What do you think?
Rate this book
Common Sense: A Political History
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 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.
368 pages, Hardcover
First published May 2, 2011
13 people are currently reading
275 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 21, 2013
This is like the social history of truth, for common sense. What were the condtions that made common sense an important idea, and how did it then spread. Rosenfeld jumps back and forth across the Atlantic looking at the history of the idea from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries.
Common sense, she argues, is a necessary part of modern democracy (a weird amalgamation that also includes popular rule, constitutionalism, and representative government.) but is not often considered--exactly because it seems so obvious, so comonsensical. But, really, common sense is polemical--always part of an argument.
Three general events structure its history: the growth of North Atlantic cities--Philadelphia, London, Aberdeen, Paris--the rise of a class of writers, and the tension between censroship and freedom of expression.
The term common sense was borrowed from Aristotlean philosophy but given a different meaning in the wake of England's Glorious Revolution. It connoted all those things that the educated and polite could agree upon--a way of blunting the partisanship that had led to so many wars.
Later, Scottish philosophers based in Aberdeen tried to define common sense, sometimes just listing those things everyone coudl agree upon. This was a fairly conservative project, definign what was necessary to maintain social order.
Common sense soon became something else, though. In Amsterdam some writers gave it a more radical interpretation, pointing towards how non-experts could be authorities. This trend culminated in Thomas Paine's famous pamphlet, Common Sense, which sparked the American Revolution. Common Sense was now subversive: it was something that belong to the common person, and stood opposed to elite knowledge and authority.
Across the Atlatnic, a few years later, as France to underwent revolution, comon sense tok back its older, conservative sense: common sense stood for the old order, and against change. Napoleon famously talked a lot of common sense, but the efect of his rhetoric was to disempower people--mobilizing people in their own disenfranchisement. Still, by using the language of common sense, he kept open the possibility of democracy and popular rule.
The final chapter of the book is a hodge-podge of where common sense ended up. Kant, for instance, restricted common sense to aesthetic judgments. After World War I, common sense was severly questioned--common sense had led to slaughter--and so we got Dadaism, which opposed the very idea of common sense. On the contrary, after World War II, common sense became a cherished value, and took on its conservative shadings, even as American conservatives cited Paine (but ignored his atheism and economic views).
Democracy, Rosenfeld consludes, needs common sense and common values--and these are always going to be in tension with authority and expertise. But common sense can also block off new ideas, and new ways of thining--Bourdieu makes this point, of course. And so we need people who stad outside of common sense, too, and question it.
"It is vital that some individuals in the modern workd consciously position themselves outside of the reigning common sense and keep a close eye on the complex and powerful work that it does."
Common sense, she argues, is a necessary part of modern democracy (a weird amalgamation that also includes popular rule, constitutionalism, and representative government.) but is not often considered--exactly because it seems so obvious, so comonsensical. But, really, common sense is polemical--always part of an argument.
Three general events structure its history: the growth of North Atlantic cities--Philadelphia, London, Aberdeen, Paris--the rise of a class of writers, and the tension between censroship and freedom of expression.
The term common sense was borrowed from Aristotlean philosophy but given a different meaning in the wake of England's Glorious Revolution. It connoted all those things that the educated and polite could agree upon--a way of blunting the partisanship that had led to so many wars.
Later, Scottish philosophers based in Aberdeen tried to define common sense, sometimes just listing those things everyone coudl agree upon. This was a fairly conservative project, definign what was necessary to maintain social order.
Common sense soon became something else, though. In Amsterdam some writers gave it a more radical interpretation, pointing towards how non-experts could be authorities. This trend culminated in Thomas Paine's famous pamphlet, Common Sense, which sparked the American Revolution. Common Sense was now subversive: it was something that belong to the common person, and stood opposed to elite knowledge and authority.
Across the Atlatnic, a few years later, as France to underwent revolution, comon sense tok back its older, conservative sense: common sense stood for the old order, and against change. Napoleon famously talked a lot of common sense, but the efect of his rhetoric was to disempower people--mobilizing people in their own disenfranchisement. Still, by using the language of common sense, he kept open the possibility of democracy and popular rule.
