Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke's Attack on the French Revolution. Thomas Paine. 1st Edition, Part 1. London: Symonds, 1792.
8vo. 1/2 Calf. This iteration is of Paine's response to Burke was printed at the behest and expense of a large group in the year that _Rights of Man_ was published. Only Part I; Part II came out in 1792. Paine's _The Rights of Man_ was his seminal work of political discourse wherein he both showed the weaknesses and absurdity of monarchy, defended individual rights of liberty and conscience, embraced representative government as the best form of government, and contended for the creation of what is now known as the welfare state. As the author of Common Sense (1776), Rights of Man (1791, 1792), Age of Reason (1794), and The [American] Crisis (1776-1783), Paine was far ahead of his times as a political and economic thinker and essayist. Having left school at 12, Thomas Paine, the son of a corset maker trained to take-up that occupation, revealed no genius as he went from job to job. But on January 10, 1776, a month before he turned 39, Paine exploded onto the transatlantic stage as the foremost advocate of obtaining liberty for the colonies by fighting the British. Paine commented that any literary talent he might have had been buried in him and might have continued to stay buried, had not the necessity of the times dragged and driven him to write.