Rights of Man
by Thomas Paine
The authorities who were in power in England during the life of Thomas Paine saw in him an agent-provocateur who used his provocative rhetoric to support the emancipation of slaves and women, the demands of the workers, the rebels of the French and American Revolutions. History, on the other hand, came to see him as a politically persuasive figure in the Enlightenment's ideas of liberation. His great pamphlets Human Rights and Common Sense are now recognized as they are – classic arguments defending the right to defend their freedom in the face of tyranny.
