REPUBLICANISMO Y DEMOCRACIA EN LOS ORÍGENES DE LA INDEPENDENCIA DE LAS AMÉRICAS Y LA INFLUENCIA DEL COMMON SENSE DE THOMAS PAINE Con motivo de los 250 años de la Independencia de los Estados Unidos y de los 215 años de la Independencia de Venezuela

This book on republicanism and democracy in the origins of the independence of the Americas, and the influence of Thomas Paine's Common Sense, is published this year 2026, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Independence of the United States of America from the United Kingdom that took place on July 4, 1776, and the 215th anniversary of Venezuela's Independence from the Kingdom of Spain, which took place on July 5, 1811. In both cases, these events occurred as a result of the assumption of sovereignty by the people, having thereby ceased to be in the hands of a Monarch, the people began to exercise it directly through representatives elected by suffrage, who formed in both cases, Congresses through which they could act on their behalf, expressing the popular will. In this way, the principle of popular sovereignty came to replace the traditional principle that then prevailed in the world, which was that of the monarchical legitimacy of the State, where the Monarch was the sovereign. In the new American states established in 1776 and from 1811 onwards, sovereignty passed definitively from the Monarch to the people, thus initiating republicanism and the practice of democratic government. In this process, particularly based on the principles of republicanism and democracy, the influence of Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense published in Philadelphia at the beginning of 1776 was decisive and fundamental in the United States in defining the option for Independence in the Colonies, and its translation into Spanish by Manuel Grcía de Sena. also published in Philadelphia in 1811, also had a definitive influence in Venezuela for the constitutional consolidation of the new republican State.