Thomas Paine and the Polity of the Blood

Formerly a research professor at Manchester Metropolitan University, Michael Laccohee Bush has published several well-received books on related topics. They include Richard Carlile’s Philosophy of Sex (Verso Press, 1998), The Casualties of Peterloo (Carnegie Press, 2005), and The Friends and Following of Richard Carlile, a Study of Infidel Republicanism in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (Twopenny Press, 2016). His current research is the impact in Britain of the Dutch philosopher Baruch de Spinoza, via Charles Blount, Anthony Collins, David Hume, Joseph Priestley, Thomas Paine, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Julian Hibbert.

Richard Whatmore, Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews:

“Polity of the Blood adds greatly to our knowledge of Paine’s world and the radicals who feared or venerated him over the following generations. Michael Bush has unearthed a lot of new information, including about Paine’s bones, and the result is a fast-paced and enjoyable work of scholarship.”

​

Paul Fitzgerald (Polyp), author of PAINE graphic novel (www.paine.org.uk):

"Great to see such a robust and well researched analysis. I was riveted by the authoritative appendix account of what actually happened to Paine’s remains. An excellent step in the task of reviving the memory of this much neglected democratic and enlightenment hero."

​

Professor Gary Berton, President of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association, USA; Associate Editor, Thomas Paine Collected Works and Correspondence:

"I commend you on an honest and objective analysis of Paine's philosophy and politics. Your analysis of Paine on hereditary government is what I found most eloquent and exact. And it also foretells one of the reasons you assign the end of Paine's influence.”

​

Lanny Jay (USA):

"Polity of the Blood is a good read and, as a Quaker, I was satisfied with your handling of that aspect of Paine’s life."

​

Barry Arden (France):

"I have just recently finished reading your book and thoroughly enjoyed it. A great read and lots of food for thought. A tour de force and some very impressive and detailed research. The bones! Well brilliant. The appendix reads like a thriller. What we do know about their location from your work is true and verifiable and the supposition about the Rosary cemetery remains a delightful enigma. Your last line is the absolutely perfect ending!"

Eoin Carter in The Freethinker, 9 February 2024

The rhythm of Tom Paine's bones (extract)

This is an academic work with a trick up its sleeve. On the face of it, it is a close scholarly study of Paine’s politics. Bush focuses on one principle - the rejection of hereditary power - that he takes to be central to Paine’s thought, his most original contribution to political debate. But read on, and you will realise something else is going on too. This is not just a book about Paine, it is a book about reading Tom Paine. About being inspired by Thomas Paine. Finally, it is about coming to terms with the fact that Tom Paine is dead.

​Having given us a new intellectual biography of Paine’s thought, Polity’s second task is to write its obituary, recording how Paineism receded fitfully from prominence in British politics throughout the nineteenth century.

Taking these two halves in turn: in the first Bush wants to secure Paine’s reputation not just as a canny populariser and polemicist, but as a profound and original thinker in his own right. Overall, this is a provocative, refreshing new view of Paine.

Polity is a lucid demonstration that Paine’s writings are just as fruitful for intellectual history as any of his better-heeled colleagues. In focusing on the origin of one core principle, Bush can identify subtle continuities and contrasts with earlier writers that have often been drowned out by the crash and din of the Revolutionary era.

​Read Eoin Carter's full review 'The rhythm of Tom Paine’s bones' In The Freethinker, 9 February 2024, on the 287th anniversary of Thomas Paine’s birth.

The Appendix about The Bones is the intriguing tale of the journey of Paine’s bones from his grave in New Rochelle, outside New York City, back to England. The source of this was a pamphlet A Brief History of the Remains of the Late Thomas Paine, From the Time of their Disinterment in 1819, By the Late William Cobbett, probably composed by Benjamin Tilly, Honorary Secretary of the William Cobbett Club, a London political society during the late 1830s and early 1840s. It was William Cobbett who brought Paine’s bones to England in 1819.