But I will dance to Tom Paine’s bones

Dance to Tom Paine’s bones

I’ll dance in the oldest boots I own

To the rhythm of Tom Paine’s bones

(Graham Moore, Tom Paine’s Bones, 1995)

To write one era-defining text would be enough for most of us. Thomas Paine wrote three. Born in Norfolk in 1737 in modest circumstances, Paine’s skill with a pen allowed him to give up his trade as a corset maker to become one of the most influential political writers of the eighteenth century, involved in both the American and French revolutions that rocked the Atlantic world and beyond.

Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense (1776), urging on American colonists in revolt against the British Crown, became an instant classic, denouncing monarchy in plain language and selling by the hundreds of thousands. His critique of hereditary power was sharpened further in Rights of Man (two parts, 1791–2), written in defence of the French Revolution and similarly fêted: Paine was briefly elected to the National Convention in Paris, despite not speaking French, although he later fell from favour and was imprisoned by the Jacobins. The last of Paine’s ‘big three’, The Age of Reason (three parts, 1794, 1795 and 1807) became his most controversial as he turned his critical gaze from monarchy and aristocracy to religion. The unabashed deism of that work alienated many of his Christian supporters, while at the same time inspiring a tradition of plain-speaking, irreverent critique of religion that in turn inspired the secularists and freethinkers of the nineteenth century, including the founder of this journal, G. W. Foote.

The best way to understand Paine’s enduring appeal is simply to read him. Despite its age, his language is easy to read, deliberately so. Paine told his readers what he thought, plainly but pithily, and published openly under his own name.  No tortuous allegories, no classical pseudonyms, none of the methods authors of the time used to protect themselves. That brought trouble — Paine himself was persecuted, and his works were suppressed for decades in Britain, making a generation of booksellers and pamphleteers into political prisoners.

It also, however, brought fame and admiration. Paine’s bold openness was an invitation to every reader, however humble, to act likewise: to think for themselves and speak their minds. There was something special about Paine, that alongside his skewering of the powerful was a palpable love for his fellow human beings. In his own words, ‘My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.’ It was that inspirational humanity that led reformers in Britain and America to hold memorials every year on Paine’s birthday (29 January). It led the radical journalist William Cobbett to exhume Paine’s bones in New York to return them to his home country. Many years later, it inspired the folk musician Graham Moore to pen Tom Paine’s Bones, quoted at the beginning of this review. Centuries on, the old boy still commands attention from the grave.

We can now add Michael Bush’s Thomas Paine and the Polity of the Blood to that list. This is an academic work with a trick up its sleeve. On the face of it, it is a close scholarly study of Paine’s politics. Bush focuses on one principle — the rejection of hereditary power — that he takes to be central to Paine’s thought, his most original contribution to political debate. But read on, and you will realise something else is going on too. This is not just a book about Paine, it is a book about reading Tom Paine. About being inspired by Tom Paine. Finally, it is about coming to terms with the fact that Tom Paine is dead.

How does this work? Roughly the first half of Polity is taken up with Paine and his political works, especially Common Sense and Rights of Man. Having identified the heredity critique as pivotal to Paine’s thought, the second half of the book turns to its legacy. Despite his advocacy of republicanism in the United States and France,  Paine and his disciples never managed to revolutionise his own mother country. Having given us a new intellectual biography of Paine’s thought, Polity’s second task is to write its obituary, recording how Paineism receded fitfully from prominence in British politics throughout the nineteenth century.

Taking these two halves in turn: in the first, Bush wants to secure Paine’s reputation not just as a canny populariser and polemicist, but as a profound and original thinker in his own right. Bush is firmly aligned with Jonathan Israel’s highly influential (and controversial) characterisation of there having been not one Enlightenment but two: one ‘Moderate’ (think John Locke, Voltaire or Adam Smith) and one ‘Radical’: Paine, Condorcet, Jefferson and others, all ultimately inspired by the seventeenth-century Dutch materialist Baruch Spinoza. To be ‘radical’ in Israel’s framework was not a matter of degree but about adherence to two specific propositions: democratic republicanism, coupled with the total rejection of religious authority.

