Common Sense

We often hear politicians and pundits speak of "common sense." Now Rosenfeld (history, Univ. of Virginia; A Revolution in Language) insightfully traces the turns the phrase has taken since it came into use in 18th-century urban centers. She covers London, where Joseph Addison and Richard Steele offered common sense in The Spectator as a calming answer to conflicting opinion after the Glorious Revolution; Aberdeen, where a group of Presbyterians found a shared capacity to see waywardness in the skeptical thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment; Amsterdam, where a circle of French writers used the term impiously to mock conventional wisdom; and Philadelphia, where Thomas Paine employed common sense as a means to bring down a government. Here, too, is Paris, where those against the Revolution used common sense to critique democracy. Rosenfeld treats the post-18th-century era more briefly in a final chapter.