What is Eustace’s perspective of Thomas Paine and how is this different from how he is portrayed by other historians? How does Eustace portray the relationship between passion and reason?
Thomas Paine is well known for invoking the “Age of Reason,” but Eustace thinks that Paine should also be well known for his recognition in the role that passion can play in making society move. It seems, according to Eustace, that Paine understood poet Alexander Pope when he wrote the following:
“On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail,
Reason the card, but passion is the gale.”
Although reason was important and served as a compass, “passion alone motivated human actions and drove human decision.”
By focusing on Pennsylvania in the pre-Revolutionary years, Eustace has a manageable amount of material to show that the beginnings of America were not based solely on the notions of the age of Enlightenment and reason. Passion played an important role in society, as it does now. Back then, the elite wanted to portray the use of crude displays of emotions as something the lower classes could not help themselves from engaging in. According to Eustace, “the elite sought to use emotional critiques to marginalize those they hoped to confine to inferior status.” But over time, it became clearer that emotion and passion were not necessarily bad things, and Paine and Pope “paved the way for a new understanding of the fundamental commonalities of human nature [as expressed through emotive discourse], irrespective of artificial social divides” Most interestingly, as with the use of reason and logic, Eustace points out that emotion was an important tool in the exercise of power, at first by the elites, and later by larger numbers in society.
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