Politics & Power Quote by Giambattista Vico

Vico’s definition of “common sense” lands like a polite insult: what passes for wisdom is often just unexamined habit that happens to be widely distributed. By calling it “judgment without reflection,” he strips the phrase of its self-congratulating aura. Common sense isn’t the sober referee; it’s the crowd noise that feels authoritative because everyone’s chanting the same thing.

The sly power here is scale. Vico moves from “an entire class” to “an entire nation” to “the entire human race,” turning agreement into something less noble than people like to admit. Consensus, in his frame, is not evidence of truth; it can be evidence of a shared blind spot. He’s warning that a belief can become common not because it’s tested, but because it’s convenient, inherited, and socially rewarded. The subtext is political as much as epistemological: elites have their “common sense,” nations have theirs, and each can be mistaken in ways that feel natural precisely because they are collective.

Context matters. Writing in the early Enlightenment, Vico pushes back against the era’s faith in transparent rationality. He’s interested in how societies actually make meaning through custom, language, myth, and history - the stuff that precedes “reflection” and often governs it. That makes his definition double-edged: it critiques conformity, but it also recognizes common sense as a real social force, the tacit glue that lets a culture function.

Read now, it’s a neat antidote to the smug modern appeal to “common sense” in politics and punditry: a rhetorical shortcut that tries to win by implying the opponent is not just wrong, but abnormal. Vico reminds us that “normal” can be a mass-produced error.