Analysis and Public Impact
According to Mark Philp, "In many respects Rights of Man is a disordered mix of narrative, principled argument, and rhetorical appeal—betraying the composite materials Paine used and the speed with which it was composed."
It was quickly reprinted and widely circulated, with copies being read aloud in inns and coffee houses, so that by May some 50,000 copies were said to be in circulation." Of the 300 or more pamphlets which the revolution controversy spawned, Rights of Man was the first seriously to damage Burke's case and to restore credit to the French both in Britain and America."
The publication of Rights of Man caused a furore in England; Thomas Paine was tried in absentia, and convicted for seditious libel against the Crown, but was unavailable for hanging, being in France and never returning to England.
Thomas Paine was not the only advocate of the rights of man or the only author of a work titled Rights of Man. The working-class radical, Thomas Spence, is amongst the first, in England, to use the phrase as a title. His 1775 lecture, usually titled The Rights of Man, and his later The Rights of Infants, offer a proto-communist government alternative to Paine's democratic offering.
Paine's visionary two-part call for republicanism and social welfare was generations ahead of its time when published in 1791.
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