Introduced by Thomas Paine, with a Printer’s Note by Benjamin Franklin
Three pamphlets. One argument. 250 years in the making. The Annotated Common Sense looks backward. Common Decency examines the present. Common Sense, NOW! demands a future. Read them in order, or begin wherever the fire catches you. Free to download. Available in print.
The Annotated Common Sense
The Annotated Common Sense looks backward. It takes my original forty-seven pages and holds them against the light of 250 years. Every section of the 1776 text is preserved; my commentary runs alongside it. What I meant then. What it means now. What has gone sideways in between. This is not a museum piece. It is a living argument between the man who wrote it and the world that has yet to finish what he started.
Common Decency
Common Decency examines the present. If Common Sense diagnosed monarchy, Common Decency diagnoses the subtler tyranny of manufactured division: the deliberate, profitable destruction of our ability to see one another as neighbors rather than enemies. It asks a question I did not think to ask in 1776 but have had two and a half centuries to consider: what do citizens owe one another before the policy arguments can even begin? Common sense told you that you could govern yourselves. Common decency will determine whether you still can.
Common Sense, NOW!
Common Sense, NOW! demands a future. The forward is complete and available now. The full work is forthcoming. Where the first pamphlet diagnosed the past and the second examined the present, this third pamphlet is the demand. What do we do? How do we act? I did not come back to whisper. The Common Sense, NOW! sampler, collects the forewords of all three works into a single pamphlet.
More About the Common Sense Trilogy from Thomas Paine
I wrote Common Sense in the winter of 1776 because no one else would say plainly what everyone already knew: that monarchy was absurd, that the colonies owed nothing to the Crown, and that the time for petitions and politeness was over. It was forty-seven pages. It sold 500,000 copies in a nation of two and a half million. It did not ask for permission and it did not hedge its arguments. I am told it helped start a revolution. I was there. It did.
The disease I diagnosed in 1776 was concentrated power justified by tradition and enforced by violence. That disease has not been cured. It has mutated. It no longer wears a crown; it wears a suit and speaks through algorithms that sort citizens into tribes and sell their attention to the highest bidder. The machinery of tyranny has been automated, and the tyrants have learned to call it freedom.
I have written three pamphlets for this hour. Read them in order, or begin wherever the fire catches you. They are meant to be passed along, argued over, left on a table where someone else will pick them up. That is what pamphlets are for.
A Note from the Printer
In 1774, I met a young Englishman in London who had failed as a corset maker, been dismissed as a tax collector, and was on the edge of debtor’s prison. I thought him clever enough and wrote a letter to my son-in-law recommending him for work in Philadelphia as “an ingenious worthy young man” who might find employment as a clerk, or perhaps an assistant tutor, or possibly a surveyor. Fourteen months later, that clerk published Common Sense and set a continent on fire. I have always had excellent judgment in people, though not always in the way I intended.
Two hundred and fifty years dead and I have learned nothing; here I am, setting type for Thomas Paine again.
All three pamphlets in the trilogy are available through this site and at our storefront on Lulu. The Annotated Common Sense is available as a printed book ($17.76). Common Decency is available as a printed pamphlet. The Common Sense, NOW! sampler is available as a free ebook or a bound pamphlet ($7.76, a price I chose because I find it amusing). All three are available as free PDF downloads on this site because Mr. Paine insists, and I have long since stopped arguing with Mr. Paine.
You may also read the Spirits’ ongoing work on Substack at substack.com/@76spirits.
I built the first American lending library because I believed knowledge ought to circulate. Lend these pamphlets. Share them. Argue about them. That is what they are for.
B. Franklin, Printer
