Thomas Paine's Common Sense: 250 Not Out (yet)
First published: January 11, 2025
Two-hundred-and-fifty years ago this weekend, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense shattered the intellectual complacency of British America. It was a pamphlet written not in legalistic jargon but for anyone who could read. It argued bluntly that monarchy itself was not only an absurd and unjust system but also incompatible with liberty. Independence, he argued, was not only necessary and urgent but also logical, and achievable.
Paine’s pamphlet was original, of the moment, and seminal to what followed for sure. No one had argued so plainly and publicly before for a complete separation from British rule.
The American colonists had been at war with their British overlords since the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, but neither the case for independence nor the propaganda war to engage their hearts and minds had yet been made, let alone won. And here was Paine telling them, in some hundred thousand copies of his pamphlet circulated throughout the early months of 1776, that a republic was theirs to claim, and by right.
“Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..."
But context is key. Thomas Paine’s pamphlet didn’t come from nowhere. Through the previous decade, colonial debates about rights and British rule had been fermenting. In his widely read Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (1767–68), John Dickinson — in reality a trained lawyer but writing under the “Farmer” pseudonym — argued that Parliament had no right to impose taxes to raise revenue. He warned that such innovations threatened colonial liberty.
Dickinson’s voice was constitutional and measured, but forceful: “Whoever seriously considers the matter must perceive that a dreadful stroke is aimed at the liberty of these colonies …” He was widely read across the colonies and his Letters set the tone of assembly and coffee-house debate.
An earlier aphorism attributed to Ben Franklin in his dealings with Pennsylvania’s pre-war assembly, also re-emerged to articulate a core idea in colonial thought, both in the run-up to and after the Revolutionary War: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety,” it stated, “deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
That claim has resonated, and helped inform the very idea of liberty, for many Americans ever since.
Equally, ‘Join, or Die’, an appeal for the colonies to unite, and one of the first political cartoons to appear in pre-War America, was published by Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette as early as 1754. While the perceived enemy had morphed by the mid-1770s, from the French and Native Americans to the colonists’ British masters, it became a rallying cry for patriots throughout the Revolutionary War and after, as the fragile union nearly fell apart in the prelude to the Constitutional Convention.
The intellectual ferment was not confined to men either. In March 1776, Abigail Adams wrote from Massachusetts to her husband John in Philadelphia, urging the revolutionary leadership to “Remember the Ladies …” and warning that women would “not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.” Suffice to say, Mrs Adams was well ahead of her time, but her words were not forgotten.
So, Common Sense rode the currents of Enlightenment thinking,✝︎ cheap printing, and vibrant tavern and coffee-house discussion to achieve extraordinary impact. It gave a clarion voice to debates already underway, crystallized them into a compelling argument for independence, and spread with unprecedented speed through reprints, public readings, and word of mouth.
Ultimately, Paine proved that ideas, whether good or bad — not armies — can start revolutions, and Common Sense remains a case study in persuasive communication, long before the advent of mass-market newspapers, party machines or viral media.
✝︎ See: John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1690), and Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws (1748)
AN AFTERTHOUGHT
“A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody."