Updated: February 12, 2026
Intellectual Foundations of the American Revolution
To fully comprehend the American Revolution, we have to study the developments that frayed relations between Great Britain and its American colonies in the Pre-Revolutionary Era, generally understood as the years between 1763, which marked the end of the French and Indian War, and 1775, when open and violent hostilities broke out starting with the Battles of Lexington and Concord (April 19, 1775). I should note that I personally believe the Pre-Revolutionary Era ended in 1774. This is because, in my opinion, for all intents and purposes, the Revolution began in 1775. That year, therefore, belongs to the Revolutionary Period itself and not to the Pre-Revolutionary Era.
In our program, Analyzing American Revolution, several scholars do just that—analyze the Pre-Revolutionary Era. For example, Dr. Robert Gross details the lead-up to Lexington and Concord, and Dr. Serena Zabin reexamines the Boston Massacre. I will link both interviews here when they publish.
But long before the dramatic events of the Pre-Revolutionary years, starting with the Boston Tea Party and the Stamp Act, revolutionary ideas were being debated and memorialized in transformative treatises in places like England, Scotland, France and the Netherlands. And although none of these ideas by themselves could have ignited a revolution (as my guest in this interview emphasizes), they nevertheless served as the intellectual foundations of revolutionary movements that began with Committees of Correspondence as early as 1772.
So to better understand this background, I explore the intellectual foundation of the American Revolution in an interview with Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld.
Here’s how I’ve structured this post:
- Part I: The Enlightenment and revolutionary thinking — key figures, ideas, and how they influenced society.
- Part II (this post): Common Sense and Thomas Paine — how everyday knowledge became a tool for political thought.
- Part III: Choice, agency, and perspectives of Americans during the Revolution — concluding with our “Just One Point” takeaway: why ideas matter.
Exploring Enlightenment Ideas, Common Sense, and the American Revolution with Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld
Thomas Paine’s Common Sense transfigured the Colonists’ fight for their rights as British subjects to a Revolutionary War for independence. In a two-part interview, my guest, Prof. Harvey Kaye, describes Paine’s personal journey in England—from his youth to his failed careers—to his transformation and rise in America. Those interviews will be linked here when they publish.
In this interview, my guest Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld explores how Enlightenment ideas reshaped the way Western Europeans and, by association, American colonists thought about their world and reprocessed contemporary and past events based on new principles that were not just for the elite and intellectually minded. In many ways, these new thoughts were common sense for and by the common people.
In essence, long before the American Revolution, a more profound revolution had been reshaping the minds of 18th-century Europeans and North Americans. It was a revolution of “thinking about thinking,” a term that I borrow from Dr. Rosenfeld, and which explains in this interview.
About My Guest – Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld
Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld is a professor of history and former chair of the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches European and American intellectual and cultural history with a special emphasis on the Enlightenment, the trans-Atlantic Age of Revolutions, and the legacy of the eighteenth century for modern democracy.
Her writings and works include the following books:
- The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in the Modern World
- Common Sense: A Political History
- A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France
- Democracy and Truth: A Short History
To learn more about Dr. Rosenfeld, you can visit her academic homepage and personal website.
Transcript of My Interview with Dr. Rosenfeld
The notes below are excerpts from the edited transcript of my November 2026 interview with Dr. Rosenfeld. You can watch the full interview in the video immediately below, and for convenience, I’ve also linked specific video clips to their corresponding sections in the transcript.
“Common Sense: A Political History”
Adel: Dr. Rosenfeld, most of us Americans remember, or should remember, Thomas Paine and his Common Sense pamphlet from our middle school and high school years, American history, hopefully remember it.
And Paine’s pamphlet that came out in January 1776 is really important to the American Revolution, and another scholar discusses that in detail in this series.
What I’m interested in discussing with you is common sense in lower cases in the context of your book, Common Sense: A Political History.
So what is common sense?
