An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot…
Thomas Paine, Age of Reason
I walked into this class the other week, and so into a conversation. A few of my classmates, undergraduates, were enjoying their own bewilderment over the recent Donald Trump phenomenon. One of these bright young people had run into an unapologetic and—weirder still—an equally unironic Trump supporter. “I can’t believe he was serious,” my memory recalls this classmate saying. “How could anyone be so stupid?” was the unvoiced question. It’s common sense to my classmate that Trump is a fraud, a bully, disingenuous, privileged, a sexist, a racist. You’ve only to turn on the television and watch—no spin room necessary. It doesn’t take a Rice University education to figure this out.
“Why dwell on the obvious?” This is the apparently unobvious question Sophia Rosenfeld takes up in her 2011 study, pragmatically and playfully titled Common Sense. Common sense isn’t really, wouldn’t you know it, just a matter of common sense after all. In proving her point Rosenfeld reaches all the way back to Aristotle, tracing the concept through the Renaissance, into its seventeenth and eighteenth century British, French, and Dutch variations, through revolutionary America (particularly with Thomas Paine’s famous pamphlet), revolutionary France, and into modern political discourse. Common sense, Rosenfeld suggests, flourishes in, as they say, interesting times. As Rosenfeld puts it,
…common sense is typically evoked and held up as authoritative only at moments of crisis in other forms of legitimacy. Revolutions, which, by definition, result in divided loyalties and the upending of the rules to multiple domains at once, are a case in point. Otherwise common sense does not need to call attention to itself. (15)
A rhetoric of normalcy to ballast an otherwise listing ship of state—Rosenfeld sees that rather than righting us, that rhetorical bulk will right us right to the ocean floor.
Rosenfeld’s study comes as in a tradition of complicating common sense (a touchstone study might be Clifford Geertz’s “Common Sense as a Cultural System”). Really the whole of academic endeavor is dedicated to complicating the obvious. No one dreads like the scholar dreads the mild words which could ultimately sound the death knell of one’s work: “Not bad. A bit obvious though, isn’t it?” And so we might see Rosenfeld eyeing rather an easy target. In fact her book turns on itself in a wonderful way: it’s really quite obvious that “the obvious” really isn’t that obvious after all. This is almost common sense, except unfortunately (according to Rosenfeld) it must not be, and so she had to write a book about it published by Harvard University Press.
Common sense began in the body. It made us human, this super sense, this “koine aesthesis.” For Aristotle, common sense was a yoke for our other sensory faculties “comparing and coordinating the impressions received by [the rest of the senses]…and thus…allowing minimal judgments about sense objects to occur independent of reason” (18). An organizer and adjudicator. Historically its location has moved around: sometimes in the head and sometimes in the heart. But then something changed. Descartes, in fact, happened. Because he needed to get away from the body, Descartes took this super sense out of the body and altogether out of physicality. Rosenfeld writes that Descartes’s “mechanistic account of the body and brain, and his desire to root knowledge firmly in cognition rather than in sensation, rendered unnecessary the common sense as a specific, locatable mental faculty” (21).
We’re coming closer to common sense as the wisdom of the ordinary. After Descartes, “[t]he watered-down Aristotelian notion of a common sense faculty merged…with the old Roman conception of sensus communis: the shared, though generally tacit, values and beliefs of a community” (22). Politicized common sense becomes a regulatory tool of the state. It could be rhetorically deployed to discourage ideological eccentricity; a tool, then, “in the creation of a noncombative common culture” (30). Common sense as common taste—not merely obvious, but shared, it could help maintain political stability (or political homeostasis). But Descartes would be, in Rosenfeld’s estimation, more a symptom than a problem. The ideological backdrop to her argument seems to be the threatening (and near constant) rise of skepticism. But Descartes’s answer to “How do we know anything?” and, really, “What makes things real?” simply didn’t take; not long after his 1637 settlement with epistemological skepticism, his cogito, his answer to the question of uncertainty, began to wear a bit thin. The problem of the era seemed to be “How do we live without certainty?”
The drive towards common sense is, then, the flight from uncertainty. Rosenfeld’s history next takes us to Britain and the Scottish Common Sense school. David Hume was a particularly dangerous gadfly for eighteenth century anti-skeptics like James Beattie and Thomas Reid; Reid the founder of a rather self-congratulatory group called “The Wise Club.” These Scots of common sense were creating a new philosophy somewhere between Descartes and Locke. Rosenfeld calls Reid’s common sense “an amorphous set of basic judgments or propositions, evident in the common language in which it is entrenched, to which all sane adult people, anywhere, anytime, must subscribe” (72). Reid might have found a hero in Othello who also needed to know that he could trust his eyes: “Men should be what they seem.” Give me proof! Unfortunately, it is Iago rather than Othello still breathing at the end of that tragedy.
