The Contested History of Common Sense
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- The Contested History of Common Sense
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 rebellion, "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 examining 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 common 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 [End Page 399] eighteenth-century, it was being invoked by both sides in the often rancorous disputes between court and country. In this partisan guise, Rosenfeld argues, common sense became a rallying cry for the extra-parliamentary opposition to Walpole, and ultimately led to his downfall.
From London in the heyday of the Whig oligarchy, Rosenfeld's story moves to Aberdeen in the 1760s, home of a less celebrated branch of the Scottish enlightenment. There Thomas Reid, a university professor, and James Beattie, Reid's chief popularizer, built on the ideas of the English Whigs—as well as the idea derived from Shaftesbury and Hutcheson of an innate moral sense—in order to develop a full-blown philosophy of common sense to combat the threat of relativism, doubt, and irreligion emanating from Hume in Edinburgh. For Reid and Beattie, common sense was a universal capability to ascertain basic matters of fact, which were, as a result, self-evident. And because it was universal, there was no need to defer to the learned for epistemological or moral guidance. In the moral realm, Reid and Beattie held that the existence of God was one of the truths revealed by common sense. Aberdonian common sense was thus "an anti-relativist Christian moral project" (p. 73), a defense of custom and communal norms against the corrosive skepticism and individualism of the leading thinkers of the age. Yet, as Rosenfeld insists, this idea of common sense was also implicitly democratic, for it held that all men could judge moral and political questions for themselves. By combining moral conservatism with epistemological egalitarianism, Rosenfeld argues that Reid and Beattie "set the intellectual stage for demagoguery and democracy alike" (p. 63).
From Aberdeen, the scene shifts to Amsterdam's radical underground in the 1760s and 1770s. A refuge for several generations of Frenchmen fleeing the monarchy and the Catholic Church, Amsterdam became the center of a flourishing underground book trade. Thus it was the perfect place for a...