Dr. Rosenfeld: Common sense is hard to define because you’re supposed to know it when you see it, but it generally means the kinds of things that we know based just on instinct or everyday life, and the capacity to know those things.
So it’s opposed to things like book learning. It’s the things you just kind of know because you exist in the world.
Common Sense vs. Reason
Adel: So based on that, is common sense different than reason?
Dr. Rosenfeld: You know, I think common sense is best understood as something a little more low-level than reason. Reason takes some sort of thinking based on common sense, maybe, but it’s some sort of higher-level kind of thinking that allows you to use logic and inference to get to steps, in a sense, to get to something larger.
Common sense is a kind of instinct.
If you put your hand in a flame, it’s going to burn you.
That doesn’t take a lot of reasoning, but it’s either you tried it, and that’s what happened, or you sensed in some way, oh, that’s hot. I better not put my hand right there.
And that’s what’s generally meant by common sense.
And what’s interesting is that starting in the 18th century, common sense becomes more valorized than before. It’s sort of invented as a category of thinking that is the, you might call the thought of ordinary people about everyday life.
It’s common, therefore, in two senses.
Adel: Help me out with this. Valorize in the 18th century.
Just a couple of minutes ago, the examples you were giving us about sticking your finger in fire. So if we’re talking about ordinary people, this is about their ordinary lives, right?
Dr. Rosenfeld: Yeah.
What’s interesting about common sense is that it’s common that it’s everyday.
Okay. It’s a kind of an ordinary thought, but it’s also common in the sense of shared. It’s something that everybody, sensible, should agree to.
In other words, it’s very hard to find somebody out there who’s going to say, oh, no, I don’t think you get burned if you put your hand in a flame. Let me show you how I do this, or something like that. That would be a very strange.
Adel: I’m a magician.
Dr. Rosenfeld: Right. I mean, other than, exactly. Somebody who’s doing something really crazy might argue something else.
But common sense is the stuff we all agree on, and it’s the things that we all know.
Adel: So if everyone agrees on an emperor, or a king, or an empress, or a queen, have common sense to the same level as a peasant?
Dr. Rosenfeld: Theoretically, the idea is that not only do, say, ordinary people have the same capacity as you just gave the example of a king or queen, but they might even have a better sense of common sense, because it hasn’t been distorted by book learning and false ideas.
Sometimes the simple peasants say knows better than everybody else, because they just see what’s there. They call it as it is. They don’t use fancy words or anything like that.
Adel: So why is this valorized in the 18th century? Is this part of enlightenment? Are you giving agency to common folk? Is that what’s happening?
Dr. Rosenfeld: So it’s a really interesting question, I think.
And I think there’s sort of two strains of how common sense works itself into the enlightenment.
In the case of the more radical enlightenment, it becomes a way to challenge established ideas. You can challenge a miracle, say, by invoking common sense.
But sometimes common sense can be used to rather more conservative effect.
In the Scottish enlightenment, it’s sometimes used to sort of argue against new notions or against really big philosophical abstractions and for the knowledge of everyday life.
And so from the beginning, it has no real politics that’s obvious about it. It can be used to democratizing effect, and it can be used against democratizing effect. Both are important, I think.
How Thomas Paine Uses ‘common sense’
Dr. Rosenfeld: And what’s so interesting about Tom Paine, for instance, is how he turns that notion into a foundation for a kind of democratic politics that says not only can ordinary people know a lot, but in fact, politics itself is perfectly suited to ordinary people’s capacity to know things.
It’s not some big abstract science that you need to spend years studying or be born into knowing about. Ordinary people know what’s right and what’s wrong, and that’s all you need to establish a new kind of politics.
Thomas Paine Image with his “Common Sense”
Click for image backstory.
Adel: So based on what you’re saying, common sense sort of undermines the paternalistic view of European monarchs that we’re here to protect you because you don’t know any better.
