PSSLEGAL is pleased to present the bilingual English–Vietnamese edition of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense — Lẽ Thường” (1776), complete with annotations and the full original text.
A slim book, a continent tilted
In the winter of 1776, in Philadelphia, a slim book of fewer than one hundred pages went on sale bearing no author’s name. The title page carried only two words: Common Sense. Within a few months it had spread across all thirteen colonies, read aloud in taverns, in barracks, in churches, even to those who could not read. Six months later, the Declaration of Independence was born.
People still debate the print run — figures passed down range from one hundred thousand to half a million, and historians have yet to reach consensus. But what no one disputes is the effect: before January 1776, independence was something people whispered; after it, independence became something people discussed openly. John Adams — who later had little affection for Paine — still had to acknowledge the book’s weight in shifting public opinion.
What gave it that weight was not a new discovery. Arguments against monarchy had existed for centuries before Paine. What was new was the way it spoke. Paine wrote for the carpenter, the farmer, the soldier; he declared in the very first chapter that he offered nothing more than “plain arguments” and “common sense.” He took that very phrase as the book’s title.
For a law firm, that was the first lesson — and not a small one.
Thomas Paine — the outsider
Thomas Paine (1737–1809) was born in Thetford, Norfolk, England, the son of a corset maker. He had worked as a tax officer and been dismissed. At thirty-seven, nearly penniless, he carried a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin and boarded a ship for America, landing in Philadelphia at the close of 1774.
He was not a lawyer. Not a landowner. Not a delegate to any assembly. He was an outsider in every sense — and precisely because of that he saw what those on the inside could not see, or did not dare to name. Only fourteen months after setting foot on the continent, he wrote the book that changed its direction.
He later wrote The American Crisis, opening with the line that has become a proverb: these are the times that try men’s souls. Then Rights of Man (1791–1792), defending the French Revolution against Edmund Burke. Then The Age of Reason — the book that drew curses upon him for the rest of his life. He was elected to the French National Convention despite speaking almost no French; he opposed the execution of Louis XVI, and was for that reason imprisoned by Robespierre, narrowly escaping with his life.
He died in 1809 in New York, nearly forsaken. Very few came to see him off. The man who had once tilted a continent was buried in silence.
That life is worth remembering, for it reminds us that ideas capable of transforming institutions rarely come from the centre of those institutions.
What the book says
Common Sense comprises four chapters, an Appendix, and a letter to the Quakers — 182 paragraphs in total in the Bradford edition we have used as our source.
Chapter I opens with a distinction that every law student should commit to memory: society and government are not the same thing, and do not share the same origin. Society arises from the wants of mankind; government arises from the wickedness of mankind. The former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections; the latter negatively by restraining our vices. Society, therefore, in every state is a blessing; government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil.
From that premise Paine draws a design principle: security is the true purpose of government, so whichever form best secures it at the least expense and greatest benefit is the form to be preferred. He then turns to the vaunted “English constitution” and dissects it coldly: it is a remnant of two ancient tyrannies — monarchy and aristocracy — blended with a modicum of republican material. To say that these three powers check one another is absurd, since the same constitution that gives the commons the power to check the king also gives the king the power to check the commons — tacitly assuming that the king is wiser than the very people it has just assumed are wiser than the king.
Chapter II attacks monarchy and hereditary succession. Here Paine does something bold for his eighteenth-century Protestant readership: he turns the Bible against kings, re-reading the story of Gideon’s refusal of kingship and the story of Israel’s demand for a king in the book of Samuel. He then offers an analogy as sharp as a blade: between original sin and hereditary succession — just as in Adam all men sinned, so in the first electors all men are subjects; in both cases posterity is robbed of a condition they had no part in losing. The chapter’s closing line has become a famous saying: of more worth is one honest man to society, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived — and virtue is not hereditary.
Chapter III is the political heart of the book: reconciliation with Britain or independence. Paine rejects the metaphor of the “mother country” with a line every American thereafter knew by heart — Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America. He points out that dependence on Britain turns America into a makeweight on the scales of European politics, dragged into wars not of its own making. And he cautions posterity with what may be the most beautiful image in the entire work: a small crack today is like a name engraved with a pin on the tender rind of a young oak — the wound will enlarge with the tree, and posterity will read it in full-grown characters.
Chapter IV shifts from whether to whether we can: the practical capacity of America — manpower, timber, iron, gunpowder, the ability to build a fleet. Paine even prints a table of shipbuilding costs to prove he is not dreaming. The chapter opens with the most compressed statement about the moment: the time hath found us.
The Appendix closes with the passage that has entered the political vocabulary of humanity: We have it in our power to begin the world over again. And the letter to the Quakers — where Paine, after arguing vigorously against the mixing of religion and politics, takes leave of them with a line we think every litigation lawyer should know by heart: with resentment I bid you farewell.
