From the margins of my copy of Common Sense, a small Penguin Classics edition I read slowly one winter, pencil in hand, because the pamphlet is short enough that a reader with time can afford to take it line by line.
Page iii, in the introduction: Isaac Kramnick writes that Paine published Common Sense in January 1776 and had sold 120,000 copies by July. Population of the colonies: 2.5 million. One copy per twenty colonists — men, women, children, slaves. Nothing published in the United States since has reached that proportion. Margin: A prose weapon at scale. What would the equivalent be now. 15 million copies of a pamphlet in six months. Nothing has. Nothing will.
Page 5: “Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.” Margin: The entire American libertarian tradition is this one sentence, repeated in bad faith for 250 years by people who benefit from the government they are denouncing. Beneath, in different ink: Paine did not benefit. Paine died broke.
Page 12: “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” Margin: This is the mechanism Paine is actually attacking. Not the king. The habit of not thinking the king is wrong.
Page 19: “Of more worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.” Margin: He meant this. It was not rhetoric. It was a thesis about how value should be assigned in a republic, and it is the thesis the American experiment has spent the subsequent 250 years failing to implement.
Page 27: On the absurdity of hereditary monarchy: “One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings, is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.” Margin: He is laughing at George III. He is also, by structural analogy, laughing at any system in which position is inherited rather than earned — which includes, now, most of the American political-economic arrangement.
Page 34: “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.” Margin: True when he wrote it. The question is whether it remained true. He would have said no, by 1796. By 1802, he was certain of no.
Page 41: Paine’s argument that the American colonies had outgrown British protection: “Nothing can be more fallacious than such an argument; we may as well assert that because a child has thrived upon milk, that it is never to have meat.” Margin: The transition from dependence to self-sufficiency, presented as a natural stage of growth, not an act of rebellion. He is writing to a readership that is nervous about rebellion. He gives them biology instead.
Page 47: “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Margin: This is from The American Crisis, not Common Sense — the editor has included the opening passage as an appendix. I underline it anyway because it is the sentence Washington read to the troops at Valley Forge, and the sentence has done more for American self-mythology than any other line written on this continent.
Page 52: On independence: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now.” Margin: The scale of the claim is what shocks me reading it now. Paine is not arguing for separation from Britain. He is arguing that a new epoch of human political life is beginning, and that the colonies are its birthplace. He was not wrong — a new epoch did begin. He was also not fully right — the epoch has not delivered on his scale of claim, and it is probable that no epoch that begins with the arithmetic of chattel slavery in its founding documents could have.
Page 58: Paine on the necessity of a written constitution, a position he argued harder and earlier than most of the Founders: “For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.” Margin: This is the sentence the American project is judged against. When the president is law, the project has failed. The project has failed before. The project has failed recently.
Page 63, last page: “O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth!” Margin: This is the call. It is the call Paine would give again in The Rights of Man in 1791 and again in The Age of Reason in 1794, and each time the call would cost him more — his French citizenship, his English citizenship, eventually almost his life in a French revolutionary prison. He wrote the call that founded a country. He then refused to stop issuing the call, even when the country he had helped found was no longer interested in hearing it. He died in 1809 in New York, attended by six mourners at his funeral. The nation had moved on from him. The pamphlet had moved on without him. That is almost always how this works.
I read this pamphlet the way it was meant to be read — slowly, alone, with a pencil, in a kitchen. It is not a historical document. It is an instruction manual for the project of refusing to accept the habit of not thinking something is wrong. The project is not done. The pamphlet is still useful. Pick it up. Mark it up. Pass it to the next person who needs it.
A related vagobond.com piece: A Question of Authority: Can There Be Authority in an Anarchist Society.
Readers and fans of Common Sense will really enjoy The Anarchist Manifesto Project 2026 — twenty-six kinds of political refusal, A through Z in the phonetic alphabet, each one written from inside its own life. Paine’s call, reissued twenty-six ways, for a century in which the king is once again the law. Have a look and let me know what you think.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
