Invisible Sovereign: Imagining Public Opinion from the Revolution to Reconstruction Contributor(s): Schmeller, Mark G. (Author) |
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ISBN: 1421418703 ISBN-13: 9781421418704 Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press OUR PRICE: $49.40 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: March 2016 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - History | United States - 19th Century - History | United States - Revolutionary Period (1775-1800) - History | United States - Civil War Period (1850-1877) |
Dewey: 303.380 |
LCCN: 2015014321 |
Series: New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History |
Physical Information: 0.8" H x 6.2" W x 9.1" (1.00 lbs) 256 pages |
Themes: - Chronological Period - 19th Century - Chronological Period - 18th Century - Chronological Period - 1851-1899 - Topical - Civil War |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: In the early American republic, the concept of public opinion was a recent--and ambiguous--invention. While appearing to promise a new style and system of democratic and deliberative politics, the concept was also invoked to limit self-rule, cement traditional prejudices and hierarchies, forestall deliberation, and marginalize dissent. As Americans contested the meaning of this essentially contestable idea, they expanded and contracted the horizons of political possibility and renegotiated the terms of political legitimacy. Tracing the notion of public opinion from its late eighteenth-century origins to the Gilded Age, Mark G. Schmeller's Invisible Sovereign argues that public opinion is a central catalyst in the history of American political thought. Schmeller treats it as a contagious idea that infected a broad range of discourses and practices in powerful, occasionally ironic, and increasingly contentious ways. Ranging across a wide variety of historical fields, Invisible Sovereign traces a shift over time from early "political-constitutional" concepts, which identified public opinion with a sovereign people and wrapped it in the language of constitutionalism, to more modern, "social-psychological" concepts, which defined public opinion as a product of social action and mass communication. |