Alan Johnson examines Christopher Hitchens’ assessment of Tom Paine’s legacy

‘If there are going to be rights, there has to be reason’: Christopher Hitchens on the living legacy of Tom Paine for democrats

“Paine…spoke not as a Virginia gentleman, certainly not as a slaveholder or owner, but as a man of no property, as a self-educated artisan. Very fitting, in that connection, that we should be meeting in an institute like this, dedicated to the idea that only the self-educated working class can create and guard and keep and preserve the ideas of a free and equal and open society”.

So said Christopher Hitchens presenting the Thomas Paine Memorial Lecture, ‘Why the Rights of Man Require an Age of Reason’, January 19, 2005 at The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York.

Hitchens’ marvellous lecture - he speaks as well as he writes - shows us why we of the decent left should see Tom Paine as one of our greatest heroes. In this passage Hitchens tells us one reason why Paine was able to play a leading role in the 18th century American and French Democratic Revolutions and inspire the great awakening of the downtrodden in 19th century Britain. He understood that human rights were inseparable from human reason.

“Because he believed in science and the scientific method and because he believed in human reason and because he evolved the concept of rights and he thought these things were indissoluble. And he thought, if there were going to be rights, then there had to be reason. (…)

Well, look, the argument that Paine makes is very simple: Until then, there was the divine right of kings. There were rights okay, but only for the rulers. It was, in a sense, not all that radical to say, “No, we annex the concept of right. If there is to be right, it is innate in all of us.” And it's at that very critical moment, John Locke would only go this far, John Locke who wrote the slave-owning constitutions of the Carolinas. He would only go as far as saying that these rights were life, liberty and property. And by a little shove and a little extension or extrapolation, Paine and his friends were able to begin the argument that says, “No, if there's to be right, it must be human and it must transcend property and, in a happy phrase, include the pursuit of happiness.” We still don’t know whether that was meant to mean happiness as a pursuit or happiness as the object of a pursuit. I'm willing to leave that question open, too, but it does mean that something has changed and the divine right of kings and bishops and popes is over and that human rights will replace them and contest them. That, if there is such a thing, which I am also willing to doubt, is progress.

Now it could have been, I suppose, that Paine could have done this without the belief in reason, but I think it's extremely unlikely. It was a time when the view of science and innovation and endeavour was very closely linked to the concept of human emancipation”.

Hitchens’ point is not merely an historical one. Today, also, the decent left will insist that rights and reason, like equality and liberty, are yoked, and will fall or rise together. (AJ)