The fact that the writer, polemicist, republican and democrat, Thomas Paine (1737-1809) is more widely known in America and France than his native Britain tells you something about the different political traditions which developed in these countries.

Both America and France saw revolutions which have subsequently carried great significance for the development of modern democratic politics. Paine has an important connection to both. His book Common Sense, written in 1776, two years after arriving in America from Britain, provided a political justification for American independence that drove the revolution at that time.

After giving strong support for the French Revolution in his Rights of Man (1791/1792), he entered the French parliament before being imprisoned under the Terror. In Britain, a country still without a written constitution, he is barely remembered. In the country of his birth, his ideas of civic republicanism and constitutional government have always received a more lukewarm reception.

Yet Paine remains a crucial figure in the development of political thought in Britain. Before leaving for America, Paine had learned his political apprenticeship in Lewes, Sussex, where he worked as an excise officer.

In Lewes he became a town councillor and held forth in the White Hart public house, as a member of the ‘Headstrong Club’, one of many debating societies in Britain at that time. On his return from America in 1787 Paine, now an established writer and political thinker, became part of a wider circle of influential thinkers, whose members included William Godwin, Henry Fuseli, a Swiss painter, Joseph Priestley, the poet William Blake and Mary Wollstonecraft, the feminist writer. This group and others – ‘public intellectuals’ in today’s language – constituted the main circles of what might be called ‘British Enlightenment’ dissenters. Indeed some have described the range of ‘Dissenting Academies’, the expansion of coffee-houses and the beginnings of public life, which included the growth of museums and art galleries, as a ‘British Enlightenment’, to mirror the more prominent intellectual developments across the water.

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