New Left Review I/214, November-December 1995
Melissa Lane
Tom Paine and Civil Society
Meet Tom Paine, raconteur, polemicist, a commoner who dominated political discussion in three countries and served the cause of revolution in them all. John Keane is eager to treat Paine as a contemporary, someone who though dead is, in the force of his thought and the vigour of his prose, more alive than many. [1] John Keane, Tom Paine:A Political Life, Bloomsbury,London 1995,£25 ,isbn 0-7475–2007–0. His new biography of Paine has been charged by reviewers elsewhere with anachronism in approach and subjectivism in some of the detail (for instance the Excise Board’s ‘coldly written minute’, p. 60). The book is certainly engrossing; it gives a richer picture of Paine’s first forty years in England than is readily available elsewhere, and, if it occasionally suffers from ‘presentism’, it enjoys the virtues of enthusiasm. Yet Keane’s hopes are not those only of a biographer. He suggests in a prologue that his Paine can and should be brought ‘alive’ as a contemporary (pp. xii–xiii), accorded the homage of, as it were, a virtual presence in our own political debates. So far, few reviews have examined this claim, which is an important one. One way of assessing it is to examine Keane’s Paine, and Keane–Paine, on the central issue of civil society—to assess just how much we can in fact learn from Paine on this issue.
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