This weekend, as the U.S. celebrates Independence Day, let’s spend some time with the notion of “common sense.” That now-folksy phrase, the title of Thomas Paine’s famous pamphlet that sparked the revolutionary spirit of the colonies, has had a long and strange political life. Sophia Rosenfeld, author of Common Sense: A Political History, argues that Paine is the originator of “the myth of a common-sense politics,” which provided “a template for popular democracy, not to mention popular challenges to democracy, that would be global in reach.” And, as Rosenfeld shows, appeals to common sense have been with us ever since, and are thriving in our current anti-government era. Below, in a passage excerpted from Common Sense, Rosenfeld considers Paine’s pamphlet and the revolutionary success of its political plain truth.
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“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” —Thomas Paine, Common Sense
In 1776, in the distant colonial outpost of Philadelphia, “common sense” became a call to arms. The basic story has, over the last 235 years, become something of a historical cliché. In January of that year, nine months after the first skirmishes of the Revolutionary War, debate on the streets of the main colonial cities of North America was not yet focused on breaking free from the British. Fear, combined with residual loyalty and affection for the mother country, mostly ruled out this kind of thinking. But behind closed doors, and within radical circles such as those frequented by the bankrupt ex-corset-maker and émigré known familiarly as Tom Paine, the conversation about independence had already begun. After arriving penniless in the old Quaker city of Philadelphia as recently as late 1774, Paine had spent the better part of his first year in the New World writing essays for the Pennsylvania Magazine under such noms de plume as “Vox Populi” and “Justice, and Humanity”; hobnobbing with Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, and other colonial radicals; and growing increasingly enraged at British responses to colonial discontent. Finally, with the backing of some of his influential new Philadelphia friends, Paine began drafting a small pamphlet in which he set out to convert the large reading public in the colonies not only to the cause of independence but also to the even more extreme idea that a self-governed, unified America should be a republic, without king or nobility. When the first edition of this revolutionary call to arms appeared on colonial bookstalls that January, it came with a title suggestive of one of the immigrant author’s chief forms of evidence. That, of course, was common sense.
Paine’s claim that his anonymous pamphlet had “the greatest sale that any performance ever had since the use of letters” may have been somewhat self-serving. But Common Sense was a publishing phenomenon even by modern standards, selling—Paine claimed—more than 100,000 copies in the first year alone. “Common Sense for eighteen pence” became one of the great sales pitches of the late eighteenth century. John Penn, a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, reported after a trip south in the spring of 1776 that he “heard nothing praised in the Course of his Journey, but Common Sense and Independence. That this was the Cry, throughout Virginia.” The Boston radical Sam Adams put it even more succinctly, albeit ambiguously: “Common sense prevails among the people.”
In effect, Paine’s success was twofold. By most accounts, what Paine produced with his slim, cheaply printed pamphlet was an abrupt and massive shift in opinion up and down the Atlantic colonies. Soon after the appearance of Common Sense, according to standard histories, national independence came to seem not only viable but also essential—and did so to a public that ran the gamut from New England ministers to Philadelphia artisans and tradesmen. In a short span of time, the notion of the natural inequality of men, all of whom owed obedience to a king, was also largely replaced by a new vision of the world, no more inherently correct in its presuppositions, in which the people were at once the governed and the governors. This massive change of heart then altered the direction of the struggle between Britain and its North American colonies, forcing the recently formed Continental Congress meeting in Paine’s adopted hometown to move toward the drafting of a Declaration of Independence the following summer. Thus Paine set the stage, or so the story generally goes, for a revolution that would produce an independent New World democracy to be called the United States of America.
There is, however, a second way to think about Paine’s achievement, one that does not require accepting this exceptionally neat story in full. That is to focus on his linkage of this startling new political vision to a mundane, invisible, but increasingly valuable standard of truth. Paine’s other great success stemmed from his decision to call upon “common sense” as both the rationale and the name for the then-revolutionary political sensibility that he hoped to instill. The transplanted English stay maker also invented the myth that there was common sense in a form of government that began from common sense, a myth that was to have a very long life in modern democratic politics. Paine did not actually use the expression much in his pathbreaking pamphlet. He only employed it three times apart from the title, which was supplied, according to Benjamin Rush, by the Philadelphia doctor himself, who had vetoed Paine’s own, more straightforward suggestion of “Plain Truth.” Moreover, some contemporaries insisted that Paine had adopted the term in a way that was entirely ambiguous. As the author of one hostile response, The True Merits of a Late Treatise, pointed out, it was not even clear whether the bard of common sense had meant to imply with this phrase “that his Opinion is the Common Sense of all America, or that all those who do not think with him are destitute of Common Sense.” From one perspective, Paine seemed to be evoking in his own defense a set of commonplace, collectively held assumptions, the quotidian wisdom of a preexisting community of ordinary people. From another, he seemed to be referring to a basic human faculty that allowed individuals to make elemental judgments about basic matters—judgments that sometimes aligned themselves with conventional wisdom but just as often did not.
Arguably, though, it was precisely this manipulation of the modest, yet semantically slippery notion of common sense—his peculiar mixing of the common sense of the Scots and the bon sens of radical continental philosophers in the new circumstances of the New World—that lay at the heart of Paine’s textual sleight of hand. With a fashionable and multivalent claim to common sense or self-evidence being on his side, Paine was able, in the remote Enlightenment city of Philadelphia, to transform himself from a marginal, foreign writer for hire into a legitimate spokesman for an amorphous “American” public. Then he was able to persuade a large number of his new compatriots that they actually desired something contrary to what they thought they did. That was not only a change in their own national identities but also the idea that their own collective common sense ought to rule the day.
The impact of this approach to politics would be felt most immediately and concretely in the new constitution for the state of Pennsylvania that a small coterie of Paine’s allies in Philadelphia drafted later that same year. This legal text set in motion a major experiment in the justification and implementation of the republican notion of the sovereignty of the people independent of any king. And though it did not survive as a literal framework for government, the consequences of this initiative have endured to the present day. The fixing of a paradoxical conception of common sense to a democratic vision of politics as authoritative cause and effect must be counted as one of Paine’s and his cohort’s chief and most lasting legacies. What require explanation are the origins and consequences of the unexpected marriage that began in Philadelphia in 1776 between self-evidence, on the one hand, and self-rule, on the other—a pairing that, by now, has become largely invisible to us because it is so thoroughly internalized and embedded in what might be called “democratic common sense.”
More from Sophia Rosenfeld: How modern political groups like the Tea Party actually misunderstand Paine’s “common sense.”
