Thomas Paine's Rights of Man A Biography

Christopher Hitchens, the #1 <i>New York Times</i> best-selling author of <i>God Is Not Great</i> has been called a Tom Paine for our times, and in this addition to the Books that Changed the World Series, he vividly introduces Paine and his <i>Declaration of the Rights of Man</i>, the world’s foremost defense of democracy. Inspired by his outrage at Edmund Burke’s attack on the French Revolution, Paine’s text is a passionate defense of man’s inalienable rights, and the key to his reputation. Ever since the day of publication in 1791, <i>Declaration of the Rights of Man</i> has been celebrated, criticized, maligned, suppressed, and co-opted, but in <i>Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man</i>, Hitchens marvels at its forethought and revels in its contentiousness. Famous as a polemicist and provocative commentator, Hitchens is a political descendent of the great pamphleteer. In this engaging work he demonstrates how Thomas Paine’s book forms the philosophical cornerstone of the United States of America, and how “in a time when both rights and reason are under attack, the life and writing of Thomas Paine will always be part of the arsenal on which we shall need to depend.”