Common Sense Thomas Paine was an American radical who felt that gaining independence from England was incredibly important for America's future. This was his basis for writing the book, or pamphlet known as Common Sense. Thomas Paine felt that writing this book was the only way to get Americans involved with the political issues surrounding gaining independence from the mother country. Common Sense is an exceptionally motivating document that attempts successfully to get American colonists inspired about breaking away from England. It calls on the so-called natural rights of human beings and for every man to stand up for these rights by raising arms against England.
Thomas Paine did not agree with the way the English Constitution was set up. He felt that it was a contradictory piece of paper and it was so complicated that it became almost useless. To explain, the English Constitution was to be divided into three powers of government, which included the king, the peers and the commons.
Thomas Paine; a painting by Auguste Millière (188...
English: 1969 stamp honoring Thomas Paine
Portrait of Thomas Paine by Matthew Pratt, 1785–...Paine felt that this in itself was a very conflicting part of the document to give the power of checking the king to commons. It was conflicting because it also gave power to the king, who can obviously check the commons, because he is wiser than them but they are also wiser than the monarchy because it cannot be trusted, which is why the commons have to check it. These are all very confusing statements that Paine thought to be too complicated. Paine stated, "The state of a king shuts him from the world, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly; wherefore the different parts, by unnaturally opposing and destroying each other, prove the whole character to be absurd and useless,"�(Paine 6). This basically meant that the entire set-up of the English...