Common sense is defined against elites’ esoteric knowledge claims

Evidence

Paine fueled American political outrage by teaching that the British claims to rule were an assault on Americans’ common sense, understood as the plain good sense of the many as opposed to the mystifications of an inherited nobility and the Crown. Common sense belongs to the people generally and contrasts with the obfuscation, hypocrisy, dogma, and demand for deference that come from authorities who use their claim to esoteric knowledge to prevent ordinary people from questioning their authority. It refers to shared experience as the basis for those things everyone can be expected to know. The first accent is on common, then, the sense of things shared by the great mass of people. Like philosophers of common sense before him, Paine insisted that a true grasp of things is accessible to everyone. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 310

Categorization

• DEFINE: Useful working definition of common sense as democratic epistemic ground versus aristocratic mystification.
• XREF: Echoes the Scottish common-sense philosophers (Reid) and the later conspiracist inversion where elites are the prejudiced ones. — connects to: Common sense is a political resource against the imposition of a ruler’s single reality. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 290; Politics mediates between elite philosophy and common sense — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1193; Name-dropping esoteric obscurities signals competence beyond any obvious skill — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 192

Broader Connections

• Politics mediates between elite philosophy and common sense #corroborates (0.80) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1193