Should Thomas Paine be considered one of the Founders of the American republic? Certainly, no account of the Revolution is complete without Paine, whose gift for political rhetoric helped to ignite the colonies and to keep them ablaze through the darkest days of the Revolutionary War. In the first weeks of 1776, in the anxious interregnum between the battle at Lexington and the formal declaration of independence, Paine crystallized the colonies’ resolve with “Common Sense,” practically daring the Americans to live up to their destiny: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

Then, in the last weeks of the same year, after the first battles against the British had seen Washington’s army beaten from one end of New Jersey to the other, Paine forbade the colonies to lose hope:

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

But Paine, as historian Harvey J. Kaye notes in “Thomas Paine and the Promise of America” (Hill and Wang, 336 pages, $25), has never had a secure place in the usual roster of Founders. Mr. Kaye’s book is, in fact, an attempt to rectify what he sees as a long-standing injustice, by establishing that Paine, no less than Washington and Jefferson, is an indispensable American hero: “When we rummage through our revolutionary heritage, we instinctively look for democratic hopes and possibilities. And there we find no Founder more committed to the progress of freedom, equality, and democracy than Paine.”

There are, however, good reasons why Paine has never been considered as central to American history as the Founders. For one thing, when the Revolution broke out, he had been in America for less than two years. Paine was 37 years old when, after losing his job as a British customs inspector, he decided to take the advice of his patron Benjamin Franklin and make a new start in Philadelphia. He remained in the country for just 12 years before heading back to England and France in 1787; he would not return to America until 1802, spending his last years in semi-retirement until he died, in New Rochelle, in 1809.

Paine was not, then, a stakeholder in the new nation in quite the same way as the other Founders. He had not reluctantly evolved, after a long series of infringements and usurpations, from British soldier to American captain, like Washington; or from born aristocrat to principled egalitarian, like Jefferson; or from New England respectability to political radicalism, like Adams. He never sat in a legislature or commanded a battalion, either before or after 1776. Indeed, the term “Founder” is precisely wrong for Paine, whose greatness had nothing to do with founding anything that lasted.

Instead, Paine was an intellectual, an ideologue and pamphleteer of genius who dealt in short, sharp interventions that changed the national debate. His effectiveness lay not so much in the originality of his ideas – in “Common Sense,” he advanced a familiar version of Lockean social-contract theory – but in his ardor and bravery, which still light up his prose:

The Sun never shined on a cause of greater worth. ‘Tis not the affair of a City, a County, a Province, or a Kingdom; but of a Continent – of at least one-eighth part of the habitable Globe. ‘Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected even to the end of time, by the proceedings now. Now is the seed-time of Continental union, faith and honour.

Mr. Kaye’s book inadvertently confirms this limited view of Paine’s genius, by showing the disastrous consequences that ensue if Paine is taken as a true Founder – more, as the complete American, the repository of everything good and virtuous in our national character. In attempting to show that Paine was, is, and should be central to American history, Mr. Kaye succeeds in proving the opposite: that, except for a few crucial moments in 1776, Paine was a marginal figure, in some important way eccentric to the American enterprise.

“Thomas Paine and the Promise of America” is an oddly shaped book, injured by the doubleness of Mr. Kaye’s purpose: to write a hagiography of Paine, but also to write a survey of everything he finds progressive and admirable in American history, in ostensible proof of Paine’s continuing influence. Thus his first 90 pages are devoted to a lightning-quick exposition of Paine’s life and major works, whose pious reverence leaves no room for characterological nuance or intellectual sophistication. The reader comes away knowing little about Paine’s thought, except Mr. Kaye’s vigorous approval of it.

The remainder of the book is devoted to a laundry list of famous American “radicals and working people,” from Paine’s death down to approximately 1980. Mr. Kaye offers some 200 pages of summary biographies of abolitionists, feminists, labor organizers, and socialists, a familiar catalog that has all the depth and charm of a high-school textbook (“Artisan, teacher, journalist, and poet, Walt Whitman would often speak of Paine …”).

It doesn’t really matter, for Mr. Kaye’s purposes, whether his heroes and heroines ever actually expressed admiration for Paine; as long as they fit into the pantheon of the contemporary left, they are counted as Paine’s followers. By the same token, anyone who doesn’t care for Paine, from John Adams to Theodore Roosevelt, wears a big black hat: “Of course, the propertied, powerful, and pious continued to anathematize Paine.”

As the generations of admirable “folk” roll on (you can always tell that Mr. Kaye approves of a class or group if he calls them “folk”), any concrete sense of what Thomas Paine thought and believed is lost. This vagueness is not just a literary flaw, however; it is intrinsic to Mr. Kaye’s ideological complacency, which leaves him unable to admit that any of what he regards as the political virtues might be incompatible. Thus Mr. Kaye sees the abolitionists, who were deeply religious, as Painites at heart, even though Paine was an arch-atheist (his “Age of Reason” made him a churchgoer’s bogeyman for generations). He invokes Paine as equally a model for Lincoln the Republican and Debs the Socialist.

Conversely, he is certain that no one who disagrees with his politics could feel an allegiance to Paine. He is blinded with rage at the fact that Ronald Reagan invokes Paine in his 1980 convention speech: “For all of their citations of Paine and his lines,” Mr. Kaye insists, “conservatives do not – and truly cannot – embrace him and his arguments.” Yet he can only maintain this certainty by ignoring the actual Paine, whose libertarianism and mistrust of government are absolutely consistent with a certain strain of contemporary conservatism: “Society in every state is a blessing,” he wrote in “Common Sense,” “but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil.”

In fact, like all men of the 18th century, Paine’s politics do not map neatly onto our current categories. What survives of him is not a program but a spirit, a democratic impulse, that is potentially one of the finest aspects of the American character. But to draw effective sustenance from that legacy requires a generosity of spirit, and a complexity of mind, that Mr. Kaye’s book is very far from demonstrating.