Culture

Thomas Paine (1737 – 1809) was a British revolutionary, radical, inventor, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He lived and worked in Britain until he was 37, when he emigrated to America, in time to participate in the Revolution. His principal contributions were the powerful, widely-read pamphlet Common Sense (1776), advocating colonial America’s independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain; and The American Crisis (1776–1783), a pro-revolutionary series of pamphlets. After that, Paine influenced the French Revolution. He wrote the Rights of Man (1791), a guide to Enlightenment ideas advocating the revolutionary idea of representative government with enumerated social programs and progressive taxation to remedy the prevailing poverty of commoners. He was elected to the French National Convention in 1792, fixing – extraordinarily – his place in British, American and French history. He became notorious because of his anti-Christian The Age of Reason (1793–94). In France, he also wrote the pamphlet Agrarian Justice (1795), discussing the origins of property, and extolled the merit of a guaranteed minimum income. It is not that his ideas were original so much as that his pamphleteering attracted for him a wide readership and influence. Why he’s relevant He was ahead of his time, proposing in detail a form of social welfare and an old age pension as early as 1791. Paine wrote brilliantly on the need for a free press. He argued against monopolies and contributed a great deal to what became both the basic principles of the French Revolution and the Constitution of the United States of America. Nevertheless he has been practically washed out of popular history. Uncompromising Paine stepped on a great many toes. Some of the owners of these toes were very powerful indeed, and ruthless. He was not surprisingly derided by King George the Third because of his support for the French Revolution and the American war of independence, and he went head to head with Edmund Burke. The Rights of Man was Paine’s response to criticisms by Burke (who was born on Arran Quay in Dublin) of the revolution in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Slavery There is strong evidence that the American Revolution would not have succeeded at all were it not for Paine’s work. The fact that he is not in the pantheon, with Jefferson and Washington is down primarily to his opposition to slavery. Most of the other founding fathers were slave owners. Paine was sidelined after the foundation of the Republic by his former colleagues for this reason. Religion The greatest obstacle to a place in posterity for Paine was his criticism of organised religion. He was not an atheist. He subscribed to the principles of Deism as did such notables as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Greatest Contribution: US Constitution Even if Paine’s writings were left aside, and they should not be, his contribution to the birth of what was to become the United States of America, and his influence on its constitution, were immense. As there are very notable instances where our own constitution was influenced by that of the USA, it is also fair to say that Paine was an indirect contributor to our public and legal affairs also. Paine was perhaps the first great socialist. His concern for ordinary men and women, while it may give an additional clue to the attitude towards him of capitalist America, deserves to be recognised by those on the left wing today. That it is not might be down to the fact that, unlike Marx and Engels, who were theorists, Paine was a practical man. He suffered from no delusions whatever, and was somewhat less than patient with those that did. For that other major faction, the people who live according to principles that are only for public presentation and which they discard in private, and for frauds and exploiters everywhere, Paine was merciless. In the Press Barack Obama, has recognised the contribution that Paine made. In his inaugural address, the new president quoted from Paine’s pamphlet “The Crisis”, which was very influential at the time of the war of independence, and which George Washington had read to his troops in order to rally them at the critical period when the American army was on the verge of defeat by the British. The passage quoted by Obama is as follows: “Let it be told to the future world…that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive…that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it”. Paine’s spirit and insight deserve a renaissance. Written by Seamus McKenna

John Rawls (1921-2002) is often said to be the greatest political philosopher of the twentieth century. He was a professor at Harvard University in the right-on seventies. His most famous work is A Theory of Justice (1971). He refined it endlessly which made an already over-elaborate theory even trickier. His theory is intricate, full of jargon and somewhat contrived. Still it reflects something that many, perhaps most, reflective liberals, would find fair. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls attempts to balance liberty and equality, the basic components of justice and fairness, in his theory of “justice as fairness”. Utilitarianism advocates the greatest good for the greatest number. It is an appealing practice, possibly the dominant theoretical driver of liberal democracies (The Fine Gael website says that it is Enda Kenny’s long-standing political priority), but it does not have any theoretical justification – unlike Christianity for example which claims to be rooted in the Bible and natural law. Rawls feels the need to find a justification for the theory he is going to offer. He roots it in the idea that if we could work out what people would decide was just if they had no knowledge of the situation they are in, that decision would stand even when they do know the situation they are in. He infers a sort of social contract among people from what he says they would do in this “original position” operating under such a “veil of ignorance”. We would, Rawls argues abstractly, affirm a first principle of equal basic liberties, thus protecting the familiar liberal freedoms of conscience, association, expression, to vote and the like. However, he damagingly says that equal basic liberties must be preceded by meeting very “basic needs” for economic goods – in effect opening his theory to the usual tin-pot dictator excuses for violating rights to free speech etc. Rawls conservatively considers that demanding that everyone have exactly the same effective opportunities in life is a nonstarter since it would undermine the very liberties that are supposedly being equalised. Being American he assumes that free people would not want to be equal, that there are no “lasting benevolent impulses”. The most he would demand is fair equal opportunities not the same opportunities. So, he said, we would agree a two-part second principle requiring fair equality of opportunity – and the famous (and controversial) difference principle. This second principle demands that those with comparable talents and motivation face roughly similar life chances, and that inequalities in society work to the benefit of the least advantaged. Rawls further argued that these principles were to be “lexically ordered”, i.e. he gave priority to basic liberties over the more equalityoriented demands of the second principle. His theory can justify a sort of Tony Blair/Gordon Brown half-baked egalitarianism. The sort that balks at saying it wants an equal (or even “socialist”) society but happily lends its support to fairness. To equality of opportunity. Where he differs from them is that leftish governments now speak the language of community, not of individual rights; and of desert rather than the difference principle. Confusingly, this puts him both to the right and left of them. Rawls justifies inequalities provided they are necessary to increase the amount of stuff we all have. And provided they are not to the detriment of the very worst off. But the likes of Blair and Brown have a lax view of what is “necessary”. And so Rawls’ thinking can be used to justify shoulder- shrugging at inequalities in society. For example, if (as may well be the case) allowing corporate executives to earn annual incomes of ten of millions of dollars helps to generate the economic dynamism that raises living standards, including those of the poor, such inequalities are allowable. If it does not, however, they are not. Interestingly this seems to cut across orthodox contemporary leftish views that all things being equal the rich should be allowed to get richer, and not be taxed for the sake of it. So again Rawls is both to the right and left on the issue of inequalities in society. Of course his “liberal” orientation and even a half-baked egalitarianism has ruled Rawls out of the American debate. And he isn’t exactly a staple of the Irish discourse either