Volume 11, Number 10 · December 5, 1968
Common Sense
By Henry Steele Commager
In a Time of Torment
by I.F. Stone
Random House, 448 pp., $1.95 (paper)
I.F. Stone is unfailingly contemporary, but he is a man of the Enlightenment. For he has faith in Reason, which most moderns do not, and he confesses to moral passion, which is unfashionable. Though he looks with distaste on most of what goes on in the United States today, he is outraged rather than desperate, and he has never lost confidence in the essential virtue and the ultimate good sense of his countrymen. He shares, too, something of the Enlightenment's simplistic view of human nature and society, its tendency to see the world in terms of reason and folly, tyranny and liberty, virtue and vice. And he clings, somewhat wistfully, to an old-fashioned confidence in political solutions—a confidence always more pronounced in the New World than in the Old, but no longer very pronounced anywhere. He is, in short, a modern Tom Paine, celebrating Common Sense and the Rights of Man, hammering away at tyranny injustice, exploitation, deception, and chicanery with an eloquence that appeals even to the sophisticated who are most suspicious of eloquence. He shares, too, Paine's impatience with the slow processes of history; his deep suspicion of men in power, or in office; his talent for invective and epigram. He is the last of that long succession of radical pamphleteers which includes Paine and Garrison and Theodore Parker, Henry George and E.A. Ross and Henry Demarest Lloyd, Upton Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens and the Rev. A. J. Muste—crusaders all, champions of lost causes, never happier than when they had a fight on their hands, never more effective than when the causes they championed were desperate.
Review, 2294 words
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