eBook - ePub

Invisible Sovereign

Name: Invisible Sovereign
ISBN: 9781421418711

Imagining Public Opinion from the Revolution to Reconstruction

Mark G. Schmeller,

English
ePUB (mobile friendly)
Available on iOS & Android

eBook - ePub

Invisible Sovereign

Imagining Public Opinion from the Revolution to Reconstruction

Mark G. Schmeller,

About this book

How has the idea of public opinion changed since the Revolutionary War—and how has it shaped the nation?

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.

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Yes, you can access Invisible Sovereign by Mark G. Schmeller in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & American Civil War History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.