Thomas Paine published Common Sense anonymously in Philadelphia on January 10, 1776, six months before the Declaration of Independence. The pamphlet sold approximately 100,000 copies in the first three months, in a total colonial population of roughly 2.5 million, of whom many could not read. Paine argued against both the institution of monarchy in general and George III's governance of the American colonies specifically, using a combination of republican theory, Biblical argument, and practical economic reasoning to make the case that independence was not merely preferable but inevitable and that delay was harmful rather than cautious. The pamphlet is credited with shifting popular opinion decisively toward independence at a moment when the Continental Congress was still divided.
Paine's argument against monarchy is not primarily constitutional but anthropological: hereditary rule is a social absurdity, "an insult and an imposition on posterity" because it assigns governing authority on the basis of parentage rather than capacity. He uses the Old Testament account of Israel's demand for a king, which God grants reluctantly, warning of the consequences, to argue that monarchy is a human failing that true religion should oppose rather than consecrate. This combination of republican theory and Protestant Biblical argument was designed for an audience that needed both, and Paine wrote, as Benjamin Rush observed, without being abstract, reaching "the common people, the laboring classes, and the poor."
Common Sense is a political document designed for a specific historical moment and reads as one, the arguments about taxation, trade policy, and the relative costs of independence versus continued colonial status are specific to 1776 in ways that require historical context to follow. What remains is Paine's model of the political pamphlet as a form: short, direct, combining principle and practical argument without sacrificing either, written in the assumption that its readers can follow a serious argument when it is presented without condescension. That model has been available for two and a half centuries and remains instructive.
Thomas Paine's Common Sense sold 100,000 copies in its first three months, equivalent to roughly 30 million today.
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