Rights of Man is a two-part book with 31 articles which argues that it is within the natural rights of man to overthrow the government in a popular revolution. Part one deals mostly with Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution in his work, Reflections on the Revolution in France. Because of the severity of the French Revolution, and given our fledging nation's relationship with France, the work became very popular.
In the first portion of the work, Paine argues that human rights are unalienable since they originate from nature itself, which is to say that all human rights are given by existence itself, so any human has them. Therefore, when the French government failed to uphold the various interests of the French people, Paine believes they were within their God-given rights as citizens to attempt to overthrow the despotic government. Paine draws a distinction between killing the king (that is, the man) and killing the office of the king, which is what he argues the French Revolution actually accomplished. He takes the Bastille as an instance of the tyranny overthrown (because the jail represents the nation's primary force of government among its own citizenry).
This is an Enlightenment argument, highly influenced by John Locke who argued that a government's role is to protect its citizens from the fear of eminent death. From that philosophy, it makes sense that Paine would conclude that a revolution is morally permissible, since the government had essentially failed to protect the French from the fear of death by starvation.
Paine's Rights of Man goes on to outline a low view of hereditary forms of government. One of the main philosophical features of Rights is that it disagrees with Burke's Reflections on the point of aristocracy. Burke argued that whenever the uneducated masses are governed by a higher caste, like an oligarchy or an aristocracy. This would protect the powerful offices in government from being filled by people who Burke would argue are not properly qualified to bear the burden of office. However, Paine argues that to serve common man is the goal of the government in the first place, and in order for a government to truly be representative instead of tyrannical, then anyone should be eligible for office without regard for their social caste or status.
Essentially, Burke didn't believe that the common man was intelligent enough to know what was good for himself, and Paine disagreed. Rights of Man was a major influence in the development of the US government in its fledgling days, and ultimately, we selected a form of government that technically allows any qualified person to hold any office, but mostly, we tend to support the wealthy and well-educated in US politics today, which is a blend of the two world views.