Dr. Rosenfeld: That’s in Paine’s usage, yes. He starts with very ordinary things and says, well, you know, an island is smaller than a continent, so why should an island rule a continent? That sort of thing.
And it’s that kind of folksy, everyday wisdom, even though what he’s doing is actually arguing for something quite radical.
He’s arguing for getting rid of a king. He’s arguing for getting rid of aristocracy. He’s arguing for independence for colonies.
But he’s insisting that both (1) there’s nothing particularly radical in what he’s arguing, because anyone with common sense would know it, and (2) also that ordinary people could probably rule on their own just fine.
They might be representatives, but they have the capacity to determine affairs of state.
And so it’s a radical argument using a clever concept to do this.
It can be used differently, which I can explain if you’re interested, but that’s a whole other question.
When ‘common sense’ Is Used Against the People
Adel: Yeah, well, no, I’m interested because you said earlier, you said common sense can be used for the people, and we discuss much of that now.
But it seemed like you were suggesting that it could also be misappropriated or used by governing people, by the ruling class against the people.
Dr. Rosenfeld: Exactly. I mean, that’s where things get complicated. So democracies were aided and democratic movements have often been helped by invoking common sense, the common sense of women, the common sense of Black people, for instance, has been used as a way to say, we all share in the capacity to rule here.
But once a democracy is in principle up and running, it can also be a populist tool, and it can easily turn demagogic.
For instance, you could say, if the state starts saying, we embody common sense, anything else that anybody suggests is nonsense, in other words, not common sense, nonsense. And we know best what’s in the people’s common sense, it can actually work to prop up a kind of populist dictatorship.
And we’ve seen this happen in the history of populist movements quite frequently.
And there are questions right now about the current administration using often this notion of a revolution in common sense, going back to that notion now, and whether that’s in keeping with the Paine tradition, or a reversal of the Paine tradition.
Adel: You know how earlier in the last segment, you said, when we were talking about enlightenment and revolutions, so there were the ideas that contributed to revolutions from enlightenment and back and forth also from revolutions.
But you also said words and phrases, I think that’s what you said, also were used from Enlightenment for purposes of revolution.
And here is something similar, here is common sense that’s being used, you sort of get that word, turn it upside down. And you say, we the ruling people are telling you what is common sense.
And these other stuff are nonsense.
Dr. Rosenfeld: Right, right. And it can be kind of exclusionary doesn’t say those are different opinions. It says anything outside of this is nonsensical in some way.
I mean, words become in politics, words stand for concepts, and concepts can become tools or even weapons for different political movements.
And whether we’re talking about a word like nation or a word like common sense, you can imagine how different actors can mobilize those words or those concepts to different purposes.
And common sense, I think, is particularly interesting here, because it’s supposed to be something that’s non-manipulable, that’s outside of history, that’s apolitical. It’s again, don’t put your hand in a flame kind of logic. And yet, we’ve seen up to the present moment, how often it becomes a political tool.
Adel: And how often it’s manipulated, even though it should not be.
Dr. Rosenfeld: It’s manipulated to different ends.
First page of Pennsylvania’s 1776 Constitution
(Public Domain)
Was ‘common sense’ Widely Used for the Revolution?
Adel: So, okay, we know about Thomas Paine, and we know about his famous, I don’t know, almost 50-page long pamphlet, Common Sense.
Was the concept of common sense also used by our founding fathers in America? Like, I don’t know, Thomas Paine, Ben Franklin, others, Madison, these are some that come to mind.
Dr. Rosenfeld: It’s used more in later periods, really, in starting the late 19th century than initially, although it’s borrowed from British politics, it’s already there in British politics.
Common sense gets very closely associated with Paine as a figure quite quickly.
So, when people want to sign something common sense, for instance, as the name of, you know, as a pseudonym, it’s often thought to be Paine or in the tradition of Paine.
I think the place you see most is around the more radical first constitution for the State of Pennsylvania, which is a kind of radically democratic document in its moment.
