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Politics Notes Political Theory From Hobbes Notes

Thomas Paine Priority Of The Present Notes

Updated Thomas Paine Priority Of The Present Notes

Political Theory From Hobbes Notes

Political Theory From Hobbes

Approximately 13 pages

Ontology; epistemology; philosophical approach to political theory; historical approach to political theory Thomas Hobbes; Leviathan; state of nature; obligation in foro interno; obligation in foro externo; geometric reasoning; totalitarianism; Rousseau Edmund Burke; Reflections on the Revolution in France; precedent vs. abstract rationalism; justifying revolution; intergenerational contract Thomas Paine; Rights of Man; priority of the present; consent; generational democracy...

The following is a more accessible plain text extract of the PDF sample above, taken from our Political Theory From Hobbes Notes. Due to the challenges of extracting text from PDFs, it will have odd formatting:

THOMAS PAINE & THE PRIORITY OF THE PRESENT

QUESTIONS

  1. ‘Paine’s claim that every generation must be as free to act as the previous generation neglects the freedom of subsequent generations’. Do you agree? [2015]

Is Paine’s argument for the ‘priority of the present’ coherent? [2016, 2014]

  1. ‘Paine tried to combine liberal rights and republican civic virtue’. Discuss. [2017]

  2. On what basis did Paine argue for popular sovereignty? [2013]

Is it fail to call Paine a populist?

  1. How far is Paine’s Rights of Man appropriately understood as an answer to Burke’s Reflections?

QUOTES FROM RIGHTS OF MAN, 1791

‘The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grace is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies’.

‘Those who have quitted the world, and those who have not yet arrived in it, are as remote from each other as the utmost stretch of moral imagination can conceive. What possible obligations then can exist between them? What rule or principle can be laid down, that two nonentities – the one out of existence, and the other not in, and who never can meet in this world – that the one should control the other to the end of time?’

‘The science of government ought, therefore, to be a science of principles... and these principles are accessible to the reason of every rational individual’.

‘To render monarchy consistent with government, the next in succession should not be born a child, but a man at once, and that man a Solomon. It is ridiculous that nations are to wait and government be interrupted till boys grow to be men’.

‘[A republic] places government in a state of constant maturity... It is subject to neither nonage, nor dotage. It is never in the cradle, nor on crutches’.

‘A constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government; and government without constitution is power without a right’.

INTRODUCTION

Burke’s scathing attack on the French Revolution in Reflections (1790) prompted England-born American political activist Thomas Paine to write Rights of Man in 1791. In this fiery exchange, we see – perhaps for the first time – a self-conscious, systematic and public theoretical articulation of two competing ethics: an older ethic of stewardship* and a newer ethic of individualism.

Questions about the relation between generations and the sway our political past holds over our future, lies at the crux of this debate and indeed, of the modern mentalité itself.

RIGHTS OF MAN

  • Paine dismissed ‘the vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave – i.e. Burke’s intergenerational contract – [as] the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies... [for generations] are as remote from each other as the utmost stretch of moral imagination can conceive’. Echoing Jefferson’s claim that ‘the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’, natural rights were exclusive to the present generation since only they could...

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