Abstract
Common Sense appeared on 10 January 1776. It was Tom Paine’s first important work and the first work of any length he had written since arriving in America a year previously. Paine’s Radicalism grew in the course of his life and was by no means fully developed at the time of writing Common Sense; but the year of journalism in Pennsylvania had taught him how to express his sentiments in a popular style.
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Notes and References
M. D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine (London, 1909) p. 26.
T. Paine, Common Sense, in M. Conway (ed.), The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol 1: 1774–1779 (London, 1909) p. 71.
H. H. Clark ‘Thomas Paine’s Theories of Rhetoric’, Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts and Letters, XXVIII (1933) 309–35.
Paine, Common Sense, p. 74.
Ibid., p. 75.
Ibid., p. 76.
Ibid., p. 81.
Ibid., p. 84.
Ibid., p. 89.
This information is extrapoled from the British Museum Catalogue. Several editions are undated.
See also Shils, ‘Ideology and Civility’, pp. 450–80.
R. Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals (London, 1957) p. 112; see also M. Oakeshott, ‘Scientific Politics’, Cambridge Journal, x, 6 (Mar 1948) 351: ‘Fascism tout court is, of course, something that exists only in the mind of the doctrinaire Communist; it is an idol of propaganda.’
Williams, M. ‘Up the Polls’ New Society (9 July 1970) pp. 61–2.
Conway, Life of Thomas Paine, pp. 23–4, 26, 29; A. O. Aldridge, Man of Reason: The Life of Thomas Paine (London, 1959) pp. 34–40.
Paine, Works, vol. 1, p. 395.
Aristotle, Rhetorica, 1357b ff.
E. Burke, ‘Philosophical Inquiry into our ldeas of the Sublime and the Beautiful’, in Works (London, 1890) vol. 1. See Clark, ‘Thomas Paine’s Theories of Rhetoric’, p. 316, where it is suggested that Paine read Burke.
Burke, Works, vol 1, p. 170.
See M. Janowitz, ‘Content Analysis and the Study of the “Symbolic Environment”’, in A. A. Rogow (ed.), Politics, Personality and Social Science in the Twentieth Century: Essays in Honor of Harold D. Lasswell (Chicago, 1969).
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© 1974 H. M. Drucker
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Drucker, H.M. (1974). Paine’s Common Sense. In: The Political Uses of Ideology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02096-6_6
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