SOURCE: "The Economic Philosophy of Thomas Paine," in Political Science Quarterly, Vol. LUI, No. 3, September, 1938, pp. 372-86.

In the following essay, Dorfman depicts Paine as an advocate of free trade and charts some of his engagements with the development of American economic thought.

On the eve of the Revolutionary War, Thomas Paine, a failure in England, landed in America and threw in his fortunes with the revolting colonists, fighting "for the security of their natural rights and the protection of their own property."¹ Then began a career which made him one of the most powerful pamphleteers of the eighteenth century. Not only did he play a prominent rôle in the American Revolution but also in that of France, and many English authorities feared that he might instigate one in his native land. Like any impecunious pamphleteer, he sought wealth, and like any enlightened child of the eighteenth...