David Frum

I've already discussed the first volume of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that was published in February of 1776.

The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith was published in March of 1776.

Now we're going to reach all the way back to January of 1776 when Common Sense was published as a pamphlet in the United States.

At the time, the United States had a population of about 3 million people, not all of them free, not all of them literate.

But in that population of some 3 million people, almost half a million copies of Thomas Paine's pamphlet were sold over the coming years.

It is maybe the greatest bestseller in the country's history apart from the Bible, and maybe even in terms of speed of penetration, bigger than the Bible in any given year.

It's a book that is worth rereading because it remains, to this day, accessible and powerful.

Thomas Paine was an unusual person to make an impact in the United States.

He was actually English-born, British-born, came to the United States.

And he was someone who was in many ways a man of the future.

He was not a religious man.

He was a deist at most, maybe an outright atheist.

He certainly rejected all forms of organized religion at a time when the United States was one of the most religious societies in the world.

And he was...

in many ways, a visionary of the future.

His later books would outline some kind of image of a welfare state when he was writing in the 1790s.

But in 1776, he addressed himself directly at the feelings and beliefs of his adopted country, and he made an impact on them unlike anything seen before or maybe since.

Common sense breaks down into a series of sections.

Begins with some thoughts on government and society.

In this respect, it's one of the first libertarian manifestos.