Abstract
Sophia Rosenfeld has written a remarkable book. Her Common Sense: A Political History traces the development of the term from its initial enlightenment manifestations through the French Revolution, and then briefly into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The phrase that for much of the eighteenth century had been deployed by radicals has become, since its deployment by Ronald Reagan, “a leitmotif of a politically conservative strand of populism.” (p. 236). Rosenfeld asks herself two questions, first why was the phrase so ubiquitous in the enlightenment, and then why has it been capable of such various political deployments?
In answering these questions, Rosenfeld takes the reader on a vibrant, always elegantly phrased tour, first of major enlightenment figures from Joseph Addison, the third earl of Shaftesbury, George Berkeley, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Gimabattista Vico, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, and many minor figures in between, and then a quick rush through the twentieth century, pausing for more sustained readings of Hans George Gadamer and Hannah Arendt. All of this learning is deployed to make the—dare I say it ?—commonsensical point that “common sense has, by now, long existed as a fake normative criterion for making choices, whether the subject is soaps or candidates for office” (p. 244). In the hands of Addison, the term was deployed to overcome the rage of party, the authors of the journal Common Sense deployed the phrase to criticize the bureaucratic oligarchic government of Robert Walpole, the Scottish commonsense philosophers deployed the phrase against relativism, for Thomas Paine—an apparently reluctant deployer of the phrase—common sense meant opposition to empire and monarchical rule, and for many during the French Revolution the term was used “to push back against democratizing currents” (p. 181). All of this is deployed with verve, subtlety, and learning to argue on the one hand “that common sense’s tenets are culturally and temporally variable in content” and on the other that “what gets counted as common sense is also never fully consensual even in its time” (p. 15). So, in Rosenfeld’s view, “common sense” is an attractive slogan for the democratic age precisely because it simultaneously invokes the intellectual faculties of the populous and asserts against rampant individualism and the existence of community. “Common sense” has become the tool of conservatism, Rosenfeld says, because—and this is a consistent theme developed throughout the narrative—it has the ability to act “as an informal regulatory system and a political authority . . . blocking out truly new ideas, cutting off debate, convincing us that simple, kitchen-table solutions formulated by everyday people are necessarily better than complex or specialized or scientific ones” (p. 256).
Ironically, this delightful, at times brilliant, and always literate book, led me to doubt Rosenfeld’s sensible thesis. Let me take as an example the first substantive chapter, focusing on the British deployment of “common sense.” Joseph Addison, we are told, developed the phrase along with politeness to “overcome” “ideological divisions” in defense of a revolution that “hardly been a revolution at all” (pp. 24-25). Addison and his allies wanted combat party strife with “a low-level kind of consensus” (p. 26); he “wanted to create a non-combative common culture” as a bulwark “against all grand schemes” (p. 30). Yet Addison and his latitudinarian Episcopal allies were hardly antipartisan or unprogrammatic. Addison, who served as under-secretary of state and then secretary of state, was a deeply partisan man. He worked in tandem with some of the most radical thinkers of the day to create grand schemes—grand schemes that could finance the global War of the Spanish Succession. In the pages not only of the Tattler and The Spectator, but also in the Free-Holder, he tried to explain a complicated set of economic principles that could justify massive and unprecedented government borrowing based on the hopes of unprecedented economic growth. Placed in context, Addison was not attempting either to advocate kitchen-table solutions or to block out truly new ideas. Instead, his aim was to make complex political economic ideas accessible. Similarly, the Patriot Whigs of the 1720s and 1730s (I along with many others reject the notion that there was an undifferentiated Opposition in this period), deployed “common sense” not against innovative governmental schemes but in favor of state projects that would allow Britain to once again finance major international wars. They turned to common sense because their original technocratic arguments—witness William Pulteney’s long and detailed critiques of Walpole’s budgetary calculations—were incomprehensible to most people. The point is that “common sense” may well have a more stable meaning than Rosenfeld supposes. It is not a meaning that can be confidently assigned to the left or the right—here I agree with her. But it is a meaning nonetheless. “Common sense” can be deployed as a powerful oppositional rhetoric when the government in power has failed to communicate the rationales behind their policies. “Common sense” is a neither a plea for or against innovation, or big or small government, it is a plea for political transparency.
