Thomas Paine published “Common Sense,” in January 1776, to help persuade the 13 British colonies to leave monarchy behind and declare independence, as they did the following July. Two hundred and fifty years later, Paine’s fiery pamphlet remains as relevant as ever. Last spring and this fall, demonstrators protesting the actions of President Trump and his administration copied a famous line onto placards — “In America, the Law Is King!” — but “Common Sense” has long been a touchstone across the political spectrum, revered not just for its bold expression of democratic ideals but for its plain-spoken, accessible language.
Ronald Reagan borrowed a celebrated sentence when he accepted the Republican nomination for president in 1980: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Paine also coined a lasting libertarian mantra, writing that “government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil.” The pamphlet has less often been invoked to warn Americans against the idea of kingly rule, the most fundamental point Paine wished to make.
What we now call the American Revolution began on April 19, 1775, when British regulars exchanged fire with local militiamen in Lexington and Concord, after which patriots pursued them all the way back to Boston. By July, George Washington was installed across the river in Cambridge as commander in chief of the Continental Army. For months it wasn’t clear what the ultimate purpose of this conflict would be. Many delegates at the Continental Congress still favored “reconciliation” with the king. Until Paine published “Common Sense” in Philadelphia on Jan. 9, 1776, an irresistible argument for independence had yet to be made to the general public.
Washington likely received a copy as soon as a horseman could carry it up the King’s Highway (we know Washington’s is from the first printing of the first edition). On Jan. 31, he wrote from Cambridge that he hoped “the sound Doctrine, and unanswerable reasoning containd (in the pamphlet) Common Sense, will not leave numbers at a loss to decide upon the Propriety of a Seperation.” “Common Sense” went on to become an extraordinary best seller and arguably the most important pamphlet in American history. Paine claimed that 120,000 copies were sold in three months. A meticulous estimate by the literary historian Trish Loughran puts the number at no more than 75,000 within a year, among a population of three million people.
In place of a king, skeptics wondered, who — or what — would rule? Paine proposed a “charter” that colonists would write and authorize, which would safeguard certain rights and freedoms for the people. The change of authority that Paine sought is affirmed every time a federal official swears an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, rather than to kneel to a king.
Paine was successful partly because the style of his writing was as revolutionary as his ideas. The historian Eric Foner has argued that “Common Sense” created a “new political language.” Paine effectively communicated political philosophy to a wide audience, heavily drawing on John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Montesquieu, but without ever naming them or quoting their works directly. Over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, political philosophers worked hard to establish the idea that elected lawmakers could govern a society without a monarch. Paine translated this notion into succinct, strident and deceptively simple sentences that everyday readers could understand.
The first section of “Common Sense” narrates the origins of government with a classic Enlightenment experiment, asking: What was it like in the state of nature, before governments were instituted among people? “Let us suppose a small number of persons settled in some sequestered part of the earth” in a “state of natural liberty,” Paine wrote, sounding like a schoolteacher. Then kings arrive, like snakes in the garden. “Mankind being originally equals,” Paine went on, their “equality could only be destroyed by some subsequent circumstance.” Look at the “present race of kings,” he declared, and “we should find the first of them nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang.” Eager to make his ideas intelligible to readers who had never philosophized before, Paine used imagery he thought they could relate to.
Ripping up monarchy by the roots, he asserted that William the Conqueror did not establish an “honorable” origin for English kings when he invaded in 1066. “A French bastard landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original. It certainly hath no divinity in it.” This frank and gritty language is from the tavern, not the library.
Paine, who was born in England and didn’t arrive in the colonies until 1774, slung insults at George III, whom he called “the Royal Brute of Britain.” In his depiction of the king’s crimes, we see another reason “Common Sense” was so effective: Paine recognized the urgency of his historical moment. “The independancy of America, should have been considered, as dating its era from, and published by, the first musket that was fired against her.” This assertion retroactively established the birth date and place of the new nation as the previous April at Lexington and Concord. Paine drew a line in the sand and insisted the line had already been crossed. “A new era for politics is struck,” he wrote, “a new method of thinking hath arisen.”
Among his challenges was to activate the outrage and sympathy of people living in 13 discrete colonies not yet united as a nation — to make what was happening in Massachusetts matter in Georgia. Accordingly, “Common Sense” issued a powerful call for mutual care and fellow feeling across radical distance and differences, as the historian Nicole Eustace has shown. “The laying a Country desolate with Fire and Sword,” Paine wrote in his opening pages, “is the Concern of every Man to whom Nature hath given the Power of feeling.”
In passages worth pondering today, given our painfully divided nation, Paine tried to imagine what a truly united country might feel like. “Let our imaginations transport us for a few moments to Boston,” he wrote. “I make the sufferers case my own, and I protest, that were I driven from house and home … I could never relish the doctrine of reconciliation.” Readers were meant to feel that they shared an interest with all colonists, up and down the Eastern Seaboard.
Like many of the founders, Paine offered a vision for the nation that was in some ways quite limited, as was his notion of which kinds of people deserved sympathy. There is a striking irony in his anger over William the Conqueror’s seizure of power “against the consent of the natives” while he defended settler colonies founded on Indigenous genocide and the seizure of Indigenous land. Nor did Paine extend equal sympathy to enslaved people of African descent, although he was less supportive of slavery than many of his peers. Moreover, his insistence that 18th-century Americans can “begin the world over again” (as Reagan recited), and that they might “bury in forgetfulness every former dissension,” dubiously casts the complicated history of a people as a matter to be erased rather than confronted.
Especially as the nation prepares to mark the 250th anniversary of independence, it is crucial to ask not whether “Common Sense” is perfect, but rather what kind of wisdom it might offer at a moment as complicated as the one Paine himself inhabited.
In 1776, Paine looked toward the future. Today, many Americans are looking to the past to help navigate what really does feel like “a new era for politics.” Right after Paine declared “the law is king,” he also qualified that statement: “In free countries, the law ought to be king.” Laws in the United States have often been unjust, and just laws have often been unequally enforced. Perhaps Paine understood that the idealistic political experiment he hoped to help launch would always be a work in progress.
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