repatriation act to get the remains exhumed and returned to oklahoma. and buried next to his father, hiram thorpe. >> host: and what is the status, again, of that case, and where do you see it going? >> guest: the status is with jack dying they got a, as i understand it, a 30-day extension -- because he was the only one who technically filed the suit -- to add on more surviving descendants, the two remaining sons, and some tribal members. they were told by the court they needed to beef up the suit in order to resubmit it. that's where it stood the last i spoke to jack's descendants. where i stand on it, if the end result was for jim to come back to oklahoma, i would like to think there's a win/win solution, that the town, jim thorpe which has done so well by him, could keep the name, obviously, and be the good guys in this and bring the remains back to oklahoma. whether that'll happen or not, i

don't know. >> host: were you able to talk with a lot of mr. thorpe's descendants? >> guest: yes. >> host: for this book? >> guest: yes. all his children. >> host: what are they doing? >> guest: well, there's only two left. they're quite old or aged by this point. jack, who just died a couple of weeks ago, was the one who most reclaimed his indian identity. he lives in shawnee. bill worked as an engineer for many years as he's retired now. dick worked for the government of oklahoma. he lives there now which is almost to the texas border. grace thorpe, oneover the daughters, was -- one of the daughters, was a passionate indian rights advocate and just indefatigable all her life. gayle, the other daughter, worked for the american girl scouts and was also quite an advocate for indian issues. carr lot, the -- charlotte, the third daughter, worked very, very hard for the e

reinstatement of the gold medals. they were all pistols, terrific. >> host: we've been talking with kate buford, author of this new book, "native american son: the life and sporting legend of jim thorpe." >> you're watching 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books on c-span2's booktv. >> sophia rosenfeld, what's the definition of common sense in politics? >> guest: good question to start off with. the one thing we never talk about common sense, we refer to it all the time, but it's not something that gets defined very often. common sense is supposed to be, at least, the kind of thing you don't have to talk about. it's the wisdom everybody has, it's the obvious, the self-evident. and it's something politicians refer to a lot. if you ever note that democrats or republicans, they love to talk about a common sense solution to health care or common sense solution to the problems of the environment.

but nobody ever actually sits down and what is common sense, what would it be? it's the everyday, ordinary wisdom, reasoning about everyday, ordinary matters that we're supposed to, basically, agree upon without discussion. >> host: when did it enter, that term enter the political kiss course? >> guest: well, it's a very old term. the term goes all the way back to aristotle in different forms. it's a faculty of the brain. but starting in the early 18th century in england fist, it starts to become a political term. and it starts to suggest a kind of politics that everyone can participate in potentially. a sense that politics isn't something so complicated that everybody can't participate in it. that happens after the glorious revolution in england first.

>> host: how did aristotle use common sense, the term? >> >> guest: yeah. completely differently really. for aristotle there was some notion that humans had five basic senses. we still think that, that's right out of greek philosophy. but aristotle was trying to figure out how they coordinated, how did you figure out that sugar and salt were different? they look the same, they tasted different, how did you put all your different sensory reactions together? and he suggested there was this common sense that combined the five and lets you distinguish between things but also put together what was sweet and white was the sugar and what was a little bit bitter and white and granular was the salt. if that makes any sense. we have different explanations for that now. it's really fallen entirely out of psychology and brain science, but it lasted a long time, the idea that there was a common sense, through the middle ages.

>> host: so the glorious revolution in england happens in 1888 or so. >> guest: yeah. >> host: who introduced the political common sense theme? >> guest: it doesn't come from any one place. there's not a great book, the book of common sense. but the term started to have as the older idea declined, it started to have this more casual sense much like today, things you just happen to know. either things you knew or the faculty for figuring them out. everyday perception. and after the glorious revolution there's lots of anxiety about what are we going to do about preventing this kind of strife from happening again. and an idea that gets proposed, one great thinker talks about common sense, but it's a lot of very ordinary people do newspapers and magazines of the period that if we just used common sense, we wouldn't fight so much about things. we wouldn't fight about religion, about politics. ironically, of course, as soon as the term is introduced

