Common sense occupies an intriguing place in the history of ideas—it has a strong political presence, yet lacks a proper epistemological foundation. Grounded in the average or normal person's understanding, beliefs, and opinions, common sense convinces its audience without appealing to proof, evidence, or argument. It is an epistemic authority capable of challenging most forms of knowledge, in particular in the realm of social, political, and moral life, whether derived from history, law, custom, faith, science, reason, or logic. As a populist device, common sense often serves as the majority's weapon against the privileged, a way to make popular views heard in a public sphere often dictated by religious, political, and academic elites. As such, common sense, Sophia Rosenfeld argues in her fascinating book, deserves to be included alongside reason in the story about the genealogy of modern democratic politics.
Yet common sense also has a darker side. While Hannah Arendt called it the lifeblood of democracy, Pierre Bourdieu underscored that common sense has the capacity of becoming an instrument of conformity, domination, and exclusion, whereby some people are kept in line and others are marginalized as fools or madmen. By narrowing the spectrum of voices represented and by explicitly dismissing the importance of careful examination in favor of knee-jerk consensus, common sense is used to depoliticize the public debate and to promote anti-intellectualism. The fact that common sense has this destructive capacity—as Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and the Tea Party movement have recently showed—leads Rosenfeld to end her book by reiterating the importance and responsibility of intellectuals to “consciously position themselves outside of the reigning common sense and keep a close eye on the complex and powerful work that it does” (257).
The first episode in Rosenfeld's exploration of the political history of common sense takes place in London, during the half century following the Glorious Revolution. She illustrates how Augustan commentators envisioned common sense as a potential source of social cohesion and political stability. Through free and open conversation, Shaftesbury, Addison, Steele, and others believed that a discourse centered on plain and self-evident truths had the capacity to aid in the formation of a self-regulating community. Common sense would obviate the need for an absolutist state and mitigate the effects of party strife. Although the Spectator proclaimed to reach out to the bulk of the population, Augustan common sense was always the purview of the cultivated, refined, and polite. As the first few decades of the eighteenth century wore on, common sense not only became better defined sociologically but also acquired a more distinct political identity. No longer operating as a discursive common denominator, common sense increasingly served as an “important weapon in the development of an increasingly established, extra-parliamentary protesting political culture” (52).
In the second episode, Rosenfeld shifts our attention to Scotland—not to the center of the northern Enlightenment, Edinburgh, but rather to the more provincial Aberdeen. Here we encounter, most important, Thomas Reid and James Beattie, members of the Wise Club and central figures among the so-called Common Sense Philosophers. Drawing on the city's Presbyterian ministers who were valiantly fighting the invidious doubt and moral uncertainty sweeping across Europe, Reid and Beattie set out to restore a shared sense of truth. The destabilizing pluralism created by the cacophony of the public sphere and the epistemological confusion introduced by Humean skepticism threatened to undermine any possibility for a shared moral and political order. By focusing on the judgment common to all reasonable people, similar to Shaftesbury's and Hutcheson's notion of a moral sense, Reid and Beattie insisted that a common language and shared morality could emerge. Rosenfeld shows how this rendition of common sense, capturing the truth and morality of “an unspecified, indivisible, classless ‘people’ trumps that of outliers of all kinds, including specialists and established elites” (82). Philosophers may have been better with words, Rosenfeld points out, but they had no advantage over the average person when it came to truth.
Before crossing the Atlantic and exploring how Tom Paine put common sense to use in the American colonies, Rosenfeld takes her readers on a detour to Amsterdam, where the French concept le bon sens emerged. Polyglot Amsterdam served as the European center for the production of seditious and controversial books, providing radical French thinkers, such as Baron d’Holbach, with a base during the second half of the eighteenth century. In his Portable Library of Good Sense, d’Holbach promoted the notion that all humans have the intrinsic capacity to judge rightly. But instead of providing the basis for a collective wisdom, the purpose of le bon sens was to challenge contradictions, hypocrisies, pretensions, and falsehood, to guard against dogmas and moral absolutes. The model for this way of thinking was drawn from travelers’ accounts of Native American intellectual cultures, which embodied a clarity of thought and perception that did not rely on complex language, religion, or political theory. While d’Holbach believed that proper education might one day enable good sense to serve as the foundation for a common and popular truth among Europeans as well, the present retrograde state of the minds of the multitude made any such aspirations unrealistic.
Having equipped the reader with a deeper appreciation of the complex history of common sense, Rosenfeld then offers an illuminating exploration of the concept's most celebrated moment, the American Revolution. Paine's greatest accomplishment in Common Sense, she argues, is to merge self-evidence and self-rule in the formation of a democratic common sense. Paine drew on the Augustan notion of common sense as a basic and immediate perception and judgment, employed the French antiauthoritarian good sense to challenge and ridicule tradition and received wisdom, and finally embraced the Aberdeenian conviction that shared simple, obvious, and universal ideas can form the foundation for a new era in politics. Plain truths articulated in plain language, Paine insisted, had the potential to radically transform history.
The penultimate episode takes place in Revolutionary Paris. While common sense initially looked like it would follow the same trajectory in Paris as it had in the American colonies, Rosenfeld tells the fascinating political story of how a right-wing commonsense populism emerged in defense of traditional hierarchy and authority. The last chapter examines the afterlife of common sense, from Kant to the abolition of slavery, from Dadaism to Arendt. Although the book's central focus and most impressive analytical accomplishments can be found in the progression of common sense from Augustan London to Revolutionary America, the last two chapters nevertheless offer valuable reflections and insights as to how the concept continued to develop and permutate.
As any excellent book, this one also raises a number of questions and issues the author chooses not to engage. Rosenfeld may have strengthened her general case about the Janus face of common sense by engaging the conceptually related notion of popular opinion, which Locke and Addison, among others, assessed in starkly different normative terms. Rosenfeld could have profitably engaged more systematically with Scottish Enlightenment thought. For example, how did Reid's notion of common sense relate to Adam Smith's impartial spectator? How did Hume's confidence in the middling sorts’ capacity to do the right thing in economics and politics relate to common sense? Moreover, it would have been informative to see how Rosenfeld situates her argument in the literature on the public sphere and civil society. Yet addressing these and all other questions that come up during the course of her argument would have eliminated one of the book's virtues, the fact that it is brief, fast-paced, and engaging.
