To accomplish that was of course its ostensible purpose, and so powerful a blast, so piercing a cry so widely heard throughout the colonies-everyone who could read must have seen it in one form or another-could scarcely have failed to move some people some of the way. Not, I think, the traditional one of whether Common Sense precipitated the movement for independence. What is one to make of this extraordinary document after 200 years? What questions, in the context of the current understanding of the causes and meaning of the Revolution, should one ask of it? Yet not only does Common Sense voice some of the deepest aspirations of the American people on the eve of the Revolution but it also evokes, with superb vigor and with perfect intonation, longings and aspirations that have remained part of American culture to this day. Paine had only the barest acquaintance with American affairs when, with Rush’s encouragement, he turned an invitation by Franklin to write a history of the Anglo-American controversy into the occasion for composing a passionate tract for American independence. It was written by an Englishman, not an American. It “burst from the press,” Benjamin Rush wrote, “with an effect which has rarely been produced by types and papers in any age or country.” Its effect, Franklin said, was “prodigious.” It touched some extraordinarily sensitive nerve in American political awareness in the confusing period in which it appeared.

For it is a work of genius-slapdash as it is, rambling as it is, crude as it is. How it could have been produced by the bankrupt Quaker corsetmaker, the sometime teacher, preacher, and grocer, and twicedismissed excise officer who happened to catch Benjamin Franklin’s attention in England and who arrived in America only 14 months before Common Sense was published is nothing one can explain without explaining genius itself.

Common Sense is the most brilliant pamphlet written during the American Revolution, and one of the most brilliant pamphlets ever written in the English language.

Thomas paine wrote common sense to