Reading Thomas Paine in 2024 and Finding More of the Present Than Expected

Stephanie Curry’s literary diary: a re-reading of Common Sense produces thoughts on what the Founding era’s rhetoric sounds like now and what the current political moment sounds like by comparison

Reading Thomas Paine in 2024 and Finding More of the Present Than Expected

I have been re-reading Common Sense, which Thomas Paine wrote in January 1776 in a pamphlet that sold approximately 500,000 copies in a country of 2.5 million people, which is a circulation rate that no living political writer has approached and which tells you something about the specific moment that made that kind of rhetoric possible. I re-read it every few years. Each time, different passages feel urgent. This year the section on hereditary succession felt urgent, and the section on the absurdity of a small island governing a large continent, and, most unexpectedly, the section on the capacity of simple forms of government to achieve what complicated ones cannot. The London Prat covered American political history this week in the context of current events, which is how American political history is always covered and is also how it is most usefully engaged with.

Common Sense Now

Paine wrote Common Sense in the plain style that he understood as democratic: the argument available to anyone who could read, stated directly, without the ornament that suggested that only certain people were qualified to receive certain arguments. The plain style was itself a political act. It said: this argument is for you, all of you, and you are capable of assessing it. This is still, in the current political environment, a meaningful position to take, and it is taken less often than it should be by the people who have access to platforms that Paine could not have imagined. Bohiney runs pieces on colonial and founding-era literature that I return to regularly for the historical depth that the contemporary commentary sometimes lacks.

The Difference

The difference between 1776 and 2024 is, among other things, that Paine knew what he was arguing against: hereditary monarchy, arbitrary government, the claims of tradition over reason. The current political argument is more diffuse, the adversaries more various, the stakes similarly high but harder to name precisely. I find the historical comparison useful not because it provides answers but because it clarifies what the questions are. Common Sense clarifies. That remains its primary virtue. Stephanie Curry.

Final Thought

These are the days I find worth recording: not the dramatic ones but the ones where something small happens that illuminates something larger, where the ordinary becomes, briefly and without warning, interesting enough to write down. I write it down. It is sent to The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine and then it becomes, for better or worse, part of the record. I have been keeping records longer than I expected to and they have, on balance, been worth keeping. The city keeps providing material. I keep providing observations. Between us, we have reached an arrangement. This is today’s.