SOURCE: "Epilogue," in Paine and Cobbett: The Transatlantic Connection, McGill-Queen's University Press, 1988, pp. 184-92.

Below, Wilson summarizes the findings of his full-length comparison of Paine and Cobbett's political thought.

Tom Paine and William Cobbett, founding fathers of British popular Radicalism, developed their ideology in an Anglo-American context during the Atlantic Revolution. They responded to the American Empire of Liberty in separate and distinct ways, although they eventually came to share many ideas about political liberty in the United States and its relevance to Britain. For Paine, the American experience was central. He became aware of Real Whig and republican ideas early in life, participated in the radical transformation of those ideas in America, and transmitted democratic republican ideology back to Britain. The United States, in Paine's view, supplied a model of the benefits of government based on the rights of man, where hereditary rule had been rejected and...