A Dissenting Voice: Thomas Paine and the Narratives of Industry
By 1797, Thomas Paine had finally heard enough. Amidst the cacophony of critical responses to his scandalous The Age of Reason (1794/5), Paine publishes Agrarian Justice, his most comprehensive and radical treatment of wealth and property rights. While the former text set fire to traditional English religious sensibilities, the latter would pivot from theological to social critique. Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, would become one of Paine’s most vocal critics. Upon perusing Watson’s latest polemic against him, Paine stumbles upon the title of a sermon by the Bishop: “The Wisdom and Goodness of God, in having made both Rich and Poor.” The mere sight of the title provokes Paine’s deepest indignation. “It is wrong,” decries Paine at the opening of Agrarian Justice, “to say God made rich and poor; He made only male and female; and He gave them the earth for their inheritance.” As the culminating expression of Paine’s mature thoughts on wealth and property rights, Agrarian Justice offers a response to then contemporary ideas about the nature of poverty and its causes. Though today a relatively unknown text, Paine’s 1797 pamphlet draws our attention to Enlightenment intellectual historiography, asking us to reconsider the seemingly unilinear monolith of the disengaged, self-disciplining individual. How, in other words, do we account for Paine’s focus on systemic causes of poverty with frameworks that seem to find little room for his dissenting voice?
Paine’s dissent gains greater clarity when it is read beside Watson’s sermon. The Bishop insists on the determined nature of poverty as a punishment for idleness. Throughout the course of the approximately twenty-page homily, Watson uses the word “industry” or “industrious” nearly ten times. God, proclaims Watson, “never meaned that the idle should live upon the labour of the industrious, or that the flagitious should eat the bread of the righteous: he hath therefore permitted a state of property to be everywhere introduced; that the industrious might enjoy the rewards of their diligence; and that those who would not work, might feel the punishment of their laziness.” The poor, in Watson’s phrasing, are like parasites, living off the hard-earned labor of the industrious. Ultimately, they will find divine retribution for their laziness and meager efforts.
"A Tribute to Paine," by the American artist John Wesley Jarvis.
By contrast, Paine looks beyond self-determination to find the true causes of poverty. It is the “great mass of the poor in all countries [who] are become an hereditary race, and it is next to impossible for them to get out of that state of themselves.” In direct opposition to Watson, Paine argues that poverty is not easily eradicated through industrious application of individual willpower. Instead, Paine identifies labor practices and structures of employment as strongly determining factors for poverty. “The accumulation of personal property,” he contends, is, “in many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labor that produced it.” Paine thus reverses the thrust of Watson’s argument: rather than seeing the poor as leeching upon the industrious, Paine proposes that their economic condition is inherited at birth and becomes further hardened by unjust wages and unfair labor practices.
By rejecting the language of industry and idleness, Paine resists popular explanations for poverty provided by many of his contemporaries. It was frequently argued throughout the eighteenth century that the poor often chose to live in their own idleness, refusing to use their powers of industry to overcome hardships. Industry, sobriety, and frugality become linked in a host of eighteenth-century texts, both religious and secular, though perhaps expressed most famously by Benjamin Franklin (a close friend of Paine’s). In a letter to Peter Collinson from May 1753, Franklin argues that “God and Nature” have provided “Want and Misery as the proper punishment” for “Idleness and Extravagancy.” The Deist Franklin offers a surprisingly similar argument to the Anglican Watson. Franklin would go on to immortalize the economic virtues of industry and sobriety in his Autobiography (1791/1793), vigorously reimagining and circumscribing the self-made man that would become a hallmark of American self-mythologizing.
Franklin’s own self-mythologizing is adopted as an avatar of sorts for Max Weber, who places Franklinian economic virtue within a broader narrative of modernity in his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber most famously describes the ethos of the “spirit of capitalism” as intimately related to a “worldly asceticism.” Modern capitalistic labor practices are infused, as Weber explains it, with a rational detachment that finds success under the guise of a quasi-religious calling, with Franklin serving as a primary exemplar. Individual labor, attended to with diligence and proficiency, is itself a calling, one that obviates or ignores questions of systemic labor imbalances. Though Weber recognizes the limitations of his analysis, we are left to wonder what other intellectual currents might serve as a counterweight to the seemingly singular development of the capitalistic ethos.
