PERSON
Thomas Paine
The eighteenth-century pamphleteer who demonstrated that a medium reorganizes a society before it changes any single mind—and whose commitments to natural rights, accountability, and the common inheritance of the earth apply with startling precision to an age when the marginal cost of persuasion has once again collapsed toward zero.
Thomas Paine understood that ideas have a physics. They move through a society at a speed and cost set by the available medium, and whoever controls or lowers that cost controls the political possibilities of an era. Born in 1737 in Thetford, England, the son of a corset-maker, he arrived in Philadelphia in late 1774 with little but a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin and a talent no one had yet found a use for. Fourteen months later he published Common Sense, and the political ground of a continent shifted beneath it. The pamphlet sold in the hundreds of thousands in a population of a few million, not because it added a clever argument to an existing debate but because it changed who was permitted to have the debate at all—lifting the question of independence out of the hands of lawyers and merchants and placing
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