Burke, Paine, and the Language of Assignats

Originally published in volume 19 of the Yearbook of English Studies (1989), this essay explores the relationship between language and economics in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791/92). It argues that both authors’ rhetorical practice, and the relationship that can be traced between such practice and contemporary economic theory, make up a major site of struggle between Burke and Paine, at a critical juncture in the transition from agrarian to bourgeois capitalism. Both works reveal anxieties about the relationship of language to the real, and the power of language to effect revolutionary political change.