Before Democracy: The Production and Uses of Common Sense

Abstract

Many of the factors that shaped modern political life remain obscure to us. Some of these factors are now imperceptible because they were private, illegal, off-limits, or socially marginal. Others were, in Alain Corbin’s elegant phrase, simply too banal ever to have been much remarked upon, even if they made whole categories of thought and experience possible.2 Corbin was famously talking about what we call sense experiences: smelling, touching, and the like. But what of the historical evolution and significance of our most commonplace and trite assumptions about these banal experiences— or what is best known as common sense? Common sense is, of course, hardly an unfamiliar notion these days. Talk of it permeates every aspect of contemporary Western democratic political culture. We evoke or appeal to common sense in order to signal that the practical, everyday wisdom of ordinary people in ordinary situations, as opposed to the unrealistic and extremist advice of so-called experts, provides the foundation for our political ideals. We also use the notion of common sense to suggest that bitter, partisan disagreements have been or should be jettisoned in favor of nonideological and therefore consensual solutions to the issues of our times. This is a rhetorical stance with which no one is likely to disagree. Speaking in the name of common