Thomas Paine's Common Sense and the Age of Enlightenment

The Eighteenth Century: An Age of Revolution and Awakening

The eighteenth century was the age of revolutions and wars of independence around the world. It is commonly known as the Age of Enlightenment, though one could equally call it the age of humankind's awakening. Beginning in the fifteenth century, Europe passed through a period of rebirth in which the intellectual legacy of ancient Greece and Rome was recovered after centuries of medieval darkness. The world of ideas was transforming, science was advancing, new territories were being discovered, and people were expanding their horizons both geographically and culturally.

Economic progress followed in the seventeenth century, driven by the exploitation of resources from newly acquired colonies and by the early stirrings of the industrial era. Unfortunately, the eighteenth century also brought a period of popular dissatisfaction with the existing social order. Social inequalities and injustices gave rise to new ideas that spread rapidly across Europe and crossed the Atlantic into the American continent. Enlightenment philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, and Thomas Paine questioned the authority of the state and wrote from the perspective of a human being who was beginning to feel — and act — as an equal participant in society.

Paine's Common Sense is both a manifesto against the oppression of monarchy over the colonies and an appeal to declare independence. Although economic factors played the major role in the outbreak of the American Revolution, the ideas and visions of thinkers like Paine gave supporters of independence — and ordinary people — both the incentive and a spiritual foundation. Paine's pamphlet is considered by many to be the single most important document providing moral support to those who doubted the legitimacy of their struggle for liberation from the British Crown.

Revolutions require two equally important forces: the spiritual and the physical. As Berger and Spoerer observe, a revolution may be defined as either "a widespread collective violence targeted at changing the political system, or as immediate and substantial constitutional reform implemented to prevent it" (Berger & Spoerer, 2001).

Thomas Paine: From English Tax Collector to Revolutionary Voice

Thomas Paine was born in England in 1737 and left school at the age of twelve. After several failed attempts to find steady employment, he eventually worked as a tax collector in England — a position he also lost, partly because of an article he published arguing for higher tax-collector salaries as a means of reducing corruption. His meeting with Benjamin Franklin proved decisive: it led to his departure for Philadelphia, where he settled and began working as a journalist. He published Common Sense in 1776, the year of the American Revolution.

On February 14, 1776, Paine wrote in his introduction to the pamphlet: "who the Author of this Production is, is wholly unnecessary to the Public, as the Object of Attention is the doctrine itself, not the man" (Paine, 2005, p. 6). Common Sense is at once a political and a sociological work, with society and government as its central subjects. Paine's involvement in the American War of Independence is clearly traceable throughout its pages. The Declaration of Independence, written half a year later, bears the unmistakable imprint of the ideas Paine had articulated.

Paine's main argument rested on the imminence of independence for the colonies, one way or another. He saw in the thirteen colonies' potential liberation from British rule an opportunity for the entire world to overthrow the old order and find its way to freedom. Having lived and worked under a monarchy until the age of thirty-six, he arrived in America and discovered a means of expressing the personal aspiration to liberty he had never been able to voice in England. His political philosophy envisioned the freedom of an entire country won in the name of the greatest of all ideals: individual liberty.

Initially, Paine had supported a peaceful settlement between Britain and its thirteen North American colonies. The first armed conflicts at Lexington and Concord convinced him that a peaceful solution was no longer possible and that force was the only remaining path. Soldiers and civilians alike needed moral support, and Paine found exactly the right form and style to reach the masses: the political pamphlet. Up to a certain point, Paine's own destiny mirrored that of the North American colonies under British rule. "Time and Space, both are to be found at the heart of Common Sense, shoulder to shoulder in the same cause, bent on achieving the same object, and with geography when need be, speeding to the aid of history" (Vincent, 2005, p. 22–23).

Common Sense: Timing, Impact, and Public Reception

The success of Common Sense was immediate and unprecedented. It "sold more than 100,000 copies in three months [and] had a profound impact on public opinion and on the deliberations of the Continental Congress then meeting in Philadelphia" (Aldridge, as cited in the American Revolution War resource). The pamphlet rose above a crowded field of competing broadsides, articles, and tracts to receive public approval on a scale that remained unique in the history of the American War of Independence.

The timing was perfect. Common Sense appeared almost simultaneously with the publication of the King's Speech to Parliament and the Prohibitory Act of December 1775, which announced the embargo imposed by the House of Commons (Vincent, 2005, p. 21). The convergence of these events created a charged political atmosphere in which Paine's arguments struck an immediate chord with a public already anxious about the colonies' future.

Anyone who reads about Thomas Paine's biography is inclined to marvel at the evolution of his personality and the extraordinary influence he came to exert on one of the most consequential events in world history. Until his late thirties he was an ordinary working-class man who had left school at twelve. Yet revolutions have a way of producing great figures from common people, and Paine was unquestionably one of the most important in this regard. He became one of the leading spiritual architects of the American Revolution in part because he understood the plight of the oppressed classes from his own lived experience. He was in the right place at the right time, and he possessed exactly the knowledge needed to seize the moment and influence the outcome of the movement in a radical way.

References

Berger, H., & Spoerer, M. (2001). Economic crises and the European revolutions of 1848. The Journal of Economic History, 61(2), 293–326.

Morton, J. C. (2003). The American Revolution. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Paine, T. (2005). Common Sense. Digireads.

Vincent, B. (2005). The transatlantic republican: Thomas Paine and the age of revolutions. Rodopi.