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THE CONTESTED HISTORY OF COMMON SENSE
Sophia Rosenfeld. Common Sense: A Political History. Cambridge, Mass.: Har- vard University Press, 2011. 337 pages. Notes and index. $29.95.
In most histories of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine's Common Sense plays a pivotal role. Its publication in early 1776 radicalized the colonial population from Georgia to Maine, turning English subjects still loyal to the king into supporters of independence willing to challenge the most powerful empire in the world. Once dirty words associated with regicide and rebel- lion, "republicanism" and "democracy" became, for Americans, the merest common sense.
Despite the causal role American historians accord Paine's incendiary little pamphlet in the coming of the Revolution, they have spent scant time exam- ining just what he meant by calling his plea for the overthrow of monarchial government "common sense." They don't, in other words, treat common sense as an idea, which, along with rights, reason, and popular sovereignty, was central to the Enlightenment and the age of democratic revolutions. This neglect is in stark contrast to the amount of effort spent analyzing the competing concepts of liberalism and republicanism in the last generation's scholarship on the Revolution.1
Sophia Rosenfeld's elegant and engaging intellectual history takes com- mon sense seriously as a political idea central to early modern and modern democratic life. Her story begins in London in the age of Queen Anne, when common sense, once a technical term in classical and medieval philosophy of mind, became "an epistemological ideal" (p. 35) that Whigs, both middling and elite, appealed to as a way of combating religious enthusiasm and political factionalism in a post-Glorious Revolution world lacking royal control over speech and the press. In the hands of writers such as Joseph Addison, the idea of common sense (what Rosenfeld calls "the ordinary sense of the ordinary man") became "a respectable, trustworthy, and superior standard for judgment in such seemingly disparate arenas as religion, ethics, aesthetic taste, justice, and politics" (p. 30). For Rosenfeld, however, "the birth of modern common sense as a political instrument" (pp. 35-36) produced the opposite of what its authors intended; for the idea became so popular that, by the middle of the eighteenth-century, it was being invoked by both sides in the often rancorous...