“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”Thomas Paine · Bunul-simț · 1776 · Anexă
Legitimacy comes not from the past, but from people's conscious choice.
Written in 1776, amid the American War of Independence, the argument holds that legitimacy comes not from history or tradition but from people's deliberate choice. The mechanism is simple: if governments are made by human beings, human beings can remake them when they stop serving their purpose. The concrete example is America itself, a society that wrote its own constitution instead of inheriting one.
Paine draws a distinction that still surprises: society and government are not the same thing. Society grows from living together. Government is merely a tool we build because we are imperfect. And a tool is not inherited like a crown. It is chosen, repaired, replaced. Think of your apartment building's owners' association rules. Nobody claims the rules written in 1970 are sacred. If they no longer work, they change by vote. Paine asks for the same at the scale of a nation. Tradition is not proof of validity, only proof of age. The next question is simple: why then do we still tolerate institutions we would never choose from scratch?
Why it matters Useful whenever someone assumes a system — a law, an organization, a custom — is unchangeable simply because it has always existed.