/lit/ - Literature

>Paine goes at length to tear down the legal authority of the dead, which Burke asserted. Now certainly the dead are descriptively powerless if we disregard them (as are the yet to be born which Burke also says we have a duty to). Paine doesn't stop here, however, but attacks the very idea of the dead having authority over the living, as some sort oppression. Well has he followed the implications of this line of thought? How would national debt continue from one generation to the next? How would wills be effected when they reflect the will of the dead? Paine would have to be a proto-Bolshevik here to be consistent, which afaik he was not (although his views on land ownership expressed in a later work, trouble me).

Paine was very much part of the social contract tradition going back to Grotius and Hobbes, with especially strong influence from Locke. I don't think he ever laid it out as I am about to, but there is no contradiction here.

A group of individuals, by coming together and agreeing to form civil society, form a collective, moral person. This person is called the state. The state lives on, even as its citizens come and go. Just as you can not held responsible for promises made to yourself, the state as a person cannot be under obligation to itself. Each new generation, even as part of the same state as their ancestors, can exercise their sovereign power to change government as they see fit.