Political Philosophy

Common Sense

♡+

Thomas Paine

1776

Published anonymously in January 1776, Common Sense sold 100,000 copies within three months and did more than any other single text to shift American colonial opinion from reform to revolution. Paine argued, with an unprecedented directness and simplicity of language, that independence from Britain was not merely desirable but inevitable and right — that monarchy itself was an absurdity, that hereditary succession was a joke played on the rational mind, and that a continent could not be governed by an island. The pamphlet invented a new kind of political writing: not a legal brief addressed to educated elites but a moral argument spoken in plain English to anyone who could read. Its influence on the Declaration of Independence and on the revolutionary mood of the winter of 1776 was immediate and acknowledged by Jefferson and Washington alike.