Common Sense

I had never actually read Common Sense front to back, a shortfall I suspect some others with interest in American Revolutionary history share with me. As with other similar writings during this period, one can often forget how procedural and analytical argumentation like this can be.

This is not, by today’s standards, a short, impassioned radical monologue. It has its bombastic moments, but overall, Paine outlines and academically defends a set of fundamental constraints between colonial America’s relations with Europe, economically, geopolitically, morally, and structurally (governance). It is good to be reminded of the care that past Americans have taken, even in their moments of highest stress and danger, to think deeply and quantitatively through (seemingly) radical viewpoints.