survival after revolution is possible due to the economic capabilities that the colonies pose. Jason Solinger, in his essay titled “Thomas Paine’s Continental Mind,” attempts to show the reader how Paine may be suggesting that people from different backgrounds in the colonies are better able to associate with each other on the grounds that they are colonists, whereas the Europeans had more separating

them from each other due to their relative living space. In other words, the experience gained in travel leads people to become more open minded about associating with other groups of people—the word Solinger uses to describe this is cosmopolitan. Rowland Young also wishes to display this message in his article, “A Powerful Change in the Minds of Men.” What is noticeable in Young’s article is Paine’s inability to change and switch off his revolutionary status, and this leads Paine to end up dying a lonely and forgotten person. A book review on Edward Larkin’s Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution suggests the same things, and all three of these work to who how Thomas Paine gained great favor during one moment in history but lost that favor when he strove too far. The basic underpinnings of these three sources work to show how Thomas Paine’s Common Sense drew him to a revolutionary high that would eventually lead to his downfall. Paine’s lonely death and the forgetting of Common Sense by the public work to represent complacency or a step away from continual change after the revolution.
To Paine, government should be inclusionary and egalitarian.

With that being said, if we look into his work, we may be able to see how his words have not been heeded in our own time. Paine writes, “To the evil of monarchy we have added that of hereditary succession; and as the first is a degradation and lessening of ourselves, so the second, claimed as a matter of right, is an insult and imposition on posterity. For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others forever.” Similar to the thoughts of Locke on posterity, Paine suggests that monarchical rule is unfair due to the allowance of ancestry to be the judge of a person’s life and success. In his somewhat confusing and contradictory essay, Solinger writes, “cosmopolitanism nonetheless offered a means of differentiating a diasporic people from both the countrymen they left behind and the non-Christian natives among whom they lived.” What should be taken from this is that Solinger is not reading Thomas Paine as necessarily egalitarian but as someone who is wishing to differentiate and create another separate population of people. This is a very strange way of reading Paine, because it states that he is a man of many cultures, but it is also suggesting that he is attempting to separate from those cultures by creating a new one. It seems that Solinger may have missed the idea that Paine is attempting to incorporate all into his revolution

