"[T]he Rights of Man is a foundation-text of the English working-class movement... Paine speaks for the governed, and assumes that the authority of government derives from conquest and inherited power in a class-based society... What he gave to the people was a new rhetoric of radical egalitarianism, which touched the deepest responses of the ‘free-born Englishman’ and which penetrated the sub-political attitude of the urban working people... [T]he Paine tradition runs strongly through the popular journalism of the nineteenth century... It is strongly challenged in the 1880s, but the tradition and the rhetoric are still alive in Blatchford and in the popular appeal of Lloyd George. We can almost say that Paine established a new framework within which Radicalism was confined for nearly 100 years."
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Activists from the United StatesEssayists from EnglandPolitical activistsActivists from EnglandPolitical authors from England
Original Language: English
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Sources
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963; rev. edn. 1968), pp. 99–100, 103
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Paine
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Thomas Paine
1737 – 1809
britisch-US-amerikanischer [[Politiker]]
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