The Rights of Man is a political tract written in 1791 by Thomas Paine, an English revolutionary who had already aided the Americans against the British in the American Revolution. Here he was writing in support of the French Revolution, defending his French comrades against an attack by noted statesman and political theorist Edmund Burke in his popular tract ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’, written the previous year.
In his book Paine states his theory that popular revolution is permissible when a government fails in its obligations to protect its people and their true interests. He opposed the idea of monarchy or any form of hereditary government because he believed that human rights originate in nature and thus cannot be bestowed or retained by a ruler in the form of conferred privilege.