Paine revealed the practicality of supporting American independence. He also provided a moral justification for armed resistance by linking American independence to progressive forces at loose in the world—or at least Western Europe! Effective without being orderly, Common Sense exudes a haste that heightens the urgency of his appeal. One can imagine Paine coming home from the tavern after an evening of contentious debates on the merits of independence and furiously writing down answers to the arguments he had just heard. When he could contain them no longer, he poured his points into his pamphlet: Monarchy is without biblical warrant; the English monarchy, in particular, has failed the colonies; the very idea of monarchy goes against nature and common sense; commerce in foodstuffs had created a self-sufficient colonial economy; details for building a constitution and navy prove their viability; and finally, the present precious moment for seizing independence is fast disappearing.

Read carefully, Common Sense also yields a running attack on the unexamined assumptions of classical republican thought that many American leaders had imbibed from writings of the English opposition. In this political scheme it was assumed that government was difficult to establish and maintain, and that Britain’s special balance of the one, the few, and the many in the shared power of its king, lords, and commons miraculously guaranteed freedom while maintaining order. Fearful of change, classical republicans harked back to a purer time when men—gentlemen like themselves—put the good of the whole before their individual interests. Adhering to the kinds of philosophies that take their inspiration from a previous, golden era, classical republican thinkers lamented the declension of recent times and hoped to check further corruption by rallying the country’s leaders to the standard of civic virtue.

Paine dismissed the whole classical republican edifice with his stunning opening lines: “Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins.” “Society,” he went on to explain, “is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness possitively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices” (p. 17). Paine then demonstrated that the English constitutional balance was unnecessarily complicated, and outmoded to boot, its sole utility being that of befuddling disenfranchised subjects of the king. The source of discord in society was not human nature, Paine argued, but the oppression from those given social privileges: “Male and female are the distinctions of nature, good and bad the distinctions of Heaven” (p. 22). The English constitution was “noble for the dark and slavish times in which it was erected” (p. 19). And with this pithy comment he dispatched kings and nobles to the dustbin of history.

The eighteenth-century concept of nature does heavy-duty service in Paine’s frontal attack on the English monarchy and its philosophical underpinning in Common Sense and all subsequent writings. Paine announced that he had drawn his “idea of the form of government from a principle in nature which no art can overturn, viz. that the more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered” (p. 19). Indeed, nature comes in to support most of the assertions Paine made in Common Sense. Of independence, he wrote, “the simple voice of nature and reason will say, ’tis right” (p. 19). And he offered the shrewd advice that he “who takes nature for his guide, is not easily beaten out of his argument.”6 He offered nature as a contrast to the artifices that had given kings and lords their unwarranted power and intimidating prestige.

Nature had become the handmaiden of most eighteenth-century reformers who contrasted its regularity, simplicity, and beneficence with the Byzantine qualities of their archaic institutions. They drew on a succession of philosophers of nature from Newton through the Scottish economist Adam Smith, who at this time was preparing for publication his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. In this mighty synthesis, Smith drew together a century of theorizing about the commercial system. With trade generating new levels of wealth, observers began speculating about the dynamics behind this novel system of enterprises and exchanges. Gradually they recast the economy as a natural system working invisibly to produce harmony among buyers and sellers instead of being a hodgepodge of commercial transactions, necessarily subject to political direction.

The reconceptualization of the economy as a natural, unregulated system of exchanges greatly influenced Paine. He saw commerce as an alternative to war in getting people what they wanted. He described it as “a pacific system, operating to cordialise mankind” (p. 233). Self-interest, formerly viewed as a tool of the devil, figured benignly throughout Common Sense as a prompter to good reasoning. His opening lines drew a contrast between society, with its voluntary cooperation prompted by mutual interests, and government, with its coercive power used for the benefit of the king and his courtiers. For those living in a hierarchical society where there was much fawning over patrons, self-interest also breathed a spirit of honesty, for when people followed their interest, there was no hint of hypocrisy. Ironically, royal revenue from this ebullient economy that Paine so admired had given the king the money to secure compliant members of Parliament—the corruption that so rankled him.

American readers were undoubtedly more interested in reading what Paine had to say about their situation than his musings about social theory.