Paine, T. (1776). Common Sense. Philadelphia: Robert Bell.
The most widely read political pamphlet of the American Revolution, with an estimated 500,000 copies sold in a colonial population of roughly 2.5 million. Paine argued that hereditary monarchy was an absurdity, that reconciliation with Britain was impractical, and that republican self-governance was the natural condition of a free society. The pamphlet did not discover these propositions. It made them feel obvious to a mass audience. George Washington reported that it was “working a powerful change in the minds of many men.”
The work matters to the BioConomy corpus for two reasons.
First, it is the clearest historical example of a collective coordination story being deliberately constructed. Paine wrote in plain prose, moved from common experience to political conclusion without passing through theory, and treated the status quo as the aberration. The effect was to make the coordination event the pamphlet enabled (revolution, state formation, constitutional self-governance) feel like common sense, always available, merely obscured by habit. This is the mechanism by which coordination stories operate at scale: they make the coordination they enable feel natural. The BioConomy’s interest is in whether the same mechanism can construct a coordination story for the deceleration phase.
Second, the pamphlet appeared in the same year as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The coincidence is structural: both texts were published at the base of the industrial S-curve, and together they supplied the paired narrative substrate (political and economic) that the acceleration phase required. Smith supplied the economic story (markets self-regulate, production generates wealth). Paine supplied the political story (sovereignty resides in the people, the state derives its legitimacy from the governed, the fiscal contract funds the republic). Both stories assumed that taxes fund government spending. Both were written before the Chartalist tradition (Knapp, 1905) identified the operational mechanics of sovereign currency. The fiscal assumption was so deep in the substrate that the most radical political imagination of the period could not see past it.
Paine’s fiscal reasoning within Common Sense is straightforward: he calculated the cost of a continental navy, estimated the colonies’ trade revenues, and argued that the new republic could afford to defend itself. The argument operates entirely within the frame that a state’s spending capacity is bounded by its revenue. The more developed fiscal proposals (progressive taxation, family allowances, old-age pensions, an inheritance-funded national fund) appear in Rights of Man Part II (1792) and Agrarian Justice (1797), where the same frame persists. What Paine could imagine was radical redistribution through the tax system. What he could not imagine was that the sovereign state creates its own currency and that taxation serves a coordination function (driving demand for the currency, managing inflation) distinct from revenue collection.