Thomas Paine and the Promise of America

America’s unfinished revolution

The revolutionary spirit that runs through American history and whose founding father and greatest advocate was Thomas Paine is fiercely traced in Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. Showing how Paine turned Americans into radicals—and how we have remained radicals at heart ever since—Harvey J. Kaye presents the nation’s democratic story with wit, subtlety, and, above all, passion.

Paine was one of the most remarkable political writers of the modern world and the greatest radical of a radical age. Through writings like Common Sense—and words such as “The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth,” “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” and “These are the times that try men’s souls”—he not only turned America’s colonial rebellion into a revolutionary war but, as Kaye demonstrates, articulated an American identity charged with exceptional purpose and promise.

Beginning with Paine’s life and ideas and following their vigorous influence through to our own day, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America reveals how, while the powers that be repeatedly sought to suppress, defame, and most recently co-opt Paine’s memory, generations of radical and liberal Americans turned to Paine for inspiration as they endeavored to expand American freedom, equality, and democracy.