Polity borrows that approach to give Paineism a core principle of its own, in the rejection of political heredity, from which the rest of Paine’s political thought flows. This involves considerable detective work: to prove originality involves working out what Paine was reading at any given time, who he met with socially, and what others had said before. This is the more impressive given Paine’s own persistent tendency not to cite sources. While generally convincing, at times this can seem a little reaching, as when a particular idea—that monarchy is illegitimate because future generations cannot be bound to contracts in perpetuity—is traced to John Locke specifically via Joseph Priestley, despite Bush conceding Paine never cited Priestley and only mentioned Locke to deny (albeit unconvincingly) having ever read him. Overall, though, this is a provocative, refreshing new view of Paine. While not downplaying his polemical importance, Polity is a lucid demonstration that Paine’s writings are just as fruitful for intellectual history as any of his better-heeled colleagues. In focusing on the origin of one core principle, Bush can identify subtle continuities and contrasts with earlier writers that have often been drowned out by the crash and din of the Revolutionary era.

At the same time, the focus on a single author and a single principle can lead to some unexpected inclusions and omissions. After the political philosophy, for example, the book gives a detailed publication history of Rights of Man: its various editions and reprints, their sales figures, and their vigorous suppression in the 1790s. On one hand, this provides Paine scholars a comprehensive resource on that work, and historians of eighteenth-century print will appreciate the detail on sales figures, exigencies of publication, and the practical business of getting radicalism before the public.

On the other, readers might fairly ask for context for such exhaustive detail, whether for Paine’s other works, especially the Age of Reason, which appeared shortly after and drastically altered Paine’s public reputation, or those by other authors. For those sales figures to really tell us something, we need to be told more about the literary marketplace of the time. That Paine’s Rights was just one contribution to a multinational ‘rights of man’ debate occasioned by the French Revolution is dealt with only very briefly. For instance Mary Wollstonecraft, whose feminist critique in A Vindication for the Rights of Woman (1792) would in time come to be one of the most enduringly influential works from that debate, comes and goes in a brief list of other authors. If Polity wants to examine not just Paine’s ideas but their enduring influence even after his death, we need to know more about their reception beyond state suppression.

This is especially so for authors like Paine, whose works could unite a readership in one moment yet divide it in another. Many fans of the republicanism in Rights simply could not follow him into the anti-religious sentiments in the Age. When Paine’s works were returned to circulation after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, mainly through the advocacy of the radical journalist-publisher Richard Carlile, Paine’s reputation changed again. Many of the Carlilean ‘infidels’ accepted Paine’s political principles but not his theological, not because his deism was too extreme, but because it was too mild compared to their own materialist atheism. Over the course of the 1820s, Britain’s Paineites ensured his name remained scandalous, associated with atheism and Jacobinism, such that many other radicals publicly distanced themselves from his principles: Henry Hunt, Major Cartwright, and even Cobbett himself.

Bush of course knows all this: his Friends and Following of Richard Carlile (2016) is the most detailed study to date of the rise and decline of Paineite agitation across the 1820s. There, we received a close study of how artisan agitators scattered around the country forged themselves into a national ‘infidel’ movement, united behind the publisher Richard Carlile’s efforts to keep Paine’s works in print. The second half of Polity is effectively the sequel to that study, jumping straight from Paine’s lifetime in the 1790s to a later resurgence in republican sentiments in Britain during the early 1830s.

In Paris, the July Revolution of 1830 had shown that popular resistance could overthrow a despotic monarch with little bloodshed. In Britain, the long-awaited Reform Acts of 1832 had been treated first with suspicion, then with outrage by radical campaigners. While abolishing the old Rotten Boroughs with only a handful of electors, and enfranchising the new industrial towns and cities, Earl Grey’s reforms fell far short of the universal manhood suffrage demanded by most radicals. The Reform Crisis seemed to confirm that, when push came to shove, even the nominally reformist Whigs were more interested in their own advancement, and maintaining order, than they were in enfranchising the working classes. The result was a renewed interest in radical reform: the question was, in what mode?