It does not quickly, though, become a kind of key element of American political life.
Later on, it does. And in fact, since the Reagan years, it’s really had a real revival in American political life, more often on the right than on the left, but not exclusively.
From Thomas Paine to Ronald Reagan: The Afterlife of ‘common sense’
Adel: Oh, wow, this is fascinating.
So, it’s not something that plays a huge role in most of 19th century politics. It develops later in the 19th century into the 20th century American politics.
Dr. Rosenfeld: It’s not unknown. I mean, it’s certainly a concept that you can find, and it’s in the first populist movements of the farmers’ movements, for instance, in the 19th century. So, there’s certainly echoes of it down through time.
But it’s often thought that Reagan is particularly responsible for the turn towards common sense as a tool of a kind of right-leaning nostalgic politics.
And in some ways, Trump is the heir to that Reaganesque turn, though I would say that he means something a little different by it.
Adel: I want to confirm something to make sure that I’m following our conversation to the point here.
You said that you can use common sense to also challenge a miracle. Like, how does that make sense? I think miracle is the example you gave Dr. Rosenfeld.
So, if that’s the case, was the religious establishment anti-common sense?
Because you can come and say, this is a statue of Virgin Mary, and she’s crying, or this has happened, and full respect to all of that. But a peasant may say, well, how does that make sense, using common sense?
Common Sense and the Figure of the “Naïve” Truth-Teller
Dr. Rosenfeld: Right. So, in the more radical uses of common sense, or sometimes in the French tradition, le bon sens, it’s often given as an attribute to somebody, an imagined figure, say a Native American, or a person in the state of nature, or somebody in the South Sea island, or a child, or somebody who’s kind of hasn’t yet been schooled in traditions of different kinds, who can then sort of say the emperor has no clothes.
It’s a way to sort of challenge miracles as one example, but traditions of various kinds, so that writers could use this figure of the person who’s only endowed with sort of basic common sense, hasn’t learned anything in school, hasn’t learned anything in church, to come in and say, but why does this make sense? Why is a family constituted like this? Or why are some people have so much more power than others? How is that fair? The kinds of things that you could imagine a child saying.
Adel: There’s a certain naivete there.
Dr. Rosenfeld: Yes.
So, common sense can go with a kind of imagined naive figure, who’s actually a kind of truth teller.
Adel: I see. Did Rousseau, this goes back to my college days, Dr. Rosenfeld, did Rousseau write about state of nature or something?
Dr. Rosenfeld: Yes, absolutely.
Yeah, yeah. And Rousseau was very interested in, and again, he doesn’t really imagine the state of nature as a kind of place you can go back to exactly, but he imagines it as a helpful counterpart to what have humans become in the modern civilized, quote unquote, world.
And much of what he has to say about the civilized world is as a critic to say that we’ve become hypocritical, we’ve become unjust in different ways.
And different writers, some of Rousseau himself, but also writers who follow in his tradition, try to sometimes pierce that kind of sense that this is just how the world is by showing that in fact, if you really applied logic of some kind to it, basic logic, you’d see that the whole world we’re living in is kind of nuts.
Discover more about Enlightenment Ideas, Common Sense, and the American Revolution in Parts I and III:
The Enlightenment and revolutionary thinking — key figures, ideas, and how they influenced society.
Choice, agency, and perspectives of Americans during the Revolution — concluding with our “Just One Point” takeaway: why ideas matter.
About the Featured Image
The featured image brings together images of Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld and Adel Aali from the interview, alongside a collage of Enlightenment-era philosophers—Adam Smith, Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, the Marquis de Condorcet, René Descartes, and John Locke.
About This Program
Analyzing American Revolution (AAR) is a special series podcast production of the History Behind News program. In this series, 33 professors (and counting) analyze the American Revolution from 33 different angles through in-depth interviews with host Adel Aali.
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Think You Know the American Revolution?
