Singer-songwriter and leftwing activist Billy Bragg is spearheading the launch of a new line of political pamphlets in the tradition of Thomas Paine, taking on the crisis of accountability in western democracies.

Running to 15,000 words, Bragg’s polemic, The Three Dimensions of Freedom, will be published in May and will tackle the battleground that free speech has become. Bragg argues, said publisher Faber & Faber, “that to protect ourselves from encroaching tyranny, we must look beyond this one-dimensional notion of what it means to be free and, by reconnecting liberty to equality and accountability, restore the individual agency engendered by the three dimensions of freedom”.

“I think the interest in in-depth writing is returning,” said Bragg, who previously published a pamphlet in 2001 about reform of the House of Lords. Back then, he said, “I was trying to stimulate a debate about that, to start a fire. I think that’s what pamphlets are good at. If you think about Rights of Man by Thomas Paine, it was starting a debate, and I’ve really been thinking and writing about accountability since then.”

Bragg said that he had “written a few songs on the subject, but it’s hard to get a rhyme for accountability”. Then last year he was invited to give a talk to staff at the Bank of England, and tackled the subject in depth.

The issue of accountability, said Bragg, comes up “everywhere”. “When you think of Donald Trump saying, ‘I could walk down Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and people would still vote for me,’ that’s a terrible analysis of the way accountability doesn’t work. Not only is he talking about shooting someone and getting away with it, he’s saying he could do that and his voters wouldn’t even care. Where’s the accountability in that? … That’s where I come up with the idea that free speech alone is not the definition of freedom. It’s liberty, fine, but freedom has to be more than just saying whatever you want to whoever you want whenever you want and having no comeback. That’s not freedom.”

Bragg said he wasn’t “writing about a principle, like John Stuart Mill”. Instead he was “trying to get to grips with the situation we find ourselves in at the moment … If your free speech is to be more than a privilege, it’s something that has to be reciprocated for others, and that’s being lost as well .... One of the things about being a singer-songwriter is that you’re trying to talk about something that everyone’s experienced, love, and you’re trying to join the dots in a way that helps people see from another perspective. That’s what I’m trying to do here too,” he said.

Faber will launch the political pamphlet series in May with The Three Dimensions of Freedom, and intends to publish two new pamphlets a year, all by major musicians. The publisher is in talks with future authors for the series.

Publisher Lee Brackstone said: “There is such an absence of this discourse now … I think we’ve perhaps slightly lost touch with how musicians can be so powerful in this respect. It feels like they are people who are connected but who don’t have a vested interest in what they’re saying, unlike politicians, where of course what we’re seeing is rampant hypocrisy. Billy’s always had this tradition and was the natural person to go to first to galvanise the whole series.”

Brackstone said that the authors would be free to choose what they wanted to write about: “I don’t think we can prescribe an issue to address, it’s got to come from the heart and you’ve got to be prepared to break a few eggs.”

The series marks a high-profile revival of pamphlet publishing in the UK, riffing on the 18th and 19th-century idea of chapbooks. Paine’s 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, which helped pave the way for the US Declaration of Independence, sold more than half a million copies within a few months; his 1791 pamphlet Rights of Man, a defence of the French Revolution, also sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

Small publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions has been publishing long-form essays since its launch, finding bestsellers in Dan Fox’s polemic Pretentiousness: Why It Matters, which argues that some affectation is necessary for innovation in art and culture, and Simon Critchley’s call for a rational discourse on killing oneself, Notes on a Suicide.

“It’s a good time to be publishing those kinds of short book, books about ideas, that are a simple pitch and can be read quickly,” said Fitzcarraldo publisher Jacques Testard. “In France, publishers have been publishing short literary essays or politically inflected books forever, but it’s a form that has sort of died down in the UK … It’s a form we felt was underrepresented in British publishing, and where there was potential.”