Available Copies from Independent Booksellers
Price: US$1260.00 + shipping
Condition: Fine
Description: Thomas Paine, Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke s Attack on the French Revolution, Dublin: G. Burnet, et al., 1791. This iteration is the first Dublin edition of Paine s response to Burke printed at the behest and expense of a large group in the year that Rights of Man was published. Only Part I. Part II came out in 1792. Before the French Revolution went awry and literally almost took his head, Paine wrote The Rights of Man, his seminal work of political discourse wherein he both showed the weaknesses and absurdity of monarchy, defended individual rights of liberty and conscience, embraced representative government as the best form of government, and contended for the creation of what is now known as the welfare state. As the author of Common Sense (1776), Rights of Man (1791, 1792), Age of Reason (1794), and The [American] Crisis (1776-1783), Paine was far ahead of his times as a political and economic thinker and essayist. Having left school at 12, Thomas Paine, the son of a corset maker trained to take-up that occupation, revealed no genius as he went from job to job. But on January 10, 1776, a month before he turned 39, Paine exploded onto the transatlantic stage as the foremost advocate of obtaining liberty for the colonies by fighting the British. Paine himself commented that any literary talent he might have had was buried in me and might ever have continued so, had not the necessity of the times dragged and driven him to write. (The Crisis, No. VIII, ¶6.) This volume has a modern hardback binding decorated with a few stars on a blue field. The cover page features a faint image of Paine behind the printed words. All pages are intact and in fine shape. The only writing observed is a note inside the front which in pencil reads, Rear Dublin Edition Published same year as the American edition (1791).
Seller: Paines Pen, Guerneville, CA, U.S.A.