Thomas Paine at the Semiquincentennial: A Conversation with Gregory Claeys
About this episode
This episode features a conversation with Gregory Claeys about the new edition of Thomas Paine's collected writings and its implications for understanding his role as a democratic theorist.
Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (Princeton University Press, 2026) is the first major new edition of Paine’s works, bringing together all his writings in six breathtaking volumes that dramatically revise our previous understanding of his activities as a writer and his importance as a democratic theorist in the age of revolutions. It includes about 180 new letters and some two hundred works newly attributed to Paine, with twenty-nine works previously regarded as Paine’s being deattributed. Drawing on pioneering computerized text analysis that makes possible for the first time attributions of anonymous and pseudonymous texts, this collection includes in volumes 5–6 newly identified pamphlets and newspaper and journal contributions, and suggests that Paine was extremely active as a Grub Street oppositional Whig writer in the decade prior to the American Revolution. Many writings from the period of his residence in France (1792–1802) and his subsequent return to the United States are also restored to his published output. Paine emerges as a much more consistent and serious democratic theorist than is often assumed, whose contributions to revolutionary debates in America, Britain…
People in this episode
Host: Marshall Poe
Guest: Gregory Claeys
Topics covered
- Thomas Paine
- democratic theory
- American Revolution
- historical writings
- text analysis
Keywords
- Thomas Paine
- democratic theorist
- revolutionary debates
- historical writings
- text analysis
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Princeton University Press
Books & works: Thomas Paine: Collected Writings
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