Common Sense

Common Sense

Common Sense

Common Sense

eBook

$8.99 

Available on Compatible NOOK Devices and the free NOOK Apps.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers


Overview

Thomas Paine's Common Sense first appeared on January 10, 1776, and the stroke of luck it enjoyed upon its appearance could hardly have been calculated to greater effect. The political tract immediately became the moral and intellectual touchstone for American colonists struggling to articulate their case for independence from England. It sold over 120,000 copies within three months of its publication.

The United States of America owes its existence in part to the incendiary brilliance of the work. Common Sense challenged the authority of the British government and the royal monarchy and was the first document to openly ask for independence.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781101603727
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date: 08/28/2012
Series: Penguin Civic Classics Series
Sold by: Penguin Group
Format: eBook
Pages: 160
Lexile: 1260L (what's this?)
File size: 337 KB
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Thomas Paine was born in Thetford, England, in 1737, the son of a staymaker. He had little schooling and worked at a number of jobs, including tax collector, a position he lost for agitating for an increase in excisemen’s pay. Persuaded by Benjamin Franklin, he emigrated to America in 1774. In 1776 he began his American Crisis series of thirteen pamphlets, and also published the incalculably influential Common Sense, which established Paine not only as a truly revolutionary thinker, but as the American Revolution’s fiercest political theorist. In 1787 Paine returned to Europe, where he became involved in revolutionary politics. In England his books were burned by the public hangman. Escaping to France, Paine took part in drafting the French constitution and voted against the king’s execution. He was imprisoned for a year and narrowly missed execution himself. In 1802 he returned to America and lived in New York State, poor, ill and largely despised for his extremism and so-called atheism (he was in fact a deist). Thomas Paine died in 1809. His body was exhumed by William Cobbett, and the remains were taken to England for a memorial burial. Unfortunately, the remains were subsequently lost.

Read an Excerpt

Of the Origin and Design of Government in General. With Concise Remarks on the English Constitution

Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamities are heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him out of two evils to choose the least.

Table of Contents

Common Sense1
Agrarian Justice79
From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews