Thomas Paine e a Revolução Americana

O "excepcionalismo" ( a existir) americano:

Tom Paine: "Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants and governed by our wickedness…. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

Society in every state, is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer … the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise."

Diz Murray N. Rothbard:

"All this culminated in Paine's tremendous blow for American independence. His fiery and brilliant pamphlet Common Sense,[ii] off the press in early January 1776, spread like wildfire throughout the colonies.

A phenomenal 120,000 copies were sold in the space of three months. Passages were reprinted in newspapers all over America. All this meant that nearly every literate home was familiar with the pamphlet. Tom Paine had, at a single blow, become the voice of the American Revolution and the greatest single force in propelling it to completion and independence.(...)

While he followed Locke in holding that the State should be confined to the protection of man's natural rights, he saw clearly that actual states had not originated in this way or for this purpose. Instead, they had been born in naked conquest and plunder."