Having ploughed a lonely furrow through most of the 1820s, republicanism now seemed to have its moment. Carlile remained a vocal Paineite republican, albeit having undergone a personal religious journey that now saw him professing Christianity as an allegory for the martyring of human reason. Even former sceptics like Hunt and Cobbett seemed, if not converted, at least amenable to the idea that a republic might be achieved without a French-style Terror. Lastly, the 1820s had also given rise to social experiments in trades unionism, co-operative exchange, agrarian communitarianism, and socialism as sponsored by the industrial philanthropist Robert Owen. While these latter groups were all dissatisfied with the status quo, they were yet to be convinced that a Paineite republic was the answer for modern economic problems.

Polity narrates this brief republican juncture in gripping detail. Compared to the meticulous prose of the first half, this is social history that fairly rips along — expect covert meetings, spies and police brutality — and we get a strong sense of the personalities and egos in play. The view is very much from within the radical scene: only by getting up close can we understand how a generation of reformers, all united in disdain for the status quo, could so singularly fail to align their efforts to achieve change. Partly this was down to individuals, with Carlile particularly notorious for clashing with every other radical leader. But increasingly Paine’s ideas were showing their age. He might remain an inspirational figure, but in practical terms his writings against monarchs and priests offered little guidance in defending against the more invisible enemies of hunger and poverty in the age of capital. As Bush succinctly puts it, for many the ‘rights of man’ had been superseded by the ‘rights of labour’. There is a certain wistfulness to the portrayal: while republicanism has not disappeared from British politics, Paineism would never command such attention again. 

That elegiac mood continues in the Appendix on the Bones. Bush takes up the question of what happened to Paine’s remains after Cobbett’s exhumation. Ever since then, they have been a metaphor for the fate of his ideas, perhaps misplaced but not forgotten. Parts of their subsequent trajectory have been known before, as they passed through various hands. Writers over the years have had a crack, but Bush claims the most complete answer yet as to where the bones likely reside. I shall not disclose the location here, but there is no cinematic ‘reveal’: no triumphant marble, no plaque, no humble grave marker awaiting at the end of the trail. But we knew that going in. Tom Paine was famed across the world, revered by generations of British reformers. If his name were engraved somewhere we would know it. There would be no mystery. Instead, we get a different kind of narrative, one that is about the looking, not the finding. The prose is palpably more relaxed, and the better for it, with Bush himself appearing in the text for the first time as he takes up the hunt.

Finding the bones would teach Bush nothing about Tom Paine he did not know already. But the fact that, two centuries on, people are still looking for them, teaches us something significant about Paine’s ability to reach across time like no one else. Cobbett dug. Carlile printed. Moore sang. Bush has read and looked and walked and written. And now, you can read this book.

Book details

Thomas Paine and the Polity of the Blood. With an Appendix on the Bones, by Michael Laccohee Bush, published by Mot Juste (May 2023)

More about Paine

All of Paine’s works are freely available online here.

Peter Linebaugh’s Red Round Globe Hot Burning (2019) uses a similarly personal author’s journey to explore the era of Atlantic revolutions, failed and successful, through the lives of Ned and Kate Despard.

Listen to: this recent cover of Tom Paine’s Bones, by Trials of Cato.

The post The rhythm of Tom Paine’s bones appeared first on The Freethinker.

One of the curious facts of history, especially since the Second World War, is how (to the presumptive embarrass­ment of Fundamentalists) “houses divided” (several nation states and famous families) have managed not only to stand up, but often do so with considerable success. For this reason I have chosen the above title for an article on the structure of the Humanist/Rationalist¹ movement in Britain. Before going any further I must apologise firstly for excluding the Irish movement from this essay, for reasons of simplicity (Ireland is a “special case”); and secondly for the long list of footnotes, which I have ap­pended separately to avoid too many digressions in the main text.

