Book 34: Common Sense by Thomas Paine (100 Great Books)

The Pamphlet That Started a Revolution

Paine was born in 1737 in Thetford, England, into circumstances that offered little hint of what he would become. His early years were spent moving restlessly between trades—he stitched corsets as a teenager, went briefly to sea, taught school, and collected taxes—never settling, never quite advancing. It was a string of middling occupations that left him, by his late thirties, with little to show and a reputation complicated enough to make England feel small. Benjamin Franklin met him in London and saw something worth betting on. He gave Paine a letter of introduction and pointed him toward Philadelphia.

Paine arrived in November 1774 with almost nothing. Within months, he was editing the Pennsylvania Magazine. A year later, he had written the most consequential political document in the history of the American republic. He was a man the colonies had never seen before and, in certain ways, have rarely seen since. An outsider with no rank, no wealth, no militia, and no institutional standing of any kind, whose only instrument was the quality of his argument.

That turns out to have been enough.

January 10, 1776

The timing of Common Sense was not accidental. Paine had coordinated its release with the arrival, in Philadelphia bookshops, of King George III’s speech to Parliament. It was a speech that slammed the door on any remaining possibility of negotiation.