Common Sense in Early 18th-Century British Literature and Culture: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Politics, 1680–1750 by Christopher Henke (review)

What is “common sense”? This was a pressing question during the first decades of the Enlightenment in Britain. Appeals to common sense were everywhere, and yet few could say what exactly it meant. Not just a set of received ideas, it was also considered a way of judging, even a faculty of judgment. As Addison put it in Spectator No. 259, “that which we call Common Sense suffers under that word; for it sometimes implies no more than that Faculty which is common to all Men, but sometimes signifies right Reason, and what all men should consent to” (December 27, 1711; cited by Henke).

Mr. Henke makes it clear in this wide-ranging and detailed book that common sense became a master discourse that regulated all others—including those of the emerging civil society: moral philosophy, empiricism, religion, and aesthetics. Appeals to common sense affirm normative standards: art is neoclassical; “nature” a moral ideal; politics liberal; and religion Protestant. It is also so contradictory that it threatens to descend to nonsense: it is common and yet elusive; universal and yet peculiarly English. The appeal to common sense creates, paradoxically, coteries, clubs, and factions—ably explored here in Mr. Henke’s extended examination of rhetorical appeals to common sense in the pamphlet and periodical wars of the 1730s, as well as through the Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s essay, “Sensus Communis; or, The Freedom of Wit and Humour.” Linked to truth and honesty on the one hand and raillery on the other, Shaftesbury suggests common sense can only be spoken in private.

Its special province becomes what Mr. Henke goes on to study in a series of careful and detailed readings: literature, particularly political and religious satire. Dryden, Swift, Pope, Defoe, Fielding, Mandeville, and Johnson feature in detailed and valuable readings. Few women writers figure, unfortunately, among the primary texts here, though they are a presence throughout Mr. Henke’s up-to-date and extensive critical apparatus. Mary Astell’s political philosophy would have been well received alongside the study of Shaftesbury’s, while Eliza Haywood was a ubiquitous presence in the period, writing in virtually every genre, including the periodical essay. Women and other “others” are, however, interestingly represented through readings of Pope’s Rape of the Lock and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

While appropriated as distinctively “English,” common sense has a long history. “The two-thousand-year-old notion prevailing from Aristotle until the end of Renaissance times that the common sense is a sensory faculty … prefigures eighteenth-century public discourses of a rational common sense and its ethical-aesthetic implications.” Empiricism could do nothing without it. While celebrated for the concept of the tabula rasa, Locke also showed sensations do not make sense without prior context: the idea comes before the sensation, as much as it comes after. Further, a series of analogies links the immediacy of sensations, such as taste, to moral and aesthetic judgments that seem immediate, and therefore natural, simply because they are anchored in a world held in common. This shared sense of things is itself the product of common sense’s other linked concepts: imagination, memory, and idea. As Locke makes clear in his Essay, our ideas about the world necessarily precede our ability to see, or to perceive. Common sense is, finally, circular: we see only what it tells us is there to be seen, and it tells us how we ought to see it. No wonder common sense itself is so hard to pull into view.

For this, Mr. Henke turns to Shaftesbury, who becomes the period’s prime mover in the field of common sense. And yet, as he notes,

The irony in the case of the Earl of Shaftesbury is that the society of “good sense” and “good taste” he implies is not really democratic-egalitarian, but modelled on a conservative...