everybody starts fighting over who has it. but that's been the story ever since. >> host: okay. in the american political discourse, is it thomas paine who introduced the term? >> guest: yes. it's a known term before paine, but he brings the term into american politics. and what he does most of all is attach it to some notion of democracy. so it's already it helps bring about -- common sense is already in circulation. it helps foster democratic notions before that, but it's paine who really puts it all together and comes up with this idea. why can't the common sense of a people be the source of self-rule? >> host: what was the impact of his book? >> guest: it's really hard to imagine. no book had anything like the popularity of paine's -- >> host: it was a pamphlet. >> guest: you know, you can still buy the dover, i think it's called thrift edition for

about $2. didn't cost a lot in 18th century terms, and no book was read anything like it as commonly as common sense. twenty-five editions in the first year, came out in every major city. editions came out in london, dublin, edinborough. you know, it was the right set of ideas for the right moment. it's rare for a book to have that kind of immediate impact and a pamphlet even more so. >> host: did he make a lot of money writing it? >> guest: he did not. paine was not a very successful businessman. he died in the total poverty. he had all kinds of schemes along the way. he did not make much off of it. publishing worked a lot differently than today. bestsellers did not guarantee a large income, and it was pirated by all kinds of people. and paine, but he was, obviously, an incredibly difficult man. he was a flop at most things. but he was also absolutely brilliant as a polemicist, and he wrote one great tract during

the american revolution, another great one during the french revolution -- or more -- and changed opinion, really internationally. you might call him the first international revolutionary. >> host: where did you come up with the idea of writing about common sense in politics? >> guest: yeah. i was intrigued with two things, and they sound quite different. one is, could you write a history of something that sounds like it's outside history? common sense isn't supposed to have a history. it's the thing we always agree upon, you know? don't put your hand in the fire, you'll burn yourself. that's common sense. that doesn't sound very historical. but i was intrigued by the idea of where did we get the idea in the first place that there were these ideas that were outside history? and the second reason i really came to this topic is that we're living through a moment of a resurgence of populism. i think we'd probably all agree on that, different kinds of populism. and common sense is the idea that's at the root of populism.

in some ways this book is a prehistory of pop populism. how did we ever get the notion that ordinary people together with kitchen table solutions might know better than experts, policy wonks in washington? that's, that's -- those two roots, kind of an interest in politics and an interest in historical writing combined. >> host: well, what do you think about the fact that glenn beck and the tea party movement have adopted thomas paine's common sense? >> guest: yeah. i find it fascinating. so for years and years really until the reagan years tom paine was considered the patron saint of the left. he's the favorite founding father of radicals. he was much hated, really, in the early 19th century in america for his supposedly atheist views, his radical political economy. and most people associated themselves with paine ideas were always on the left for a very long time. you notice that washington doesn't have a monument to tom

paine. he's the only founding father we don't recognize in quite the same way as hamilton, madison, jefferson. here we are in madison, hamilton and monroe territory. with reagan something interesting happened. he started quoting paine quite often. he also appropriated the notion of common sense. he often spoke of his own ideas as stemming not from, you know, his political wisdom or his advisers, but from the people's common sense. and he opened the way for a kind of -- as opposed to a left-wing populism adoption of paine and beck is, therefore, now the last in a long line of reappropriaters of paine to new effect. but it was again a best seller. but i think beck writes a book pretty often.

>> host: professor sophia rosenfeld, in your view was ronald reagan's adaptation of thomas paine purposeful? >> guest: i think he recognized in paine, very cleverly, certain themes that continue to have a really good american rez advance. resonance. a kind of tomorrow will be sunny outlook, a sense we can do this. and in paine a kind of folksy quality that didn't have to necessarily be applied to the set of ideas that paine did, but could be adopted and used for a lot of different purposes. the interesting thing about populism as a whole and common sense more particularly is that it doesn't have to stand for any set of ideas. it's not a ideology that matches with some politics. it's a way of talking and a style of politics that can resonate in a lot of different contexts and to a lot of different ends. so it has this quality of being,

having sometimes revolutionary implications and sometimes deeply conservative ones. and reagan found in paine a temperament that he really could use. >> host: you teach history here at the university of virginia. >> guest: i do. >> host: what do you teach? >> guest: well, i'm by training a french historian. i'm an expert in the french revolution and the enlightenment. but i teach much more widely in that. i'm really interested at this point in teaching courses that are about the age of revolution, so the american, french, haitian revolutions among others, and i teach some more general courses about the history of europe and the world, europe's relationship to the world. i'm teaching a course right now on the history of human rights, where do we get the modern ideas of human rights. i'm interested in the roots of our modern political vocabulary and our, the concepts that we bandy about a lot. sometimes without exploring much.