Many newcomers to this movement are at first be­wildered by the mystical trinity of abbreviations — BHA, NSS and RPA — into which it is divided at the national level. He or she eventually finds out that these are the names of the main national organisations, the British Humanist Association,² National Secular Society³ and Rationalist Press Association Ltd.⁴ Later on, the newcomer will come across another London-based body of quasi-national im­portance, South Place Ethical Society,⁵ known as SPES or “South Place” (or sometimes “Conway Hall”). Having worked out what all the abbreviations stand for, one can sympathise with the new member for asking, “Why so many organisations for the same thing? Why on earth don’t they all unite or something?”

I must confess that, in my own case, I was never much bothered by this phenomenon of division when I first joined the movement (around 1963), perhaps be­cause I have a sense of history and suspected that the various organisations had arisen as a result of different circumstances in the past; but the fact still remains that many new members do wonder why there is not now just one national Humanist society, and not only newcomers: in the last few years a number of leading Humanists have advocated a unified movement at the national level. For this reason, in particular, I venture into print in order to represent the opposing case; I contend that the present arrangement serves the cause of Rationalism as a whole (at least potentially) far better than a single monolithic structure.

To begin with, unity is not practicable for legal reasons as the law now stands. A few years ago the RPA had to break off its affaire du coeur with the old Ethical Union as the RPA had become an educational charity (which precluded it from political campaigning) and a court ruled that the Ethical Union’s aims and objects were not charit­able in law. The two bodies had jointly “floated” the British Humanist Association (as the word “Humanism” had suddenly come into vogue in the late 1950s) with a view to eventual merger if the “trial marriage” had worked out. When the RPA was forced to retire from the BHA the Ethical Union changed its name to British Humanist Association and decided, quite rightly in my view, to re­main non-charitable in order to campaign for law reforms. The National Secular Society has always been a non-charitable reform society, and therefore it, too, could not merge with the RPA.⁶

Secondly, a single Humanist national organisation simply would not work out: It would tend to be unstable, and once its leading members started quarrelling — as being human they would do — there would always be the tempta­tion for a dissatisfied faction to secede and set up a society of its own; “back to square one” again! Humanism is essentially a compromise term for a wide spectrum of ideas, including Freethought, Rationalism, Secularism,⁷ Ethicism (even Deism perhaps); it is not a monolithic, detailed ideology and for this reason people of different tem­peraments and outlook have their own interpretations of what Humanism means to them. The three national bodies, together with South Place, at present cater for nearly all tastes within the “spectrum”, and for those of us whose philosophy is more elastic membership is available in all four bodies, if we can afford it.

The existence of several national bodies provides an additional safeguard for the movement at large; it ensures that, in the event of one of the organisations “going off the rails” and making a fool of itself in the eyes of the general public, the movement as a whole can (at least partially) be redeemed by the other bodies publicly dis­senting from the actions of the first. This argument also holds good if one of the societies falls into the hands of incompetent officers or a lazy committee. Another advant­age lies in the field of political campaigning and law re­form, where sometimes two voices raised in unison sound more impressive than one, as in the case of Abortion Law reform, supported by both the BHA and NSS.⁸

Excluding for the moment South Place and the RPA, it is still feasible to suggest that the BHA and NSS, both non-charitable, politically minded bodies should merge. In fact this has already been suggested (by the BHA) and turned down (by the NSS Executive Committee). Whilst a measure of co-operation between these two organisations is essen­tial, for instance in running the Humanist Parliamentary Group, I would submit that there are a number of ob­stacles — some trivial, others more important — to their complete union.

The obvious problem is that of name: the NSS is by far the oldest⁹ of the two organisations and has a great pride in its history, and would be reluctant to abandon its title. The BHA, on the other hand, would be anxious to keep the word “Humanist” in the name of a combined body and could advance the claim of having the larger member­ship for this.¹⁰

Before dealing with the other problems I think it is necessary to examine them in the light of a number of rumours (and veiled personality disputes) that have crept in over the years. For an ideology traditionally devoted to debunking myths the Humanist movement has acquired a surprising number of its own, and I would like, if I can, to try to “lay” a few of them.

The first myth I would like to mention is one that I used to hear about five years ago from vociferous, but ill-informed, members of certain NSS branches. It was to the effect that the societies outside the NSS orbit were full of half-hearted agnostic quislings who did not have the cour­age to stand up and be counted or practice militancy. If anyone still believes this I would remind them that in the past (before the BHA existed) South Place, and particularly its leaders, never failed to speak up when it came to “the crunch”, e.g. Bradlaugh’s Parliamentary struggle; G. W. Foote’s imprisonment; discrimination against Annie Besant; slavery and the Corn Laws; not to mention RI in schools!¹¹ It is easy to poke fun at parodies of baptism, such as the SPES “Naming Ceremony of Welcome”,¹² but it should not be forgotten that under the influence of Annie Besant in the 1870s the NSS held similar “naming cere­monies” until Bradlaugh put a stop to them; and if the singing of Ethical Hymns (now discontinued) sounds ludicrous to the twentieth-century Freethinker, the Secular Songs that once filled the Hall of Science would be just as excruciating!¹³ South Place is still, of course, famous for its Sunday concerts.

The other myth is characteristic of new, often BHA-oriented members of, particularly, local Humanist groups; I have also heard it from people who should know better: the story is put around that the NSS is a pack of bigoted atheistical “Paisleyites” dedicated solely to attacking or­ganised religions, “bishop baiting”, or episcopophagy,¹⁴to use Sir Alfred Ayer’s colourful term. The simple fact is, of course, that the NSS has campaigned ever since its in­ception, on a whole host of issues, particularly birth control, Irish and Indian home rule, woman suffrage, re­form of the Sunday Observance laws, freedom of the press and against dictatorship.¹⁵ Anyone who actually reads some of the old NSS religious debates will find them fairly free of what the average Humanist understands by bigotry, and whilst I cannot say that I have never encountered bigotry in the NSS I have come across far more outside in the form of Secularist-baiting.¹⁶ I very much hope that since the NSS has wound up its branches and encouraged their members to join local Humanist groups the old ani­mosities will die down; this seems to be the case as about 75 per cent¹⁷ of the active local groups are now affiliated to the NSS as well as the BHA.

Another obstacle to NSS-BHA unification is a recent change in policy being undertaken by the BHA. The latter has decided to concentrate its policies and activity upon the advocacy of the concept known as the Open Society, and at the same time to play down as far as possible former disagreements with the churches — the “sour old tunes” of “old-fashioned Rationalists”. Let me say quite clearly that I am entirely in favour of the Open Society¹⁸ concept as an improvement upon the present situation or the Dutch “confessional” system, but I question the bury­ing of the “old tunes”. I am no prophet of the future, and for all I know the BHA may acquire a booming member­ship by attracting people to its ranks who have in the past been put off by its former attitude to religion. On the other hand, by making its more or less sole aim the Open Society the BHA may well find itself to a very large extent duplicating the aims and policies of the National Council for Civil Liberties, so splitting the “mar­ket” for both bodies, and itself breathing very thin air as far as members go. We must wait and see.

In any event, if the BHA does go ahead with its change of policy, the NSS will be left “holding the baby” as far as anti-ecclesiastical campaigning is concerned. There is, of course, a possibility that the Society could as a result of this become obsessively anti-clerical, but from my know­ledge of the officers and general membership I feel pretty certain that the NSS will continue to carry out a balanced programme of activities without going to either extreme. Christianity may be dying, but its political and financial power in this country is still a force to be reckoned with; and I feel that those of us who believe that religion is an illusion have a moral and emotional duty to say so, if only in homage to the millions who have suffered, directly or indirectly, because a lie was foisted upon Europe two thousand years ago.

