Rebels with Causes

City Journal ^ | 18 January 2008 | Jerry Weinberger (reviewer) Christopher Hitchens (book author)

[Lorianne]

A review of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man: A Biography by Christopher Hitchens

He was born and educated in England but became an American citizen and patriot. He was an egalitarian moralist and left-wing political radical. He was involved in the political and revolutionary currents of his time, almost always on the side of reason and universal freedom. He made his living as a brilliant political essayist, pamphleteer, and controversialist and often quarreled in print and elsewhere with former comrades in arms. He wrote a best-selling critique of religion in defense of rationalism as the basis for political, social, and moral life. He was to some Americans a national treasure. He was to others an obnoxious pest. I’m talking about Tom Paine. With an appropriate change of tense, I might be talking about Christopher Hitchens.

Hitchens’s Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man: A Biography is not, in fact, his latest book. (Who can keep up?) Though just out on this side of the pond, it was published a year ago in Britain, well before the blockbuster God Is Not Great. It’s striking that the cover of the British edition sports William Blake’s Albion’s Angel (the frontispiece to the poet’s America: A Prophecy), while the American edition features a Wilde-like photo of Hitchens. Some will complain that the American cover is shameless commercial hype. Of course it is—we’re in America, after all—but sometimes commercial hype gets it right: had Hitchens been plying his trade in Paine’s time and in his stead, he might have been the one to write the pamphlet that would help spark the most important political revolution in human history, and he’d consider Blake, who conversed with biblical prophets, something of a nut. There are other, more scholarly, biographies and studies of Thomas Paine; but there is, to my knowledge, no account of Paine by an author whose heart and mind are so close to Paine’s and who possesses such Paine-like rhetorical and polemical skills. In this wonderful book, Hitchens depicts the ups and downs of Paine’s life, private and political, and brilliantly shows that the choice for revolution is never easy or free of moral ambiguity.