Summary Of Continental Mind By Thomas Paine

Common Sense, the revolutionary era document by Thomas Paine, can be said to be one of the main components that helped guide the minds and hearts of the people into a push for revolution. The essay itself is an indictment of the King and the wrongs done to the colonies by the Britain’s monarchy. Paine also wishes to help show the colonists that survival after revolution is possible due to the economic capabilities that the colonies pose. Jason Solinger, in his essay titled “Thomas Paine’s Continental Mind,” attempts to show the reader how Paine may be suggesting that people from different backgrounds in the colonies are better able to associate with each other on the grounds that they are colonists, whereas the Europeans had more separating

With that being said, if we look into his work, we may be able to see how his words have not been heeded in our own time. Paine writes, “To the evil of monarchy we have added that of hereditary succession; and as the first is a degradation and lessening of ourselves, so the second, claimed as a matter of right, is an insult and imposition on posterity. For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others forever.” Similar to the thoughts of Locke on posterity, Paine suggests that monarchical rule is unfair due to the allowance of ancestry to be the judge of a person’s life and success. In his somewhat confusing and contradictory essay, Solinger writes, “cosmopolitanism nonetheless offered a means of differentiating a diasporic people from both the countrymen they left behind and the non-Christian natives among whom they lived.” What should be taken from this is that Solinger is not reading Thomas Paine as necessarily egalitarian but as someone who is wishing to differentiate and create another separate population of people. This is a very strange way of reading Paine, because it states that he is a man of many cultures, but it is also suggesting that he is attempting to separate from those cultures by creating a new one. It seems that Solinger may have missed the idea that Paine is attempting to incorporate all into his revolution

"Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution." Early American Literature

42, no. 1 (March 2007): 206-210. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed July 11, 2017).

This is a 5 page book review. Slawinski outlines Edward Larkin’s book that covers Common Sense and other writing from Thomas Paine. It covers Paine’s use of rhetoric to really drive to create American nationalism or unity. It also goes over how Paine’s relevance declined in his later years. It also touches on how Paine’s later writings may have overreached and stepped beyond the boundaries that society set up at the time.

Solinger, Jason D. "Thomas Paine's Continental Mind." Early American Literature 45, no. 3

(November 2010): 593-617. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed July 11, 2017).

This text is 25 pages in length, and it discusses Paine’s use of the word “continental.” The main thing to gather from it is the idea that people were able to better unify once they crossed the Atlantic than they would have been had they stayed in Europe. Another idea to gather is the open mindedness towards others that comes with travelling and living in another country due to the experience that you get from