Speaking for myself, I am a shameless “old fashioned Rationalist”. I believe it was Marx who said that “nothing makes sense apart from its history”, and I think this certainly holds true of Rationalism (of which Marx had rather a dim view). I do not propose that we should live entirely in the past, dwelling endlessly upon the “dear dead days beyond recall”, but the past, if good, can serve as an in­spiration to future action, and never did any movement have less cause to be ashamed of its heritage. To us has been passed the mantle (or iconoclast’s hammer!) of Paine, Carlile, Conway and Mill; Bradlaugh, Garibaldi, Robertson, and Ferrer; McCabe, Bruno, Bertrand Russell and many others — let us wear it with pride! To me the “old tunes” are the Rationalist’s Marseillaise, but let us offer the hand of co-operation and friendship (so long as it is reciprocated) to those who find them “sour”, even if we pity them their tone-deafness!

. . .  How sour sweet music is

When time is broke and no proportion kept!

So it is in the music of men’s lives! ¹⁹

1    I use the terms “Humanist” and “Rationalist” more or less as synonyms here. Like Bertrand Russell, I regret the latter’s pass­ing out of fashion.

2   BHA, 13 Prince of Wales Terrace, London, W8.

3   NSS, 103 Borough High Street, London, SE1.

4   RPA, 88 Islington High Street, London, Nl.

5   SPES, Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL.

6   The RPA now provides a book service for its members, many of them overseas; it also holds annual conferences and is the wealthiest of the national bodies.

7   I use the term Secularism here as it is applied to the NSS; it should be distinguished from so-called Neo-secularism, the ephemeral brainchild of W. S. Ross (1844 – 1906, “Saladin”), a “respectable” agnostic with a grudge against Bradlaugh, the NSS, and contraception. This may explain why NSS members tend to speak of themselves as “Freethinkers” rather than “Secularists”.

8   Very few members of either body opposed abortion law reform; exceptions were Baroness Wootton and Leo Abse MP (who resigned from the BHA over this issue). Many of the active reformers were also Humanists.

9   Founded 1866, by Charles Bradlaugh.

10 The Executive Committee has shown a virginal modesty about revealing the NSS membership figures; however, I am reasonably certain that the BHA has the larger membership.

11 See Ratcliffe, S. K., 1955. The Story of South Place (London) or any biography of Moncure Conway or William J. Fox.

12 Harry Knight (former SPES General Secretary) tells me that this practice is now virtually redundant.

13 For some people even South Place was not ritualistic enough at one time; Stanton Coit left it to form his own Ethical Church,  now no longer in existence.

14 Literally, “bishop-eating”. Ayer has rarely missed a public opportunity of embarrassing the NSS.

15 See Tribe, D. H., 1967. 100 Years of Freethought (London).

16 The persistence over the years, and in the face of all evidence, of anti-NSS prejudice is quite remarkable. Soon after joining a local group a few years ago I attended a social evening at which it was mentioned that I was an NSS Committee member; a young lady sitting next to me was quite horrified that someone so apparently normal could be even vaguely associated with “that lot”. Last year the lady in question joined the NSS! Free­thinker readers will remember David Tribe’s recent review of Essex Forum No. 1 in which he claimed that the editorial had slighted the NSS. The editor replied to the effect that his re­marks were directed only to certain individuals in local Essex groups who were “putting off” potential new members. The editorial was so worded as to be capable of this interpretation, but it seems extraordinary to me to commence a “prestige” magazine of this type by “washing one’s dirty linen in public” — hardly a good advertising technique!

17 Fide William McIlroy, General Secretary, NSS.

18 The term Open Society is recent (1945, see Popper, K. R. [4th edn., 1962] The Open Society and its Enemies, 2 vols. London) but the ideas it embodies go back at least to the Chartists and Victorian radicals, including the Freethinkers.

19 Shakespeare, W. King Richard II, Act 5.

See also:

The Freethinker on the British Humanist Association, 1967

‘Possessed by Not-Quite-Holy-Spirit’

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The post From the archive: ‘A House Divided’ appeared first on The Freethinker.