Thomas Paine And The American Enlightenment

The eighteenth century is often called the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason due to the profound political and philosophical changes that took place in the Western world. In America, in particular, it was also a period of sweeping economic and demographic changes. The Age of Reason developed first in the seventeenth century England spread to France and Europe, and finally came to English colonies in America.
The American Enlightenment was an era of prolific discussions and debates when America’s new intellectuals studied human nature, society, politics, and religion. This era had several key thinkers who influenced and shape the American Enlightenment one of them was Thomas Paine (1737-1809). Thomas Paine was a political propagandist for

the American Revolution and a proponent of Deism (which was an informal, unorganized religious movement among the upper classes of intellectuals) and natural religion. On January the 10th 1776, he published a pamphlet for which he is probably well known called Common Sense. On this pamphlet Pine declares that the government is necessary evil limited to regularly functions that can only avoid conflicts of liberty by practicing free electors in a representative democracy. He was among the first revolutionist for the declaration of American independence from the British monarchy. Then the declaration of independence happened on 4th July on 1776, written by Thomas, Jefferson, but powerfully lead over the common sense pamphlet. After the publicity of that paper we wrote a second one called the American crisis where he argues for the of British recognition of American independence. Paine castigates persons reluctant to engage the British in the battle for independence. Around the 1790’s Paine published his most important contribution to political philosophy, the Rights of Man, in which he defended political rights for all people fighting for their natural equality under God and concluded, much as in the American Crisis, that only a republic founded on the democratic principles could protect the equal rights of all citizens, who were to benefit from his program of social alleviating poverty.
It was during his incarceration that Paine began work on his most ambitious work, The Age of Reason, published in 1794-1795. In this philosophical work, Paine rejects Christianity, expressed his commitment to science in the person of Isaac Newton, and argues that nature reveals the existence of God in the law like order of the universe. Paine denies that the Bible is the revealed word of God and maintains that many of its stories are immoral and illogical. The Age of Reason is Paine’s manifesto for deism, the view that a God probably exists as the intelligent designer of the universe, but that there is no reason to attribute any moral attributes that to god obligate human beings to worship God or consider God a righteous judge. Paine’s political and religious activities earned him considerable enmity in France as in England.
Although by most standard Paine’s life and political work were largely unsuccessful, he represent Enlightenment ideals of the advancement of science, individual liberty, and free thinking in religion and liberal social reform. With his pen rather than directly through participation in the great political movements of his day, Paine exerted a powerful influence on the government in three nations and left a legacy of humanistic power in politics and religion that remains a testament to the spirit of the Enlightenment.