Common sense would seem to be a poor subject for a historian. By definition, it means that which is self-evident to all peoples in all times and places and thus requires no explanation. When historians consider common sense at all, it is usually only to debunk what passes for it in the present. And yet faith in common sense, as both a conceptual category and a rhetorical reference point, has run stealthily through many aspects of modern western culture since the late seventeenth century, not least its political life. This makes it a ripe subject for historical analysis.
This talk will have two goals. This first is to make a case for the significance of common sense to the long history of democracy. The idea of common sense, as it developed from the seventeenth through the mid-eighteenth century, helped initially both to expand the social basis for political life and to alter perceptions of politics itself. As such, it was critical to the first modern experiments in crafting a democratic politics, beginning in Philadelphia in 1776, but also to popular challenges to the very idea of democracy starting in the 1790s and continuing to the present. The second goal is to argue, through the example of the history of common sense, for a particular kind of “big” intellectual history that I call philosophical history. The argument here is that the empirical study of the ideas of the past can also be used to contemplate the pressing political and theoretical questions of our own time—in this case, the symbiotic relationship between democracy and the style (rather than form or doctrine) of politics we now call populism. As this paper will make clear, the work of Hannah Arendt provides the essential link between these two goals.
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