So there came a taste for doubting in the wake of the Renaissance, and a counter rhetoric rose to combat the resultant epistemological anxiety. This seems obvious. But Rosenfeld is at her best when investigating the “radical” uses of common sense in Holland and France in the late eighteenth century. Eventually important to Holland, the early to mid-seventeenth century French le bon sens was “the very obverse of the kind of reasoning that formed the backdrop to the common sense philosophy of the Scots” (103). Le bon sens, or “good sense,” was the subversive French counterpart to British regulatory common sense. If British common sense loved its doxa, French le bon sens reveled in paradox. As with everything in France, this discourse eventually got classed. Rosenfeld points to the rise of “the philosophe” in this new “war over representation” (134). The other combatant? Common Sense de jour:
The philosophe, in other words, routinely chose unsettling language games over restoring the direct and long-established correspondence between words and things. His love of contradictions, like his refusal to follow either established authorities or the consensus gentium, pushed society in two directions: toward a generalized doubt about all that should be certain and toward the espousal of dangerous new absurdities under the banner of truth. (134)
We still find this formulation in variant forms of what we call “the culture wars,” often categorized by level of education, religion, geography etc. The Overeducated Coastal Snob (who knows quite a lot about very little) and the Ignorant Quasi-Bigoted Midwesterner, to make one generalized colorful example.
Of course if Tocqueville’s observation in 1835 that “in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States” has any merit, French le bon sens likely never took much hold in America. Rosenfeld goes into great detail about American and French Revolutionary forms of common sense, but her most interesting thesis is that “in the radical Whig rhetoric of revolutionary Pennsylvania, we can locate the apotheosis of a brand-new and decidedly modern form of political legitimation known as populism” (167). Ours is a particularly provocative climate in which to be reading of the inchoate roots of populism. Rosenfeld continues, asserting that in Philadelphia was initiated a “style and form of politics that depended upon wrapping itself in the moral and epistemological notion of the collective common sense of common men more than any economic argument” (167). Her dismissal of the centrality of an “economic argument” is quite provocative and, the reviewer admits, not entirely convincing. She takes this interpretation as evidenced by a one-page pamphlet written by James Cannon in 1776; what he did “in a few short strokes,” Rosenfeld argues, “was turn a concept long associated with a plainspoken, pragmatic, anti-aristocratic, and anti-expert way of seeing the world—that is, common sense—into an ideal foundation for a new, and distinctly American, political order” (167).
It’s a well formulated argument—smart and neat. If we distill the book down to one sentence it might just be: Ideas matter, and few would argue with that. But there’s something telling about the concluding chapter wherein Rosenfeld claims the common sense playbook, this anti-expert, anti-thinking rhetorical toolbox, as “increasingly the province of the right” (255). Palin, Huckabee, Beck, and The Great Communicator himself Ronald Reagan began “a second American afterlife” to common sense politics. This isn’t to undercut the value of Rosenfeld’s book which I found interesting, intelligent, and clarifying. But the problem connects for me to the conversation I sketched at the beginning of this review essay.
Rosenfeld betrays, at times, the frustrations of the bewildered, beleaguered intellectual. So anxious about the cult of an American unthinking public, Rosenfeld has had to write a book ripping down the façade of the greatest rhetorical weapon of the “common sense conservative” —a book that will likely only be read by people already interested in why common sense isn’t a matter of common sense at all. Common sense is everywhere. Everyone uses it for divers purposes. Donald Trump has in fact said “I’m a common sense conservative,” but the political Left uses it with “common sense gun solutions” all the time. And most people realize that common sense is a rhetorical weapon of political whimsy; and most people don’t need to read Tristan Tzara and Pierre Bourdieu to figure this out. Thus when Rosenfeld closes with the injunction that “[i]t is vital that some individuals in the modern world consciously position themselves outside of the reigning common sense and keep a close eye on the complex and powerful work that it does” we see Rosenfeld waving at us from her self-regulated commonsense-free zone and we can thank her politely and keep on walking because it doesn’t take a whole lot of common sense to realize that wherever it’s located, and in spite of ourselves, we’re always bound to fall back on it. This doesn’t make us stupid, but it might make us vote for Donald Trump.
