Regaining Our Common Sense

Harvey J. Kaye

January 10, 2006

Harvey J. Kaye is professor of social change and development at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and the author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (Hill and Wang, 2005).

The 230th anniversary of the publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense—the brilliant little pamphlet whose arguments literally turned the world upside down— invites reflection both on the state of the nation to which it gave birth and on the state of the left to which it gave rise and whose many generations carried on the fight to realize the democratic vision rendered in its pages. Recalling Paine’s work should serve, as well, to remind us of not only what we stand in opposition to, but also what we stand in opposition for. And ultimately we might ask, “What would Tom Paine do?”

Born in 1737, the son of an English Quaker artisan and an Anglican mother, Paine had a career before coming to Philadelphia in 1774 that included corsetmaking, privateering, tax collecting, preaching, teaching, labor campaigning and shopkeeping, punctuated by bouts of poverty, the loss of two wives, business bankruptcy and dismissal from government service (twice!). And yet as much as he came to despise kingly rule, aristocratic privilege and religious establishments for their oppression, exploitation and corruption, Paine did not pick up his pen to assail Crown, Constitution and Empire out of anger alone.