Common Sense (magazine)

Common Sense (magazine)

Common Sense was a political magazine named after the pamphlet by Thomas Paine and published in the United States between 1932 and 1946.

Positioned to the left of liberalism but critical of Communism, with its contributors often being democratic socialists of one kind or another, Common Sense was founded in 1932 by Yale graduates Selden Rodman and Alfred Bingham, son of U.S. Senator for Connecticut Hiram Bingham III. Politically the magazine tended to support progressive, left-of-center, independent political action in farmer-labor parties.

The magazine attracted a broad range of contributors, largely but not exclusively from the independent left, including Roger N. Baldwin, Carleton Beals, V. F. Calverton, John Chamberlain, Stuart Chase, Miriam Allen DeFord, Lawrence Dennis, John Dewey, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, John T. Flynn, J. B. S. Hardman, Morris Hillquit, Sidney Hook, Jay Lovestone, H. L. Mencken, Dwight Macdonald, Lewis Mumford, A. J. Muste, James Rorty, Howard Scott, Upton Sinclair, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary McCarthy, Stephen Spender and Edmund Wilson.

In his book The Politics of Upheaval, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. stated that during the early New Deal years of the Great Depression Common Sense became "the most lively and interesting forum of radical discussion in the country."