“In America the law is king”
If we had to choose a single sentence to explain why a law firm would translate Thomas Paine, we would choose paragraph 103.
Paine imagines a ceremony. On the day the charter is proclaimed, place it on a divine law. Place a crown upon it, so that the world may know: in so far as we approve of monarchy, in America the law is king. For in absolute governments the King is law; so in free countries the law ought to be king. And then — this is where Paine surpasses every thinker who came before him — when the ceremony is over, let the crown be demolished and scattered among the people, to whom it rightfully belongs.
That sentence did not fall from the sky. It stands at the end of a long chain of reasoning.
Since the thirteenth century, Bracton had written that the king ought not to be subject to any man, but subject to God and the law. Magna Carta (1215) bound royal power to a written text. Samuel Rutherford, in Lex, Rex (1644), reversed the order in the very title: the law, and then the king. James Harrington dreamed of a government of laws and not of men. Locke grounded government on compact and consent. Montesquieu separated the powers so that they might restrain one another.
Paine stands within that tradition, but he does something different. Those who came before asked: how do we bind the king by law? Paine asks: why must there be a king at all? And he answers with an act of institutional design, not with a piece of moral advice.
Four years later, John Adams inscribed into the Massachusetts Constitution the formula that has since become a classic: a government of laws and not of men. Eleven years later, the United States Constitution was born. In 1885, A. V. Dicey systematised the concept of the rule of law. In 2010, Tom Bingham reduced it to eight verifiable principles. And in Vietnam, Article 2 of the 2013 Constitution recognises the socialist rule-of-law State of the People, by the People, for the People.
Between Bracton and Bingham, between Magna Carta and Article 2, there is a slim book printed in Philadelphia in the winter of 1776. It is the place where the principle of the rule of law was first spoken in the language of ordinary people, and spoken as something to be done at once — not as an ideal to be admired from a distance.
Two contributions that legal scholars often overlook
Paine is commonly remembered as a revolutionary orator. Read carefully, he is a constitutional designer.
First, he reverses the sequence. In paragraph 127, Paine observes that most peoples have let slip the opportunity to form their own governments, and so end up receiving laws from a conqueror instead of making laws for themselves. Their error is this: first they have a king, and only afterwards a form of government. The correct order is precisely the reverse — the articles or charter of government ought to be formed first, and then the people appointed to execute them. He calls this beginning government at the right end.
This is constitutionalism in its purest form: a constitution is not something we write to describe the power already in place, but something we write in advance so that power must subsequently conform to it.
Second, he defines a charter in the language of obligation, not of power. In paragraph 130, a charter is understood as a solemn bargain to which the whole has pledged itself, for the protection of the rights of each individual part — whether those rights concern religion, personal liberty, or property.
Read that clause again: the whole binds itself to protect each part. That is precisely the counter-majoritarian nucleus of every modern constitutional order — the reason judicial constitutional review exists, the reason a majority may not vote to strip a minority of its rights. Paine wrote that sentence in 1776, before any constitutional court existed anywhere in the world.
Attached to it are two corollaries he draws immediately: the state has one duty with respect to religion, which is to protect every conscientious worshipper (paragraph 129); and the right of representation and the right of election may well be a power too great for the same body of men to hold (paragraph 132) — the seed of the doctrine of separation of powers and of every modern debate about conflicts of interest in the design of representative bodies.
Reading Paine critically
We publish this book because we believe in its value, not because we venerate it. A scholarly edition has an obligation to identify where the author is weak as well.
Paine’s scriptural exegesis is instrumental; it persuades a Protestant readership in 1776 more readily than it would persuade a theologian today. His historical narrative is polemical and selective — the calculation of “thirty kings, eight civil wars, nineteen rebellions” is more rhetoric than historiography. The institutional design he proposes — an annual congress, a three-fifths majority, a president chosen by lot and rotated by turns among the thirteen colonies — was not adopted by the Constitution of 1787. To read Paine is to read the moment before the design was settled.
And there is one large lacuna that we think readers trained in law must see for themselves: Paine declares that law is king, but erects no institution to say what the law is. In the whole of his constitutional sketch, there is no court. The crown has been placed upon the statute book, but no one has been given the power to interpret that statute book when the branches of government disagree. That gap had to wait until Marbury v. Madison (1803) to be filled — and the debate about how it should be filled has not closed to this day, in the United States or anywhere else.
Finally, in paragraph 104, in the heat of wartime passion, Paine writes lines carrying the full racial vocabulary of his age about the British crown inciting Native Americans and Black people. We print the text as written, without alteration, and annotate the context clearly. A source text must not be whitewashed. Readers have the right to encounter Paine exactly as he wrote, including where he makes us uncomfortable.