>> host: well, let's go to your expertise then. [laughter] was common sense a term or a concept used during the french revolution, 1789? >> guest: exactly. exactly. what i find most interesting in in -- and this sort of came out as i started working on this topic, is that the french revolution does adopt the french version, good sense more than common sense, a very similar notion but to very different ends. and this is where we see the roots -- if you see in the paine the roots of a kind of revolutionary democratic populism, what you see in the french revolution is common sense being used exactly the opposite way as a kind of counterrevolutionary or conservative idea meaning an idea that could be leveled against the radical reason of the pierre in many particular, a way of defending tradition always of doing things, the

wisdom of people in the countryside and the roots of modern really anti-democratic populism, also, i think lie in the age of revolutions but in the french context. >> host: and that happened just a couple of years after ours concluded. >> guest: it did. >> host: so were there a lot of influences? >> guest: incredible number. jefferson helped write the declaration of the rights of man and citizen, the great document that flames the revolution. -- frames the revolution. lafayette becomes the head of the national guard. why? because he's the hero of the american revolution. and, of course, the real reason the french have a financial crisis to begin with is it costs so much to participate in the american revolution about 15 years earlier. so the french revolution, in some sense, is inconceivable without the american revolution. not that it went the same direction. plenty of differences between the two. but one of the fascinating things about teaching them

together or thinking about them together is figuring out how deeply interwoven the ideas, the finances, even the military aspects of these two revolutions were. >> host: professor rosenfeld, do you include any examples of uncommon sense? nonsensical? >> guest: i do. there's a final section on the politics of dada which would seem quite far afield, dada being this international artistic movement of the first half of the 20th century between the two world wars. took really the approach that it, common sense had gotten us nowhere. common sense had gotten us to the first world war, mass destruction, and it was time that we considered the possibilities of undoing common sense. and i'm fascinated by the idea that much of the artistic avant-garde literary paintings,

movies of the 20th century is focused on challenging common sense, figuring out what attention to the surreal, the nonsensical, the absurd as a kind of response to politics of common sense that ended, you might say, in the 20th century with an awful lot of deeply destructive events. >> host: now, your book "common sense: a political history" is published by harvard. >> guest: yeah. >> host: why? >> guest: that's a good question. harvard does wonderful books that, i think, straddle this realm between the academic and the trade. really trying to reach a broader audience with intelligent, serious books and marketing them as such. and it's hope that many of their publications will fill this particular space in which they can be read by university audiences whether they be students or other faculty.

but also, ideally, make some sort of dent in public discourse. and reach a readership who's interested in ideas and politics. and harvard was willing to situate this book in that space, and i hope that's what will happen. >> host: what's your background? where were you raised, who are your parents. >> guest: well, that's okay. i was born in new york city, i grew up in if northern new jersey, a little town called leonia, and grew up with parents who were in the arts. my father was a cellist, now retired. a mother who was an editor. and i went to university of princeton and then graduate school at harvard and ended up about 14 or 15 years ago here in charlottesville where i've been teaching european history and atlantic history really ever since. >> host: what's life like at uva?

