Common Sense: Summary & Key Insights

Let us begin with the first principles. Society and government, though often confounded, are not the same. Society is born of our wants, government of our wickedness. The one unites, the other restrains. Society fosters our affections and encourages every virtue; government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil, and in its worst, an intolerable one.

Consider a small number of people settled in a new land, living peaceably together. They unite to assist one another in labor and safety. In such simplicity there is no need of formal law, for mutual interest guides them. Yet as their numbers grow, disputes arise and partiality leads to injustice. To prevent the ruin of harmony, they appoint representatives—a government—to ensure fairness and protect property. Such is the true origin of all government: not divine ordination nor the claim of kings, but the people's voluntary act of trust.

Government exists for one purpose only: to safeguard freedom and property. When it oversteps that boundary, when it becomes the means of oppression rather than protection, it loses its legitimacy. What I wish my readers to understand is that government is not a parent to whom we owe obedience but a servant answerable to its masters. The British government has forgotten this truth; it has made the colonies its prey rather than its charge. And thus, America must reclaim the principle that all political authority derives from consent, not inheritance.

If we examine monarchy with the eye of reason, it appears an absurdity in the face of nature and a crime in the sight of heaven. Why should one man rule millions merely because he happened to be born first? Kingship is not the child of wisdom but of sin; it sprang from the basest passions of mankind. The first kings were nothing more than military leaders who made themselves masters by force, and their descendants have continued the tyranny under a cloak of divine right.

Scripture itself, to which monarchy often appeals, condemns the idea. It shows that when men demanded a king, they did so in defiance of their Creator’s warnings. History, too, bears witness that hereditary succession produces weak and wicked rulers. Nature disclaims it; she does not distinguish between birth and merit. If heredity were a guarantee of virtue, the world would be full of saints in crowns, yet we find instead fools and tyrants, from whom nations have suffered beyond measure.

England herself has borne this corruption for centuries, sustaining a family of monarchs as though blood alone were a title to wisdom. I appeal to you: can a system that enthrones accident and perpetuates inequality be called just? If one man is born a king, a thousand are born slaves. The very essence of monarchy is contempt for reason and equality; it demands that we bow to the pretension of superiority engraved, not in conduct, but in genealogy. Such a system cannot produce freedom—it exists to extinguish it.