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Tom Paine's Common Sense and Ours
Sophia Rosenfeld
| HOW was one to respond in early 1776 to Thomas Paine's startling new political pamphlet Common Sense? Most commentators weighed Paine's political recommendations, exploring their feasibility, their morality, and their potential consequences. Many contemporaries also speculated about the then-unknown author's personal qualities. His origins, personality, and motives, his associates, and even the sources of his style of expression all became grounds for praise or derision. And more than a few writers found themselves, albeit largely for rhetorical effect, taking up a question of epistemology and asking in what way, precisely, Paine's ideas amounted to "common sense." 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." Had Paine, in other words, evoked in his own defense a set of commonplace, collectively held assumptions, the quotidian wisdom of a preexisting community of everyday people (in this case, Americans)? Or had he referred to a basic human faculty that allowed individuals to make elemental judgments about ordinary matters in the first place, judgments that sometimes aligned themselves with conventional wisdom but just as often did not?1 |
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Either way, according to the anonymous author of The True Merits of a Late Treatise, Paine was entirely mistaken in his claim of representativeness; Common Sense did not live up to its name no matter how one interpreted it. Yet the angry writer of this inflammatory response was also clearly onto something about Paine's working methods. With hindsight, we can now see that the success of Paine's brief polemic lay in good measure in his potentially paradoxical suggestion that the political theory laid out in Common Sense encapsulated both meanings of this then-fashionable phrase at once. At the opening of what would soon become the American Revolution, Paine found a way to make compatible within one text two previously distinct and in many ways antithetical Enlightenment uses of both the expression and the concept of common sense. In the process he certainly proved his ability as a writer of effective propaganda. But more to the point, Paine's efforts to employ common sense as a key form of evidence in the realm of political decision making also mark a crucial moment in the history of the conceptualization and usage of the idea itself. As critics such as the "late Member of the Continental Congress" who wrote The True Merits of a Late Treatise understood, Paine had somehow managed to link a loosely defined and mundane but increasingly valued standard of truth to a revolutionary form of politics. From our vantage point, understanding the sources and consequences of Paine's achievement constitutes a first step toward constructing something unexpected: a political history of common sense. |
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Common sense is not generally considered a historical artifact of any kind. Quite the opposite: in modern parlance, it refers to a special realm of perception and judgment that seems to exist outside history or any contingency, including politics.2 To conjure up common sense is to indicate that something is self-evidently true, that it requires no further reflection or analysis on anyone's part. Its conclusions barely need to be stated as such, except possibly with a preceding "of course." Moreover these conclusions are understood to be so readily apparent (at least to all sensible people) that they hold across manifold divisions in the social fabric and across the vagaries of time and locale. |
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