>> guest: it's actually a wonderful place to teach, particularly about the 18th century as you might imagine. the students are excellent. it's, you know, as you've probably seen a beautiful place to live. and it's an interesting place insofar as it's something that occupies a space between a big state public university and a smaller liberal arts school, something like an ivy league school. it's an interesting amalgam of the two. kind of public/private, in-state/out-of-state, and the quality of life here is enhanced, certainly, by there being a number of professional schools too, especially a law school filled with really interesting people. so i've been very happy being here. >> host: tenured? >> guest: yes. >> host: as a tenured professor are you pressured is probably the wrong word, but are you encouraged to write and to publish books such as "common

sense"? >> guest: absolutely. there's not a sense that if you don't write a book this year, you'll lose your job tomorrow. we have enormous privilege of job security. but there's a strong sense this is a research university, that teaching and research go together, that the way you provide your students with interesting courses is by being simultaneously engaged always in some kind of research and writing project. so almost all my colleagues are always somewhere in the process of writing books and articles. pressure might not be the right word after a while, but it just becomes what you do. >> host: were there any legalities in the using, in naming a book "common sense"? >> guest: i don't know. i hadn't thought of that really. i hope i don't discover that after the fact. [laughter] there are legalities, certainly, in publishing some of the images in the book. that's always the case. but "common sense" is not a copyrighted term, it's part of

our vocabulary. in fact, it's a common senseical part of our vocabulary. if you go to amazon and type in common sense, you'll see there's the common sense of investing, the common sense of, you know, reseeding your backyard. there's a common sense for everything. >> host: second book? >> guest: this is my second book, yes. >> host: and, sophia rosenfeld, professor at the university of virginia and author of "common sense: a political history" has joined us here on booktv. >> we'd like to hear from you. tweet us your feedback. twitter.com/booktv. >> host: nathan hodge is the author of "armed humanitarians: the rise of the nation builders." mr. hodge, define nation building. >> guest: it's one of those tricky terms that nobody wants to own, and that's one of the reasons i chose to write about

it. i'm using it in the way that people like george w. bush, barack obama or even dave petraeus would have used it which is this is a way of describing this kind of mission of armed nation building that we're involved in. it's been described in some ways as armed social work. and i'm trying to really tribe this phenomenon to the ordinary reader who might have this idea when they look at the news and they see lots of what journalists call the bang bang from places like iraq and afghanistan and show them another picture of what goes on, the sort of three cups of tea side of the war, that is what the military calls the nonkinetic side of things. and what i really wanted to get at was the experience of people who are really kind of getting their hands dirty doing these kinds of things; rebuilding schools, digging wells, building roads. fundamentally nonmilitary missions in places like iraq and afghanistan. >> host: so is the u.s. military currently building schools, building roads, doing nonmilitary functions?

>> guest: you'd be surprised to see the extent to which they've embraced that mission especially in places like afghanistan where it's kind of a cornerstone of the exit strategy, creating a capable local government that's actually capable of delivering things like, you know, criminal justice. the big concern in a place like afghanistan is that the taliban could outgovern the coalition, so that's really where civilians who have nonmilitary expertise need to be able to step in. >> host: where did the termination building come from? >> guest: it's one of those terms, again, it's kind of wooly, it's sort of very unsatisfying term. precisely why i wanted to dig into it because back in the 1990s there was a lot of hand wringing sort of within the national security set that the u.s. military was too tied down in nation building. and, in fact, when he was running for office in 2000 george w. bush said he didn't believe that we needed a nation building cadre, that the u.s. military shouldn't be involved in this kind of thing. by the end of his term, he'd embraced it to the extent to

which he'd even called for the creation of sort of a civilian nation-building response corps in his state of the union address. so it was really a dramatic turn around, and in part it was just because this kind of sort of armed humanitarianism was seen as a way of getting out of the mess that we had gotten into in iraq. >> host: how is it that nation building became a political term where george w. bush in 2000 said we're not, we don't nation build? >> guest: right. or barack obama in december of 2009 saying that hen't wanted -- he wanted to send more troops to afghanistan but with the caveat that the nation he wanted to build was our own. you know, nation building in some circles is kind of a dirty word, you know? it's sort of, it's not what the military's supposed to be doing. they're supposed to be training for this force-on-force conflict, the kind of conflict in a lot of ways that the military trains and equips around and, in some ways, i'd say, pines for in a way because