The Weberian thesis has been qualified by many, but its essential themes are often repeated—albeit sometimes reimagined—in later scholarship. In Foucault’s famous example, the shift from the sovereign/juridical model to a disciplinary society marks the internalization of a disciplinary tactic. The Panopticon becomes a symbol of power that is internalized and reproduced in new networks, including the economic exchanges of capitalist enterprise. Foucault thus places Weber’s thesis within larger mechanisms of power, revealing the implicit connections between worldly asceticism and internalized discipline.
Charles Taylor, meanwhile, has integrated these Weberian and Foucauldian insights into a richer picture of a developing modernity. Taylor invokes the term “disengagement” to describe an “impersonal order,” one where discipline has become the hallmark of the self-acquired practice of reform. For Taylor, the practice of self-discipline leads to the industrious and sober modern individual, disengaged from the world around him or her so as to more “coolly” (in Adam Smith’s words) enter into contract with others. Despite obvious differences in both framework and method, the narratives from all three tell the story of a developing modern ethos, one that is sober, rational, and calculating.
What, then, becomes of the poor in these narratives of the modern industrious self—who speaks for them? Always marginalized, their defense becomes further ignored. Despite the obvious critiques of the “disengaged” self, these standard narratives speak almost exclusively of the ascendancy of the industrious individual. We are left with little sense of developing counternarratives, of those moments when the rational, self-calculating “I” was contested, and the flicker of an alternate path was glimpsed.
Re-enter Thomas Paine. While the famed revolutionary is certainly no proto-Marxist—Paine constantly champions a robust free market—he rejects the language of Franklinian economic virtue, instead focusing his attention on large-scale causes within corrupt systems. It is “every individual in the world,” Paine proclaims, who has “legitimate claims” on the “natural” property of the earth. Channeling and qualifying Locke and Rousseau, Paine in Agrarian Justice offers a political theory in which poverty is created by “civilized life,” which he contrasts with the “natural state.” In the “natural state,” individuals subsist as hunter-gatherers, while the “civilized” state consists of land cultivation. In its uncultivated state, the earth was intended to be the “common property of the human race.” Cultivation, however, has created an imbalance, leaving many dispossessed without providing a just compensation for their loss. Paine therefore finds that “the fault is in the system, and it has stolen imperceptibly upon the world, aided afterwards by the agrarian law of the sword.” The imbalance of land ownership punctuated by warfare has created a species of poverty global in nature that is not easily eradicated.
Now that the disease of property imbalance has been diagnosed, Paine offers a political cure. He proposes that every proprietor of cultivated land owes to the community a “ground-rent,” the money from which will provide further relief for the poor. This tax would supply a national fund from which fifteen pounds would be paid to every adult person as compensation for the loss of their “natural inheritance.” A further ten pounds per year is to be paid to every living person (rich or poor) as a kind of universal basic income. Though Paine believed it was government’s role to operate in justice and not charity, he loudly proclaims that these proposals are indeed for justice.
Paine’s fight for the poor against standard images of idleness calls in to question the seemingly monolithic narrative of the ascent of the industrious self. While we are now thoroughly familiar with this story, Paine provides an insight into the historical contingency of the self-made ethos. Success is not necessarily the proven result of a tried-and-true equation; effort + ingenuity does not always equate to economic freedom. Indeed, Paine’s intervention into debates about poverty suggests the fissures inherent in narrative construction. Such constructions are productive and frequently harmless—unless they are adopted en masse to become part of a determining structure of nation making and self-mythologizing. In the context of the latter, Paine’s defense of the poor becomes fine cracks in the façade of a national—perhaps even global—ethos, revealing all the ways that the stories we tell about ourselves obscure those narratives lost in the shadows of triumphant excess.
Timothy DeCelle, a 4th year PhD student at Washington University in St. Louis studying early American literature. His academic interests include the American Enlightenment, the discourse of poverty in late 18th century America, and the role of sympathy in social and political critique.