Given that English usages of “common sense” had a potentially far more radical meaning than Rosenfeld allows, and that that meaning inhered in the relationship between “common sense” and political economy I found the arguments that Rosenfeld deploys about Tom Paine’s Common Sense more difficult to swallow. Paine’s innovation, in Rosenfeld’s view, was to map the Scottish communitarian meaning of “common sense” onto a continental subversive meaning of “le bon sens” and add a uniquely American commitment—“a local tradition” according to Rosenfeld (p. 151)—to nonelite politics. Paine, according to Rosenfeld, “brought divergent European conceptions of common sense into play in the American context and, after mixing in some local elements, crafted them into something new. . . . An American politics of common sense in practice offered its example to would-be revolutionaries on the other side of the ocean” (p. 179). To be sure, Rosenfeld is no triumphalist. She is careful to point out that American populism always involved exclusions, always involved a tension between common sense as the notions of the community as they are versus common sense as the rationality of the way things should be. But Rosenfeld’s story is still an exceptionalist one. A story in which something new happened in America. To make this argument, she has to insist that when “common sense” is used by Britons—whether by the Scottish philosophers of midcentury or deployed as “Shaftesbury and Addison had done at the start of the eighteenth century”—it was an “essentially conservative device” (p. 147). In other words, if one takes the radical implications of Addison’s arguments more seriously, Paine’s deployment and the subsequent American debates seem less exceptional, less of a turning point, and perhaps more of a variant of one of the forms of Whig common sense.
Why has Rosenfeld underplayed this radicalism? And why should we care? I think the problem is that Rosenfeld has been too willing to follow the trend of much recent writing in the history of political thought, and insisted that “sovereignty” was the “fundamental issue” (p. 139). She reads eighteenth-century arguments as “political rather than economic remedies” (p. 169). For most in the eighteenth century, this was not a meaningful dichotomy. Political economy was, as John Robertson and many others have argued, the quintessential language of the enlightenment. Arguments about political participation were also arguments about the nature of economic production and consumption. So, when Rosenfeld asserts that “in English though . . . only those in possession of income-producing land could be truly called independent” (p. 163), she has missed the fundamental radical turn in Whig thinking. Locke, Addison, Mandeville, Benjamin Franklin, and Joseph Priestly all insisted that labor rather than land was the source of property. They therefore reasoned that many more were capable of independence than merely the landed. So, common sense in this view became the property of all who labored. Of course, those who understood political economy rather differently, those who insisted that property was finite rather than potentially infinite, had a rather more restricted view of who could possess property and common sense. I agree with Rosenfeld that Paine’s “personal trajectory intersected with one of the great ages of thinking about common sense and its meaning and function” (p. 140). But I think in interpreting that personal trajectory, it is at least as important to emphasize his career as an excise collector as to highlight his connections—sometimes distant—with Scottish thinkers.
All of this raises a larger methodological point about writing the history of concepts or ideas. Why do I read, in this instance, eighteenth-century British political polemic differently from Rosenfeld? I think it has little to do with political predispositions. Instead, it is because I have come to read these same texts by analyzing them within the context of contemporary political and social movements. Rosenfeld contextualizes them by reading them alongside a dense matrix of secondary scholarship. Such an approach can’t help—I posit—but to assign those texts meanings that accord with the received scholarly wisdom about an epoch. Rosenfeld is too sensitive of a reader not to perceive the tensions. She notes that the deployment of “common sense” generated “a competition to define and embody it, which, in turn helped legitimate disagreement, dissent, and even full-blown extra-parliamentary opposition as established elements of modern political culture.” And yet, this in turn occurred “at a moment that is generally thought to make the final demise of the explosive ideological squabbles associated with the previous century’s wars of religion and the emergence of extraordinary social stability and even consensus” (p. 36). Rosenfeld is aware of the tension between her reading and the established narrative. Yet, she persists in describing 1688 as a sensible revolution, and Addison’s project as one of promoting political stability. Perhaps reading more deeply in the cut and thrust of these debates, perhaps by analyzing the new institutions created in the early eighteenth century (many of which she later ascribes to the nineteenth century, p. 229), Rosenfeld could analyze more convincingly the peculiar confluence of the terms common sense and patriot as revolutionary rhetorics in the eighteenth century.
Rosenfeld has written a marvelous book. It is a real pleasure to read. It is, like its subject, simultaneously powerful and written in plain and easily accessible prose. I am persuaded that histories of political ideas and concepts can indeed offer us unique vantage points from which to comment on contemporary politics. I worry, however, that histories that rely too heavily on placing keywords within established narratives risk telling us powerfully what we had suspected.