This examination of Paine's commitment to democracy and republicanism aims to show how the clear, direct style of his rhetoric is intimately bound up with the power of his political and religious ideas. Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was oulawed and burnt in effigy in his native Britain. Paine believed that government, at best a necessary evil, should be by and for the people, exercising minimal interference in society. He drafted one of the first blueprints for a welfare state and argued for the progressive taxation of property to secure a basic provision for all. His Common Sense (1776) was seen by some as the most important pamphlet of the American Revolution and his Rights of Man (1791-2) the most famous defence of the French Revolution. The Age of Reason (1795), his last major work, proved as damaging to the established Church as his political thought was to governments. Mark Philp has also written Godwin's Political Justice.