As the sociologist Ann Swidler has observed, “common sense”is really just deeply embedded culture: “the set of assumptions so unselfconscious as to s… - Thomas E. Ricks

The view that there are limits to the powers of rulers traveled with the colonists to New England, where the relationship between church, state, and the people became a subject of intense discussion. As early as 1644, Roger Williams (Cambridge, 1627), the colonial Puritan dissident, had argued in a book that “the Soveraigne, orginal and foundation of civill power lies in the people.” Hence, he added, governments were entitled to exercise power only as long as they held the trust of the people.

In a letter to President Madison mainly about his sheep Jefferson concluded with a quotation from Horace’s very Epicurean sixth epistle: Vive, vale, et siquid novisti rectius istis Candidus imperti sinon, his ulere mecum.73 That is, in the translation of the eighteenth-century English poet Christopher Smart, “Live: be happy. If you know of any thing preferable to these maxims, candidly communicate it: if not, with me make use of these.

As Orwell once wrote, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear” — most especially, for him, facts that they did not want to acknowledge.