The final chapter of the book is a hodge-podge of where common sense ended up. Kant, for instance, restricted common sense to aesthetic judgments. After World War I, common sense was severly questioned--common sense had led to slaughter--and so we got Dadaism, which opposed the very idea of common sense. On the contrary, after World War II, common sense became a cherished value, and took on its conservative shadings, even as American conservatives cited Paine (but ignored his atheism and economic views).
Democracy, Rosenfeld consludes, needs common sense and common values--and these are always going to be in tension with authority and expertise. But common sense can also block off new ideas, and new ways of thining--Bourdieu makes this point, of course. And so we need people who stad outside of common sense, too, and question it.
"It is vital that some individuals in the modern workd consciously position themselves outside of the reigning common sense and keep a close eye on the complex and powerful work that it does."
November 16, 2023
"Real conversation depended, as Shaftesbury pointed out repeatedly, upon toleration and freedom from external constraints, upon the ability to question, to ridicule, to debate. But politeness potentially helped to reconcile, or at least paper over, the differences among truth claims and the competitiveness upon which modern politics, urban social life, and commercial culture, as opposed to court culture, seemed to thrive." (26)
"Paine's great revolutionary gesture was thus an act of synthesis. The success of Paine as a polemicist stemmed in large part from his bringing together the individualist with the collective and the conservative with the subversive strains of common sense -- or sometimes good sense -- thought and expression current on both sides of the northern Atlantic. Here was British common sense, with its pseudo-egalitarian consensualism, and a radical bon sens, with its elite attack on the status of all presumed universal truths, melded into a locally inflected tour de force: an argument for a scarcely tested form of government in which a radical interpretation of the sovereignty of the people was to be the essential principle." (152)
"Democracy requires for its success both the promotion of common values and the very notion that there is something out there called 'common sense' that has an important role in political life. ... Common sense ultimately works to help us talk to each other but also limit what we can hear and from whom." (256)
"Paine's great revolutionary gesture was thus an act of synthesis. The success of Paine as a polemicist stemmed in large part from his bringing together the individualist with the collective and the conservative with the subversive strains of common sense -- or sometimes good sense -- thought and expression current on both sides of the northern Atlantic. Here was British common sense, with its pseudo-egalitarian consensualism, and a radical bon sens, with its elite attack on the status of all presumed universal truths, melded into a locally inflected tour de force: an argument for a scarcely tested form of government in which a radical interpretation of the sovereignty of the people was to be the essential principle." (152)
"Democracy requires for its success both the promotion of common values and the very notion that there is something out there called 'common sense' that has an important role in political life. ... Common sense ultimately works to help us talk to each other but also limit what we can hear and from whom." (256)
October 16, 2011
Common sense is oppositional--it is what we have and you do not. “For evocations of common sense always imply an Other, a shared antagonist outside the boundaries of this sense—whether the proponent is Fielding, Paine, Hannah More, or most recently, Sarah Palin. One of the leitmotifs of populist thought, after all, is the division of the world into two opposing camps, even as one claims to be the whole.” 238 Common sense is the banner picked up, paradoxically, by both those holding to an unpopular position as well as by those holding a popular position when opposed by an educated or elite minority.
One of the lines that really struck me was this:
“It became a form of what sociologists would eventually describe as the structural censorship characteristic of all societies that pride themselves on their formal deregulation of speech.” 33
We cannot silence you with the law of the courts,so we will silence you with the unspoken threat of being an outcast.
One of the lines that really struck me was this:
“It became a form of what sociologists would eventually describe as the structural censorship characteristic of all societies that pride themselves on their formal deregulation of speech.” 33
We cannot silence you with the law of the courts,so we will silence you with the unspoken threat of being an outcast.
March 21, 2015
Seldom does a monograph seem like its brevity is a problem, but Rosenfeld's last chapter really should have been expanded into about three. She goes from Kant to Arendt and even though there is a strong reason for doing so (Arendt is specifically reaching back to Kant in the way she uses the concept of common sense) the chapter breezed past so much. It is a tribute to Rosenfeld, however, that I felt like I wanted more from her, wanted her readings of other intellectuals on common sense.
Read
June 1, 2018320.011 R8139 2011
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews