Christopher Hitchens, the #1 New York Times best-selling author of
God Is Not Great has been called a Tom Paine for our times, and in
this addition to the Books that Changed the World Series, he vividly
introduces Paine and his Declaration of the Rights of Man, the world's
foremost defense of democracy. Inspired by his outrage at Edmund Burke's
attack on the French Revolution, Paine's text is a passionate defense of
man's inalienable rights, and the key to his reputation. Ever since the
day of publication in 1791, Declaration of the Rights of Man has been
celebrated, criticized, maligned, suppressed, and co-opted, but in
Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, Hitchens marvels at its forethought and
revels in its contentiousness. Famous as a polemicist and provocative
commentator, Hitchens is a political descendent of the great
pamphleteer. In this engaging work he demonstrates how Thomas Paine's
book forms the philosophical cornerstone of the United States of
America, and how "in a time when both rights and reason are under
attack, the life and writing of Thomas Paine will always be part of the
arsenal on which we shall need to depend."