During the Eighteenth Century, settlement of the North American continent became part of the larger political struggle between major European nations. Great Britain, Spain, and France vied with each other for dominance in Europe and the New World.
What Thomas Paine may have meant by that is that government is necessary for social and political change. Based off of enlightenment ideas such as unalienable rights and revolutions in the america’s, People have the right to life, liberty, and property. This led to revolutions in Haiti inspired by what happened in the United states a couple years back and the French Revolution. This “necessary evil” could be representing how bad things need to happen in order to make humanity progress because without it, humanity would most likely never learn and not be as developed as it is now.
