What is Common Sense about?

Common Sense, published in January 1776, is a forty-seven-page pamphlet that argued for American independence from Britain with a directness and reach that no previous colonial publication had achieved. Within three months of its anonymous publication, roughly 100,000 copies had circulated in a colonial population of about 2.5 million. Thomas Paine wrote for a general audience deliberately, avoiding the classical allusions and legal precedents that characterized elite political discourse, and targeting instead a literate but non-specialist public who needed the case for independence made in plain terms.

Paine's argument is twofold. First, he attacks monarchy and hereditary rule as inherently irrational and unjust. Drawing selectively on the Bible, he argues that the institution of kingship was itself a usurpation — God's warning to the Israelites about kings was a warning about all kings. Hereditary succession is absurd: there is no reliable mechanism by which merit or wisdom is transmitted through bloodlines, and an accident of birth is a poor foundation for the authority to govern millions. This section is the more radical and the more philosophically grounded; it is an attack on the legitimacy of monarchy in general, not just George III in particular.

The second argument is pragmatic. Reconciliation with Britain, the hope of many moderate colonists, is not a realistic option. The colonies' commercial interests are fundamentally incompatible with British mercantilist policy, Britain will always subordinate colonial welfare to its own interests, and the distance across the Atlantic makes effective representation in Parliament a fiction. Independence is not only justified but necessary and, Paine argues, advantageous. The colonies are large enough, resource-rich enough, and commercially connected enough to sustain a republic capable of trading with all of Europe.

The pamphlet's influence was immediate and substantial. Washington had it read to his troops. John Adams, who disliked its radicalism, acknowledged that it changed the terms of the debate. Common Sense shifted the argument in the colonial public sphere from grievances and rights within the British empire to the question of whether the empire itself had any legitimate claim on American allegiance. It remains one of the most effective pieces of political advocacy ever written in English.