A drunken and dishevelled English journalist, a rebel once condemned as a Godless rabble-rouser, played a starring role in the inauguration of Barack Obama this week. This strange man had been, in his time, a pirate, a maker of ladies' corsets, a schoolteacher, a failed tobacconist and a jailbird. He first set foot in America at the age of 37, and died 200 years ago this year, poor, cantankerous and all but unmourned.

Thomas Paine was not mentioned by name in Mr Obama's speech. But Paine's words formed a central plank of his oration, and the ideas of that great radical thinker, the unsung Founding Father of America, enemy of slavery and rousing trumpet of the revolution, ran through every passage. “These are the times that try men's souls,” Paine wrote in 1776.

With the souls of men being sorely tried once more, Paine's common sense is back at the heart of US politics. America, and the world, have never needed him more.

Paine appeared in Mr Obama's speech in the final, rousing crescendo, by far its most memorable part. “In the year of America's birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood.”

“At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people: ‘Let it be told to the future world that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it'.”

The words are from Paine's pamphlet The Crisis, perhaps the most sinew-stiffening journalism yet written. George Washington had the stirring article read to his troops before they crossed the Delaware at Christmas in 1776, to do battle with King George's Hessian mercenaries encamped at Trenton.

The new President has fudged the history here a little. His speech has sparked a fierce nitpicking debate among historians as to which “capital” he could mean. The patriots did not camp by the river, let alone light fires, but sped across in secret, as fast as possible. And the enemy were as not so much advancing as sleeping off their Christmas hangover.

Paine's exhortation to the troops ends with the warning that unless the Hessian troops are driven out, they will bonk all the women left behind, leaving Americans with lots of expensive, unwanted, half-German children to look after “whose fathers we shall doubt of”. What a very 18th-century anxiety.

Parts of The Crisis read like the ideal prescription for a time of tumbling markets, looming recession, war and international terrorism. “'Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a country. All nations and ages have been subject to them. Yet panics, in some cases, have their uses; they produce as much good as hurt.”

Rahm Emanuel, the President's new Chief of Staff, puts the same point more bluntly: “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.”

It has been a long, slow and long overdue march back to acceptance for the radical pamphleteer from rural Norfolk. Theodore Roosevelt considered him a “filthy little atheist”, although the other Roosevelt quoted his words to a fearful nation after Pearl Harbor. Jefferson and Lincoln both admired Paine's pungent writing, but he fell out spectacularly with Washington.

The Founding Fathers found it useful to have an Englishman attack the tyranny of the English monarchy, but Paine was never fully accepted as one of them. His fervent opposition to slavery led the slave-owning leaders of the young republic to exclude him from power, while his attack on the “fabulous inventions” of the Bible led many (wrongly) to accuse him of atheism.

Paine was too cussed, his brand of democracy too radical for conservative revolutionaries, yet his words, more than any other writer of the time, capture what that revolution meant, and what it could and should become.

Paine's Common Sense, advocating America's independence from his own homeland, was published six months before the Declaration of Independence and became the bestselling American pamphlet of the 18th century.

His ideas seem astonishingly modern: universal education, a guaranteed wage and progressive tax measures to alleviate the poverty of the poorest. The new President's call for greater inventiveness and restoring science “to its rightful place” invokes the spirit of Paine, that irrepressible architect of ideas and things - he designed bridges and steam engines, and created the smokeless candle. He also invented the phrase “United States of America”.

But even more crucially, he was among the first to advocate the wholesale abolition of slavery. More than any other revolutionary thinker, he imagined the role that free black men might play in the fledgeling country's future.

At his funeral in June 1809, there were only six mourners, including “two negroes filled with gratitude”. When Mr Obama marvels that a man whose “father might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath”, he offers a small nod of gratitude to Thomas Paine.

Paine leaves a legacy of steely optimism in dark times and a boundless faith in human renewal. “I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection,” he wrote in The Crisis.

Obama: “We must begin again the work of remaking America.”

Paine: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

For eight years the bust of Winston Churchill has stared out from a plinth in the Oval Office. The time has come to replace him with another Englishman who never surrendered.

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