PAINE VS. BURKE

A. J. Ayer calls it for Paine and I have a backup signature quote if I decide to switch from Mill's devastating comment.  From page 187:

There is no safe decision procedure for subjective conditionals in history and I should not venture to assert that but for Tom Paine the American States would never have been united or made themselves independent of Great Britain. There is, however, no doubt that his Common Sense and other early writings were major causal factors in the actual development of the American Revolution. It would perhaps not be fair to say that he took his political philosophy from Locke, since he claimed never to have read him, but he occupied the same theoretical position. What he did was to give Locke's principles a more radical application. We have seen that his gallant attempt to guide the course of the French Revolution was unsuccessful, and while in the first volume of Rights of Man he enjoys a logical triumph over Burke, the Conservatives who think of Burke as supplying them with a political warrant are perhaps not greatly susceptible to logic. The second volume is remarkable for its blueprint of a Welfare State, but I doubt if either the New Dealers in America or the politicians who built up the Welfare State in Britain were consciously influenced by it. As for The Age of Reason, its deism needs a stronger defence and its way of discrediting the Bible appears old-fashioned, though I suspect that it is still capable of making converts, especially among younger readers.