and into his culture. The best idea that Solinger lays out is the idea of a culture of experience; this idea incorporated with Paine’s writing works to suggest that what our society may be missing today is experience with other cultures, because it is evident that we are somewhat exclusionary, and Paine would wish nothing more than to be inclusionary.
That being said, Paine wrote this essay for the colonists, and he did so in order to promote unity within a somewhat un-unified nation. Paine writes, “Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind!” Paine is calling out for the United States to receive the fugitive of freedom, and he is pushing to ensure that there is a place mankind can go to in order to experience this freedom. Young writes, “Common Sense was the catalyst that made the colonists think of themselves as Americans, not as Englishmen, and once that change was wrought, independence became inevitable. Washington remarked, ‘I find Common Sense is working a powerful change in the minds of men.’” Young’s view of what Common Sense aimed to do can be said to be the most common and appropriate view, the reason being is that it gives an active push towards revolution by spelling out the economics of war, giving a basic outline of what the new government should be, and by insinuating that there has been a push away from freedom in other parts of the world. What this essay did was create a purpose for an entire population; it enabled an entire population to embrace revolution. This is another thing that can be said to be missing within out American society. We have sold out to an exclusionary government ruled by the wealthy, and we have quit listening to the words of wise men but have resorted to hearing the opinions of news commentators as seen on CNN, Fox News and pretty much any other new network. We have put faith in all politicians based on our party affiliations, thus leading to non-thinkers (sleepers) being elected. In a sense, we have stepped away from what Paine represents, because we have destroyed all unity by creating a two party system.
Paine is a person who has lived in different nations and has experience with other cultures, thus he is very experienced and educated. He represents a person with little interest in his own promotion, and is a person who wishes to promote or drive the whole of society forward. Young writes, “He refused to profit from his writing—he made no money at all from Common Sense, for example—and he remained impecunious almost all his life.” He was not a man who needed too much to live, and he wished to solely promote social change. He appears to have had a lack of self-interest as evidenced by the fact that, “Paine contributed to [his] decline not just by offending key people who might have stood by him but by being ‘remarkably careless about protecting his own public image,’ and since he was steadfastly silent about his own story, others wrote it for him, to his detriment.” His unwillingness to reveal anything about his own life may be said to show how he saw himself as a true man of the people; it shows that he may have seen his own story as being irrelevant in the broader scheme of things. He is a social reformer who did not write to please or give information on himself, but he wrote to bring change. Paine does have one problem, and that is an inability to compromise in his arguments, and, in the case of Common Sense, this stance worked, but it would eventually lead to much conflict and strife.
Thomas Paine had a tendency to make people dislike him, and it is evident that he did not seek public favor; he is representative of a true reformer and not a publicity seeker. Slawinski writes, “Whereas Benjamin Franklin was open to others’ views, Paine applied polemical argumentation and appealed to the certainty of truth. Franklin became a beloved Founder, while Paine upset his supporters as well as his enemies.” Paine wrote with a purpose, and he did not sway from that purpose. Paine writes, “Let the names of whig and tory be extinct; and let none other be heard among us, than those of a good citizen, an open and resolute friend, and virtuous supporter of the rights of mankind and of the FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES OF AMERICA.” Paine wanted to dissolve both parties and to tear down the walls that divide mankind from one another. What we need to take from this today is the openness that is in the language; it presents us with the problem that our culture enjoys having plenty of space, we are not a close nit bunch, but it also presents the problem that we must promote freedom and the rights of man.
Paine’s writings still have relevance in today’s time, and it further complicates the question of the intentions of the founding fathers when this nation was started. Are we to be a nation that is sealed off from the world, or are we meant to be open to the experience and growth that comes with incorporating and learning from other cultures? It seems that Paine had the intention of forming a nation for those who strive to promote egalitarianism, but it also seems that this is only achievable through education, because in order to incorporate all, you must be educated enough to create a system that works for all. This is evidenced by the fact that Paine was able to experience and see the importance in all cultures and peoples that he came into contact with, and he was able to take these experiences and apply them to the world in order to enact change. Paine and his writings that promote change and revolution seem to be what is needed to break down the divisions we have today, and they are also needed to show that a government ran by a few major families or the highest bidder may be no better than that of a monarchy.

Primary Source: Book
Thomas Paine, Common Sense (New York: The Classics of Liberty Library, 1992), 1-60.
This is a 60 page essay that explains the importance of a self-governing nation, and it explains the evils or the downfall of having one family rule the nation. There is also a push to go to war, and there is evidence or reasons provided that aim to push the U.S. to war. The most important thing about this text is that it drove what was perceived to be at least a halfway indecisive/ loyalist crowd more in favor of revolution. It was a stepping stone from wanting to make peace with the crown to wanting to form a new nation.

Secondary Sources: Academic Journals
Slawinski, Scott.

"Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution." Early American Literature

42, no. 1 (March 2007): 206-210. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed July 11, 2017).

This is a 5 page book review. Slawinski outlines Edward Larkin’s book that covers Common Sense and other writing from Thomas Paine. It covers Paine’s use of rhetoric to really drive to create American nationalism or unity. It also goes over how Paine’s relevance declined in his later years. It also touches on how Paine’s later writings may have overreached and stepped beyond the boundaries that society set up at the time.

Solinger, Jason D. "Thomas Paine's Continental Mind." Early American Literature 45, no. 3

(November 2010): 593-617. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed July 11, 2017).

This text is 25 pages in length, and it discusses Paine’s use of the word “continental.” The main thing to gather from it is the idea that people were able to better unify once they crossed the Atlantic than they would have been had they stayed in Europe. Another idea to gather is the open mindedness towards others that comes with travelling and living in another country due to the experience that you get from

it.

Young, Rowland L. "A Powerful Change in the Minds of Men." American Bar Association
Journal 62, no. 1 (January 1976): 90. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed July 11, 2017).
This is a 3 page article that tells the key points to take away from Common Sense, and it also works to give a short biography on Thomas Paine’s life.