Why law students must read it
The book’s very first sentence is a warning about the profession you are about to enter: a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.
That is the occupational disease of the legal profession. We are trained to work within a system, to know it, to operate it with fluency. The more fluent we become, the easier it is to confuse the familiar with the correct. Paine wrote an entire book for the sole purpose of separating those two things. He states plainly: an inquiry into the constitutional errors of this country is needful, for so long as we are prejudiced we cannot perceive a good constitution even when it is before our eyes.
Students will also find in Paine three very concrete lessons.
Learn how to construct an argument. Paine writes like a lawyer writing a brief: he states his premises, cites his authorities (natural, scriptural, historical), builds the opposing argument to its strongest form before refuting it. In paragraph 88, he reduces the entire question of independence to a single question — who is to make laws for us? — and declares: whoever answers that the king cannot do so is already an independence man. That is the technique of narrowing a dispute to a single decisive point — a technique every litigation lawyer must master.
Learn that clarity is strength, not concession. Paine did not write simply because he lacked the capacity to write with complexity; he wrote simply because he wished to be understood by ordinary people. A legal system that cannot explain itself to those it binds is a system with a legitimacy problem.
Learn the duty to posterity. In paragraph 74, Paine sets out a moral imperative that we consider the most powerful sentence in the book for those who practise law: because we are thrusting the next generation into debt, we must do their work for them — otherwise we deal basely by them. He says to take children by the hand and stand a few years further into life; from that height a prospect will open which the present fears obscure.
Why lawyers must read it
Because our profession has its own particular temptation: to mistake procedure for justice, and to defend the existing order simply because it is the order we know best.
Paine forces us to confront the question that daily practice usually permits us to avoid: the constitution I operate every day — whom does it serve? If I set aside pride and prejudice, do I still believe it is the best instrument human reason has devised?
And because Paine gives us a model of the right attitude in argument. He states at the outset that he avoids everything of a personal nature; neither praise nor censure directed at individuals has any place in the book. He attacks doctrines, not persons. Then, after more than a hundred pages of the most forceful polemic, he bids farewell to his opponents with the words: with resentment I bid you farewell.
In the Latin of historians, that is sine ira et studio — without anger, without partiality. Few professions stand in greater need of that maxim than the law.
Why those who wish to understand the meaning of law must read it
Because Common Sense answers the most elementary and most difficult question in the whole of legal philosophy: why must I obey something I did not myself make?
Paine does not answer with metaphysics. He answers with a chain of reasoning that anyone can verify: government is not a gift from heaven but a tool made by human beings to compensate for the deficiency of virtue; being a tool, it must be judged by its effectiveness and by its cost; and the right to make that judgment belongs to those who are bound by it, not to those who wield it.
From this, the sentence in America the law is king ceases to be a slogan. It is the conclusion of an argument. And the crown, shattered and scattered among the people, is the most precise image that political literature has ever found for the idea of popular sovereignty.
About this edition
The PSSLEGAL edition is based on the “new edition” printed and published by W. & T. Bradford in Philadelphia on 14 February 1776 — the edition containing the complete Appendix and the Letter to the Quakers — collated against the Project Gutenberg eBook #147.
All 182 paragraphs of the original have been newly translated and verified sentence by sentence against the source. Each paragraph is presented on three levels: the original English text, the Vietnamese translation, and annotations clarifying allusions, figures, context, and the line of argument. Spelling, capitalisation, italicisation, and early modern verb forms (hath, doth, ye) are preserved exactly as in the 1776 printed edition and have not been modernised.
At the end of the book is an Appendix containing the complete original English text, presented continuously and without translation — so that readers may follow Paine in one unbroken reading from beginning to end. The paragraph numbers in the margin of the Appendix correspond exactly to the paragraph numbers in the facing-text section, so cross-referencing from the translation to the original, or vice versa, takes only a few seconds.
Thomas Paine’s original work has passed out of copyright and is in the public domain — no one owns it, including us. The Vietnamese translation, the annotations, and the design and layout of the publication are derivative works and remain under the copyright of PSSLEGAL Law Firm.
This edition is published on a non-profit basis and is offered as a gift to intern students and interested readers. You are free to download, print, and share it in its entirety for the purposes of non-commercial study, research, and teaching, provided the source is clearly acknowledged.
A closing word
In 1776, Thomas Paine wrote that a situation like the one then at hand had not happened since the days of Noah, and that humanity held in its power the ability to begin the world over again. He may have exaggerated. But he was right about one fundamental thing: institutions are not destiny. They are things made by human beings, and therefore things that human beings can examine, reform, and make better.
For those who have chosen the legal profession, or are considering it, that is not a comforting thought. It is a responsibility.
The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth.