Sophia Rosenfeld is a distinguished historian and the author of Common Sense: A Political History. She discusses how the idea of “common sense” has been used as a political weapon, from Thomas Paine to Donald Trump. Rosenfeld explains how appeals to common sense can both empower ordinary people and shut down dissent, why the term has become central to right-wing populism, and how it helps mask deeply ideological claims as obvious truths. She also reflects on her new book, The Age of Choice, and the hidden politics behind the freedoms we take for granted.

Nathan J. Robinson

You were the person I wanted to talk to because I heard President Trump in his inaugural address speak of “a revolution of common sense.” And after there was the recent tragic plane crash over the Potomac in January, he gave a press conference and claimed that diversity policies were responsible for the crash. He was asked, how could you possibly conclude this? And he replied, because I have common sense. So I thought, well, I need to talk to the world's leading historian of the concept of common sense, which is a very interesting niche for you to occupy. But first, what's your reaction to hearing the President of the United States put so much emphasis in his rhetoric on this term?

Sophia Rosenfeld

We, the experts on common sense, are a small number of people. It's not exactly a huge field, so I'm happy to be described as a world-leading authority in the area. And actually, common sense and its evocation in political life is hardly new with President Trump. This is a storyline in American politics that goes all the way back to Thomas Paine, and we can talk about its various manifestations since then. Trump already used common sense here and there in his first term, so it isn't entirely a new term for him, but he's been talking about it a lot lately, and so have a lot of his acolytes. It's been repeated all over the place, on Fox News and elsewhere, and so I wasn't surprised. But I am interested that the more radical his ideas become in recent days—the more extreme anything he pronounces is—the more likely he is to tell us that it's common sense. And there are many reasons for that, but I'll start with that. Simply evoking common sense as your crutch, and actually espousing common sense, have never really gone together.

Robinson 

That's fascinating. One's intuition, perhaps one's associations with the term, might be that common sense is the term that we use to describe that which is essentially inarguable, those things that nearly everyone accepts to be true and accepts to be true because they're very difficult to dispute. There's some kind of body of factual knowledge and values that we can all roughly agree on—these things are common sense. You're describing a political use of the term, however, which seems to take things that are highly contentious and try to brand them as being part of that body of indisputable, inarguable truths.

Rosenfeld

That is exactly right. Notice that the first thing you evoked was the expression "a revolution of common sense." Revolutions, by definition, upset norms on all fronts. Common sense is, in some sense, the antithesis. Common sense is the thing we all already agree on that we barely need to talk about because it's all so obvious. You put your hand in the fire, you're going to get burned. You don't need to explain that to most people because that seems like something that experientially all of us just simply know, and yet a revolution of common sense was in some ways what Thomas Paine in 1776 said he was inaugurating. And what he meant by that was not so much that the existing common sense was in favor of what he's saying, but that common sense itself could be invoked, if we thought about it the right way, to justify what was actually a revolution—a vast change in thinking: the reversal of the idea that the colonies belong to a mother country and the reversal of the idea that it was obvious that people needed to be ruled by a king in an aristocracy.

What's interesting about Trump is that he's using this language, but in some sense in reverse, to argue for himself as something like a king and to reintroduce ideas of colonialism. Much of this is a kind of reversal. Invoking common sense does suggest we all already believe this, but it also suggests the possibility that with time, we will all come to see this as the general wisdom.

Robinson

That's an interesting kind of paradox. Common sense is used in political discourse to talk about things that are, in fact, extremely contentious. And obviously, people's main association with the term common sense might be Thomas Paine's pamphlet that was so instrumental in catalyzing the American Revolution. You draw our attention to an interesting feature of that, which is there is a kind of attempt—I don't want to call it dishonest, but it is. It is a piece of rhetoric that suggests that we all ought to believe something, by suggesting that we all, on some level, already do believe it, even though, technically, we don't already all believe it. The American Revolution at the time Thomas Paine is writing Common Sense, the position that he is espousing, was not a consensus position of Americans.

Rosenfeld 

Absolutely correct. That is well put, and you're absolutely right. It's a rhetorical kind of sleight of hand. But there's a second dimension to what it does, too. And this is why populists in particular, from Paine onwards, [use it]. Ronald Reagan talked about common sense a lot, too. Trump is also evoking a populist rhetoric in talking about common sense for two reasons.

One, common sense is opposed to the knowledge that's derived from expertise, from knowledge that's derived from elites, knowledge that's derived from anything except the kind of kitchen table logic of ordinary people. And that's been a theme for Trump all along. When he talks about common sense, he says, I'm not book smart, I don't have the big vocabulary to talk about this, I just know things when I see them. I just have instinct. I have a kind of touch that tells me what's true. So in his revolution of common sense, he's also suggesting that he isn't going to the usual sources for the kinds of opinions presidents come up with. He's going to this every day, every man shared platform.

The second thing that common sense suggests is it’s a kind of anti-pluralist position, too. It doesn't say, here's one position one might take. It says it's the only position. Common sense is what all real people would believe. If you thought something different, what's the opposite of common sense? Nonsense. It's the realm of impossible, arcane, weird, strange, not-worth-taking-seriously opinion. So it's a clever term for him because it lets him suggest something radical but in terms that really go very well with his efforts to make himself into something of an at least rhetorical populist. Whether his policies are populist is a different matter.

Robinson  

Common sense is used in a way that suggests the concept is democratic, that it is an appeal to what all of us think and believe. But in fact, it can be quite exclusionary in the way that it's used. If I take things I believe that are actually quite ideological, actually quite contentious, and I brand them as common sense, what I am essentially doing, as you indicate, is saying that if you are not on board with me, you are outside the realm of reason itself. I don't need to debate with you. You've lost the plot. You are not in the community of people who even have the basic ability to perceive the world, which is quite an exclusionary claim if the thing that you are branding as common sense is a highly contentious claim, like "DEI causes plane crashes."

Rosenfeld  

Right. It's a conversation stopper. He's like, that's just common sense. You aren't saying, let's keep talking about this because I see things differently than you. You're saying there's no other possible idea out there; nothing else is really going to hold up. So there's definitely a sense in which it can be exclusionary. What I think is really interesting, though, is when people on the outside politically evoke common sense. It can be a way to say, okay, maybe I don't have all the sophistication you do, and maybe I don't have all the right language, but I've lived in the world and I know various things, and sometimes it actually can be a useful democratic tool. For groups that have been marginal, they can marshal it to say, I don't have to be an economist myself to know how to save money or something like that. But if you're inside, and you evoke it from the center, it's an exclusionary tool because it's saying that only the real people who really are with me know what's what.

Robinson 

I couldn't help but think, as you say, about what a brilliant kind of master stroke it was by Thomas Paine to use common sense as the framing for his argument. The pamphlet is famously, probably, the single most influential piece of writing outside, maybe, The Communist Manifesto or the Bible. It's really up there in terms of pieces of writing that changed the world and in terms of its cascading effects. And you think, well, why? This is so brilliant: to say, as you say, if you were thinking straight, you would be with me. We may be on the outside, we may not be the consensus, but pure logic and reason of the simplest kind lead inexorably toward the position that I am about to espouse for you.

Rosenfeld 

Absolutely. And it's full of rhetorical sleights of hand like that. He says things like, Britain's a small place, and the colonies are really big. Why should a small thing rule a bigger thing? And on the face of it, logically, of course, that's pretty clever. It's a little like Trump saying, I don't know who the pilot was, but it kind of makes sense that if you somehow diluted the pool of talent, that must have been the cause. It isn't a perfect analogy, but it's a suggestion of things that don't quite necessarily make sense, but they make sense at some very instinctive level. They're not really fact driven, but they're driven by some kind of logic or habit of mind, and they can sound sensible even if they might not be. Since when does it matter what size one thing ruling another is? That's not a premise in politics, but put that way, it sounds like a logical dictate.

Robinson  

And Reagan would say things like, it's just common sense that if you tax something, you get less of it, or you need to be strong in order to negotiate peace. Common sense is something that's kind of revealed immediately, like you don't need to do much analysis to find out whether it's true. It comes to you all of a sudden, and that's it. It's settled.

I recently heard a clip of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I don't think he used the term common sense, but he was using that kind of rhetoric to talk about measles vaccines. And he was like, well, my family, we had 11 siblings. We all got the measles, and we were fine. And it's like, okay, so that's all you need. You just need the common experience of your family that was fine, and so you don't need to look at any studies of childhood mortality for measles. It becomes irrelevant because your experience has already gotten you to the inarguable truth.

Rosenfeld 

That couldn't be a better example because that is exactly how common sense logic works. And one thing that's pretty clear is that in a lot of the sciences, from economics to biology, common sense isn't really the way things necessarily work. Vaccines, for instance, give you some of the disease in order for you to not get it later. Deficit spending is not how a family manages its budget, that kind of thing. We do rely to a considerable degree on experts in all of these realms because we certainly can't know the answers to all these questions. And experts are often wrong, so it's easy to find examples of expert knowledge gone bad, but we often do turn to experts to help us through all kinds of crises, especially in governments.

Families operate on slightly different principles. But if you operate on the principle that whatever has happened to me is kind of generalizable—if I had a cold winter where I live, there is no global warming, or I didn't get sick and didn't get the vaccine—that might give you a kind of common sense knowledge of things, and it's certainly worth it for experts to listen to that. Experts should not turn away from people's experiences in the world. But taken by itself, common sense can be highly misleading. It can do just the kinds of examples you just gave.

Robinson  

I spoke to the physicist Sean Carroll, and one of the two things we talked about was how the history of the development of the physical sciences is, in some ways, a history of all of our common sense understandings of how the world works being progressively overthrown. The deeper we look at the universe, the more we find that it is totally bizarre and strange. Things that you think are absolutely true via common sense, such as, for example, time is absolute—time just progresses, and it’s one thing; there's a clock for the universe, and it ticks along—turn out not to be true at all. Time is relative. There are crazy facts about the universe that we find, and in many ways, the development of expertise has come from taking these things that appear totally obvious and challenging them and finding out that the world is deeply strange and that truth and common sense radically depart from one another.

Rosenfeld  

That's exactly right. And the book that I wrote after the book about common sense—which was written in a different political moment but I think has proved to be ever more relevant as common sense has increasingly been a populist theme in the last 15 years—was a book called Democracy and Truth: A Short History. That was written during the first Trump administration, precisely because I was struck by this growing tension and bifurcation between, on the one hand, knowledge derived from expertise, which seemed to be moving farther and farther away from ordinary people—technocratic government, you might say—and on the other hand, a different kind of politics growing from an attachment to common sense but also instinct, faith. [There were] various sources of knowledge that seemed to be moving the opposite direction from expertise.

And to me, that knowledge split, which some people have called epistemological tribalism in recent years, is at the source of the growing tension in our politics between technocrats on the one side and populists on the other. To me, the ideal obviously has to lie somewhere between those two: a government that's rooted in expertise but that has democratic buy-in and ordinary people's participation in it as well. But the two strands have moved farther and farther from each other to the degree that experts often seem to be ignoring the experience of, say, farmers when they're creating policies around climate. And on the other hand, you have a kind of populism that is in its most extreme in the current weeks, is somebody like RFK Jr., who simply doesn't think that science has much to offer to explain how we're going to be healthy and safe in this crazy world.

Robinson  

Yes, I certainly have found myself making the kinds of arguments that say, alright, these economic statistics reveal one picture about the economy, but you have to understand people's experience, and you need policies that respond to people's experiences. Their experiences are not wrong, and there may be things that are overlooked by scientists. I made this argument about medicine and doctors that ignore patient reports of their own subjectivity. Subjectivity is actually an important piece of data, and experts can't be dismissive. But then, as I say, at the other end of the spectrum, you have this idea that nothing said by an expert can be trusted because they're an expert.

Rosenfeld  

That's the kind of reductio ad absurdum position, which is when you get to the degree that anything said by somebody who is part of any government agency, major research university, or major hospital system can't be trusted because they obviously have some kind of bias. It's a disaster for us if we start thinking that expert opinion in every realm as actually just a partisan political position. We want apolitical doctors and, back to airline accidents, air traffic controllers. We just want people who know their business. 

Robinson 

The terrifying thing is that that could lead you towards believing that the more people know about something, the less they are to be trusted. You have the opposite of a system where people who know what they're doing are put in charge of a thing. I think probably our listeners and readers will want to know—one of the basic questions that I'm sure you've answered many times—is, where did this term come from? It didn't originate with Thomas Paine. Where did he get it from? What are the origins of the concept of common sense?

Rosenfeld  

It's actually an ancient term, but it didn't really become a term in politics until the very beginning of the 18th century, [initially in] English politics. It proves to be a good political weapon just around the time that a kind of partisan politics is emerging. So you'd think, well, it must have been a long-standing category. There are earlier understandings of popular opinion, but the term common sense entered politics in England in the early 18th century, just as parties were getting underway, and it was a rhetorical, political weapon from the beginning.

I think that it's hard to even imagine democracy getting off the ground later in the 18th century without this term, as it does suggest two important things: one, that ordinary people have a capacity, even if they're not extremely literate and extremely learned, to engage in politics at all; the other is that politics itself is easy enough to understand that you don't need some kind of arcane knowledge to be able to understand its principles—it doesn't have to be some kind of mysterious science only the initiated can know about—and I see that as an important development.

So by the time Thomas Paine is using the term—it's a clever use of it, for sure, it's an innovative use—it has already been circulating in politics for some time. He just makes the most spectacular use of it. And at first, it really is a tool of democracy. But what I think happens over time is that it is often a tool of a kind of populism that can undermine democracy as much as support it, and that's the kind of shift that I see happening [now].

It became a term that both Democrats and Republicans used through the 20th century, but in recent decades, it's been largely a tool of the right. It's the right that attached itself to a kind of populist politics, whereas in other times and places sometimes the left has done so, in the U.S. at least.

Robinson  

I sense a certain ambivalence that you might have about the term common sense. On the one hand, it’s important in establishing that people's own opinions about political questions are valuable, that we care about them, that everyone has something valuable to contribute. On the other hand, as we've discussed, it can very easily become a propaganda term.

Rosenfeld 

That's exactly right. And your example about the economy was, I think, a really good one. We heard a lot in the build up to the election that Biden's economic numbers, as reported by economists, were really good. Inflation was lower than most of the world. Unemployment was at record lows. There were many good indicators out there, but we also heard a lot from people who went to the supermarket. And then we always seem to be talking about the price of eggs and even more so in recent weeks.

But ordinary people found themselves wondering why their grocery bills were higher, and it led to a kind of insecurity, which we shouldn't dismiss out of hand. It's important to recognize that ordinary people going to the grocery store and having a little bit of sticker shock is an important economic indicator, too. I'm not unsympathetic at all to the idea that expert opinion alone is not helpful [when] isolated in a democratic environment, but there has to be some kind of rapprochement, a kind of meeting place, between those two kinds of indicators where we can think, what does it mean to say I'm finding my groceries really expensive and unemployment rates are at an all-time low?

Robinson 

Over the course of American political history, has everyone presented their own point of view as just being common sense? Presumably, during the debates over slavery, people who supported slavery thought that it was just common sense, that there's a natural racial hierarchy and that some people are destined to be on the bottom and some people destined to be on the top. And the opponents of slavery think, well, it's completely obvious, it's basic common sense, that if you believe in the principles of the Declaration of Independence, that slavery is completely inconsistent with basic morality. I'm sure there have been competing appeals to common sense.

Rosenfeld 

There have been competing appeals, and even the content of what counts as common sense sounds ahistorical. Like my example of you putting your hand in the fire, and it burns you. It really shouldn't matter where you are in the world and in what century. That's going to pretty much hold true. But much of what we take to be common sense actually turns out to be very culturally and historically specific.

So your example of slavery is an excellent one. Is the world organized in hierarchical ways? To most people, in most places and times, it’s been completely obvious that there are hierarchies within the world in any direction that you look. Organizations are hierarchical. The chain between heaven and earth is hierarchical. Even animals. But we've taken to be common sensical that a certain kind of basic equality also exists between humans, which is a rather radical idea, as Thomas Paine, among others, pointed out.

So Trump's suggestion that what he's proposing is nothing but common sense is, in a sense, an effort to push history in a particular direction. It's to say, yes, this is rooted a little bit in what you already know because it’s ordinary people who are backing me, but it's also to say, we all need to get on board with a view of the world in which, for instance, it's common sense that the Gulf of Mexico should be the Gulf of America or Greenland should be an American property even though this hasn't been our common sense at all. In fact, the very principle, like taking over another part of the world, has become increasingly frowned upon and is not part of our common sense in recent decades. He likes to shock [people] by putting a crown on himself in an image and to call himself a king. That's something no president has ever done. So, in fact, it violates American common sense. But there's a kind of poking at our norms that is accompanied all the time with a suggestion that this is what really ordinary people do want and think.

Robinson  

What's a little alarming in some sense, although encouraging in another, is that if the concept of common sense is malleable, it means that maybe you could establish a new norm. You say that Trump is violating the American common sense norm of opposition to monarchy, but as we've seen, if you stake out your position for the new common sense, you can, in fact, create a new common sense. I wonder if all successful social movements have, in some sense, conducted the rhetorical sleight of hand in which you declare that things are a certain way because you want them to be a certain way. You hope that by declaring that's the way things are, you can move other people to agree with you. Marx declared that capitalism is destined to destroy itself, but in a sense, he hoped that by doing so, he would encourage plenty of other people to believe that's the way so that it would bring about the outcome. 

Rosenfeld  

You're outlining exactly the kind of theories of an Italian Marxist of the early 20th century, Gramsci, who said basically what you've just said, that for any social movement to work, anything with a popular basis, it has to tap in, in a certain way, to some part of existing common sense and then turn it in a new direction. So Marx, for instance, had to tap into worker discontent, a sense that things were unjust, to then put forward and encourage an idea that was extremely radical in its moment. And this has been a Republican tool more than a Democratic one, though the Democrats have come up with things like "common sense gun laws"—again, a place where we're fighting all the time, but the suggestion is that this would be common sense. Sometimes they mean, could this be the place we could find agreement? Sometimes they believe they're simply suggesting the introduction of a new version.

But I do think a successful social movement has to, in some way, tap into ways people are already experiencing the world a little bit and then take that experience and move it a little bit in the direction that we want to go. Calling it common sense does always have the potential to be a little demagogic because it doesn't suggest the possibility of opposition, as I suggested before. But there's something to this idea that if you just announce a radical idea, people will dismiss it out of hand as just too crazy and weird to be toyed with.

Robinson

So in a sense, it may be difficult to escape from making these kinds of appeals to things that people already think. But I think one of the values of your book is that we should, at least, interrogate what our implicit assumptions about this concept are. Are we saying that the consensus position of ordinary people should be deferred to because it is the consensus position? Are we saying we believe that it can be wrong sometimes? We have to do some thinking about the degree to which we should accept something—I think we should even do it with Thomas Paine. Does the argument hold up? Is it valid? [We need to] interrogate it and to recognize the ways in which this can be wielded strategically as a propaganda term to subvert the kind of inquiry that we might otherwise be inclined to do, which is to examine whether an idea holds up.

Rosenfeld  

So true. In that sense, I'm an odd kind of historian because the things that interest me in general are the kinds of things that seem so obvious that we basically don't talk about them, much less question them. And the things that interest me are those pillars of democracy which get thrown around a lot without much investigation, and I thought common sense was one of them. What it is sounds obvious. It's obvious because it's common sense. It's almost like a circle. But in fact, it turns out to be a political weapon, and it's important both in the construction of democracy and in the undermining of democracy.

And in my current work on choice, it struck me again that it's a kind of political idea that crosses the right-left divide largely. Most people fight about what we should be choosing but not about the value of choice itself, from reproductive choice to school choice. It has an interesting way in which it's a support for our political system. Democracy is rooted in choice, human rights is rooted in choice. But then so is consumer culture and capitalism these days. And it's almost the meeting point for the two.

The idea is that choosing gets you what you want in life, and choosing ultimately makes you free. When you're a chooser, you're an autonomous, independent person. This seems maybe very obvious to us, but to my mind, it really shouldn't be seen as obvious. It's historically specific. It's unusual. It doesn't develop until quite late in our history. It's not global, although it increasingly is, just because of American and Western European influence on the world.

And again, my goal is really just to get people to think about it once more, to see the ways in which it shapes our politics even if it seems like something not really worth paying attention to.

Robinson  

Well, friend of the magazine Professor Noam Chomsky often says that the beginning of science is the willingness to be puzzled by that which seems obvious. And as I was thinking about choice—obviously, when I started being exposed to your critical analysis and interrogation of the idea—I thought, well, my first instinct is, but what could possibly be wrong with choice? And then I started to think, and I remembered that again, to go back to the subject of vaccines, the anti-vaccine movement frames itself as a movement of choice. I wrote an article a while back going, hang on a minute, there are more values here than choice, and one value is not making choices that cause other people to die. So if your choice results in the spread of a deadly illness through society, then we need to restrict your choice. I understand that choice sounds like something that trumps everything. Well, shouldn't I have a choice as to what to put in my body? Perhaps. But perhaps you shouldn't have a choice that allows you to choose the deaths of other people.

Rosenfeld  

Yes. Some of Trump's first executive orders had a lot of language about choice in them, and you think, that's kind of a liberal value, isn't it? People choosing things. And he even uses the expression "freedom of choice." And what does he want choice in? Choice in automobiles, choice in appliances, and choice in light bulbs was in one of the first ones. You think, well, how do I reconcile that with [his] authoritarian strain? But the choice itself, precisely, is to say, energy consumption be damned. Or it takes away a larger value, maybe around climate change, in favor of the idea that everybody gets what they want. And that's really the same kind of logic you're talking about when people say, my body, my choice. They mean, I don't have to wear a mask or I want to resist a vaccine mandate. It means, I get to pick what I want. But as you say, it doesn't really matter what happens to other people or the greater good in some way. Again, I'm not arguing that choice is always bad. Hardly. But I do think it's a case in which we might not want to jump to the conclusion that more options or more opportunities for choice always get us somewhere better.

Robinson 

And if we're unable to make informed choices, our choices may make us worse off. So one of the criticisms that I make of the "school choice" movement is that if you have private for-profit schools, they will trick parents into making bad choices and extract money out of the system, and then people might face a very limited range of choices. You have choices, but who decides the range of choices that you have? Who gives you the information? And sorting through information can be a very time-consuming process. Many people can't do it, so they can't make good choices even though you've given them choices.

Rosenfeld

 That's right. So sometimes it's a matter of the fact that we're all told we have free choice. But of course, some of us have much greater access to good choices and to good information than to others, and that includes, of course, financial access—not just that, but every sort of access point. So we're all held responsible for our choices even though we have very differential relations to them. But there are some choices that even people with all the resources around might not want.

For instance, would you rather have one good health plan or would you rather your employer give you a choice of nine? This one has a deductible at this percent for hospitalization, and this one has a copay that's higher. And you start thinking, well, I don't know what's going to happen to me. I don't know what's going to happen to my family. How am I supposed to decide if I'm better off paying a higher premium now because of a disaster later? In this case, it doesn't seem to me that choice is liberating. In fact, it's a kind of puzzle that's unsolvable.

Robinson 

Yes. I wrote an article a while back about the Obamacare marketplace and how it was literally impossible to make a rational choice. For the amount of information that was given to you, you had to make an arbitrary choice among so many different plans. So it had to be arbitrary. But of course, once you've made a choice, that could be used to shift responsibility to you as well.

Rosenfeld  

So you chose that health insurance plan, and you didn't know you were going to get hit by a truck, but you made your choice. You live with the consequences: you picked the plan without the full hospitalization [benefit].

Robinson

So many problems here. There's the problem of shifting the consequences, like with global warming and how the Global South suffers the consequences of consumer choices made in the United States. There's the fact that you can't make good choices. That choice can be used to shift responsibility. This is fascinating. People should pick up your new book. I want to return, as we close here, to this idea of common sense. One of the things about common sense is that even if we might disagree about the content of common sense, for the most part, we all agree that there is such a thing. There are occasionally people, like the Dadaists, who have said, to hell with that—we reject the very idea of common sense.

Rosenfeld 

If you really want to be a contrarian in aesthetic terms or in any other kinds of terms, one way to do that is to simply say there's no such thing, or if it does exist, it is a form of nonsense. And that has been a position that philosophers and artists at various moments have taken, and they've often taken it in response to what they see as abuses of common sense to support horrible things like wars. The Dadaists were responding to the First World War and saying, there's nothing sensible about any of this. How could people have destroyed each other over nothing [in this way]? And in a sense, it can be sensible to be opposed to sensibleness, in their case, especially.

I think in our politics, though, we do need some appeal to some shared values. Democracy can't, to my mind, fully work unless there's some kind of very low-level acceptance of a few basic ideas. They're not very extensive, but [they include] a certain sense that rules matter, that facts matter. These sound very, very basic. But I do think that some of those—certain things are good or bad, some very basic moral ideas—are essential to the operation of a shared culture. And that also includes a little bit of a sense of some solidarity with others. [...] So I guess my end point is really just to say that we do need a shared realm. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be a little skeptical the next time somebody invokes common sense to justify whatever the hell they proposed. 

Robinson  

There's one possible path you could take where, like the Dadaist, as you say, if this is reason, I choose madness. One [idea]that someone might get after reading a history like yours about common sense is to take a totally relativist position, which is to say all invocations of reason are propaganda, and so what could we possibly believe? But what you've outlined is an approach where we don't reject the concept of common sense, but we are on guard for its political uses. We understand that we can be manipulated through the use of terminology that is designed to make it seem as if things that are, [in fact], highly contentious are [instead] obvious and indisputable.

Rosenfeld  

Exactly.

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.