Common Sense: A Political History
by Sophia Rosenfeld (Author)
Common
sense has always been a cornerstone of American politics. In 1776, Tom Paine’s
vital pamphlet with that title sparked the American Revolution.
And today, common sense—the wisdom of ordinary people, knowledge so
self-evident that it is beyond debate—remains a powerful political ideal,
utilized alike by George W. Bush’s aw-shucks articulations and Barack Obama’s
down-to-earth reasonableness. But far from self-evident is where our faith in
common sense comes from and how its populist logic has shaped modern democracy.
Common Sense: A Political History is the first book to explore this
essential political phenomenon.
The
story begins in the aftermath of England’s Glorious Revolution, when common
sense first became a political ideal worth struggling over. Sophia Rosenfeld’s
accessible and insightful account then wends its way across two continents and
multiple centuries, revealing the remarkable individuals who appropriated the
old, seemingly universal idea of common sense and the new strategic uses they made
of it. Paine may have boasted that common sense is always on the side of the
people and opposed to the rule of kings, but Rosenfeld demonstrates that common
sense has been used to foster demagoguery and exclusivity as well as popular
sovereignty. She provides a new account of the transatlantic Enlightenment and
the Age of Revolutions, and offers a fresh reading on what the eighteenth
century bequeathed to the political ferment of our own time. Far from
commonsensical, the history of common sense turns out to be rife with paradox
and surprise.
