 Paine’s account of sovereignty dramatically delimits collective power to the securing of civil rights, based on natural right. In Rights of Man (1791) he quotes Lafayette’s claim that ‘For a nation to be free it is sufficient that she wills it’ (CW I, 322). Lafayette most likely meant it as a call to reject despotism; but Paine’s account is perhaps more subtle, seeing it as a right of the nation to determine its government, but also as a right that is itself delimited by the end of liberty—that is, by the protection of individual rights and by ensuring their more adequate security within the collective.