COMMON SENSE: A POLITICAL HISTORY BY SOPHIA ROSENFELD
Harvard University Press, 337 pages, $29.95, BY SUSAN DUNN

Common sense, Thomas Paine boasted in 1776, stood firmly on the side of the people. "There is something absurd," he wrote in Common Sense, his best-selling political pamphlet, "in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island." And it was "very ridiculous," he declared at the dawn of the American Revolution, for a hereditary monarch, a "youth of twenty-one (which hath often happened)," to rule over several million people, all older and wiser than himself.