Common sense, in Politics and Democracy

 ‘Common sense’ once had a very different set of political connotations 200 years ago, indeed  asserting a belief in ordinary people’s common sense could see you branded as a radical democrat. 

In Common Sense, the 1776 pamphlet that made his reputation, Thomas Paine appealed over and over again to ‘simple facts’, ‘plain truth’ and the ‘simple voice of nature’ to justify America’s rebellion against Britain. 

Paine also denounced ‘complexity or ambiguity in reasoning or expression as evidence of falsity or manipulation’, coming uncomfortably close to the present-day populists who mock economists and climate scientists and the elite  for using long words. 

But in Paine’s case the invocation of common sense had a revolutionary rather than a reactionary moral: politics and government are not arcane mysteries that only the wisest and highest-born can engage in. (A lesson for Hillary Clinton here) 

Politics are within the capacities of ordinary, 'uneducated; people, who therefore have the right to govern themselves.

This is the belief which, in the 18th century, legitimated democracy and turned it from an abstract concept associated with Greek city-states into a desirable form of modern government.