Historically famous critics

Thomas Paine

1737-1809 · English-American · Enlightenment

Revolutionary pamphleteer who attacked monarchy and church in the name of reason

Thomas Paine turned political argument into plain, incendiary prose that ordinary people could read and act on. His pamphlet Common Sense helped push the American colonies toward independence, and Rights of Man defended the French Revolution against its conservative critics. In The Age of Reason he attacked organized religion and scripture as instruments of superstition and priestly power. He mattered because he insisted that hereditary authority, whether royal or clerical, had to justify itself before reason.