Hi, welcome back. this is pretty short talk today. I just wanted to dive a little deeper into two really important concepts. Liberty and common sense. These are words much used in the 1770s and 1780s. Let's focus first on this term liberty and try to just think for a moment on how people think of that term in the 1770s. They think of liberty as free-thinking. You'll often see, for instance, in the literature of the time, people might use terms like �liberal thinking.� An important dividing point for a lot of the democratic revolutions is their attitudes towards church dogma And, specifically, towards the Catholic Church. A lot of the people in America and England and in other parts of Europe are really quite opposed to the Church, hate the Church, even. Not be too strong to say. So one of the things that they're meaning when they talk about liberty is liberty as opposed to dogma. Another sense in which they use the term liberty is liberty as contrasted to tyranny. By this they mean they're not subject to completely arbitrary unchecked power. So when they think of a defense against tyranny, they tend to think of things like: there should be a rule of law. And another way in which they think about stopping tyranny is to think about the roles of these intermediary institutions. Councils, parliaments, assemblies, that have some power to stand up to, or speak for, customary privileges and liberties. But one important point to think about when we're talking about liberty is that this is not the same as democracy. Indeed, it doesn't have a necessary relation to democracy at all. People should have a right to think freely or in favor of the liberal circulation of ideas, in favor of science, in favor of a rule of law, there's nothing about that that says anything about the right to vote or broad representation or even that these intermediary assemblies need to be made up of the people in general. It's just meant as checks on arbitrary unchecked royal power. Where you get more into the notion of democracy is by exploring a very popular term in the 1700s: the phrase �common sense,� most popularized by an absolutely phenomenal pamphlet written by a journeyman journalist and thinker named Thomas Paine. Here's a copy of the pamphlet published in 1776. Huge circulation on both sides of the Atlantic. And here's its author, Tom Paine, who spent time in America but would later take up residence in Paris. Where's this idea about common sense coming from? It's coming partly from ideas that resonate to readers of Rousseau about the natural nobility of man, this notion increasingly that authority comes from all of us that I've talked about before. It also comes from a sense that there is wisdom in experience. How do we get knowledge? We get knowledge from the experience of our lives. And indeed you can make an argument that the wisdom of experience is really what the scientific method is all about. You're simply conducting experiments to develop empirical data, in other words, evidence of experience. And then it's just a short jump from the wisdom Of experience to talk about the wisdom of the many. So what a lot of ordinary people sense to be right, probably is right. But you can see that that's actually a very important concept in a notion of democracy. We need to get more people involved in making these decisions about our future, partly because authority comes from them and partly because they reflect this collective experience, this common sense, that's going to be the source of wisdom in guiding the community, the proper source of what Rousseau will call the �general will� of the nation. But it's important to reflect that, this notion of common sense actually stands in a pretty uneasy relationship to philosophy. How do we get at knowledge? Because, after all, you can have a point of view and philosophy, that doesn't say that something's right because a majority of people believe it's true. If a majority of people believe the Earth is flat, does that mean it's flat? So common sense might fly in the face of say, science or the wisdom of people who have just given more thought to a subject or the wisdom of people who have a greater stake in what�s going to be decided. So there's actually some real tension having to do with the development of common sense as a guide for governance. This tension, actually, if I can plug a book by one of my colleagues, is the subject of the Book Common Sense by Professor Sophia Rosenfeld here at the University of Virginia. This whole book is about the way this idea, this phrase common sense, develops during the 1700s and this kind of double edged meaning it has. Well, we're going to hear a lot more about edges in our next talk because let's turn from this to the French Revolution.