it's simple, it's direct. your opponent wears a uniform. they've got formations that you can count. this is a lot more difficult, and it involves-and-a-half dating a lot of -- navigating linguistic barriers, trying to get at these problems has proven a lot harder in practice than it is in theory. >> host: so what's been the reaction of the pentagon to it new role? >> guest: interesting, you see some of the more recent remarks by secretary of defense robert gates. he talks a little bit about his worries that the military could become this sort of 19th century victorian constabulary. it's not at that point yet, but the military is trying to master a lot of those chores, those sort of fundamental nation-building tasks. but there's a worry, i think, within the military establishment that the pendulum may have swung too far in that direction. that there's a need to kind of go back and concentrate on the basics, the fundamentals, get back to, you know, sending tank rounds down range, that kind of thing. but there's, there's a reasonable argument behind that

which is that these fundamentally are not military missions. i mean, these are missions for the development, agencies of development, they're there for diplomats. part of the problem is that diplomats, aid workers aren't necessarily trained to operate in the kind of, you know, hostile environment where, basically, they're doing development work while being shot at. and there's been this sort of difficult transformation for agencies like usaid to try to send people who are sort of built around, you know, the embassy. that's the be-all of these organizations and get people to be willing to go out and volunteer, you know, on the sort of frontier in afghanistan, for instance. >> host: so, nathan hodge, does this diminish the role of the state department in our foreign policy? >> guest: well, really what i try to raise in the book is there's kind of a fundamental disconnect between the ambition, that is to send these sort of -- you know, put more wingtips on the ground, so to speak, and the

ability of, you know, agencies like the state department to do it. it's a simple matter of math. the department of defense at this point spends somewhere north of around $700 billion a year. it's got -- just look at the japan relief operations that are going on right now. they've got the personnel, the equipment and the training to get to places in a hurry. i saw it, and i describe it a little bit in the book with the haiti relief operations from the military side as well. and part of the effort underway, and it's sort of put into bureaucrat speak, is we need to get these diplomats to get out there, and we'll all be together jostling along in the back of a humvee going to drinking three cups of tea with an elder. what happens if you're getting shot at along the way? it's not as simple as that. >> host: has it been an effective foreign policy tool? >> guest: i would argue that it sends mixed messages about who we are as a nation. >> host: is that where armed humanitarians comes from? >> guest: yeah. it's meant to be, you know, it's

a con to diction. and -- contradiction. and it sends a signal, you know, for instance, if we're talking about in parts of the developing world that we think an important principle of civilian control is the military, yet it's our military people who are doing it, who are doing the training, it says something a little bit interesting about kind of who we are. and i worry as well, especially when it comes to operating in places like this, that we adopt a little bit of kind of a fortress america mindset. i talk a lot in part about what they call force protection in the military. and inevitably, sometimes that ends up putting -- because of the risk in some of these situations -- putting barriers between you and the people you're trying to reach out to and help. >> host: you've referenced greg mortenson, three cups of tea, a couple times. you also reference thomas barnett. who is he? >> guest: in a lot of ways, he's the guy who's best known for

"the pentagon's new map." he in the early 2000s kind of captured the zeitgeist of the department of defense and had a couple famous powerpoint briefings that he would go out and deliver to military audiences which explained how the post-9/11 world had shifted. but i drilled a little bit more into sort of what he was arguing, and part of what he was also getting at was that there needed to be something like kind of a nation-building cadre available and ready on call to address what he called these gap states, these failing states. i think e called it the -- i think he called it the fifth advent force. and his idea was you've got the leviathan, the army, you know, the big forces that go in this and kind of do regime change fundamentally. they go knock over, you know, nations if called on to do so. but then you need people who are on call, and they're kind of a mix of diplomat, aid worker, boy scout, u.s. marine, you know, kind of this mishmash of different things.

but he was one of the early people who kind of articulated it in a lot of ways and tried to explain what the new reality was to people in the department of defense. so he's a character, deft, in the book. -- definitely, in the book. >> host: how does the center for new american security play into your book? >> guest: well, they became the locus of the -- they sort of became the home for the counterinsurgency set. really the counterinsurgents in washington started as insurgents in a lot of ways. it was a rebellion by the rank and file within the military establishment. an intellectual rebellion, not anything more than that, by people who had experienced, you know, their first tours in if iraq and afghanistan and came back and were groping, you know, intellectually for answers as to why the u.s. military was failing. why were we losing in iraq? and they reached back, and they found sort of these intellectual antisee departments and, for instance, french counterinsurgency theory that