In the years following the election of Donald Trump-a victory that hinged on the votes of white Midwesterners who were both geographically and culturally distant from the media-s coastal concentrations-there has been a flurry of investigation into the politics of the so-called -common man.- The notion that the salt-of-the-earth purity implied by this appellation is best understood by conservative politicians is no recent development, though. As Antti Lepistö shows in his timely and erudite book, the intellectual wellsprings of conservative -common sense- discourse are both older and more transnational than has been thought. In considering the luminaries of American neoconservative thought-among them Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, James Q. Wilson, and Francis Fukuyama-Lepistö argues that the centrality of their conception of the common man accounts for the enduring power and influence of their thought. Intriguingly, Lepistö locates the roots of this conception in the eighteenth-ce
