The aim and meaning of constitutions according to Thomas Paine

Very often Thomas Paine has been judged a polemist, a pamphleteer, a popularizer of other’s ideas much more than an original thinker. It is not difficult to enumerate several opinions from these angles. For Crane Brinton, “Paine belongs rather to history of opinion than to the history of thought.” More articulated but not less severe is the judgment of Harry Hayden Clark; in his opinion, “Thomas Paine was neither an original thinker not a creator of literature of high intrinsic value.” The tune does not change if we skip some decades forward in the historiography. For Joyce Appleby, “Paine was not a profound thinker.” Equally terse is Jack Fruchtman who confirms: “Thomas Paine was not a political philosopher.”1