18th century
19th century
A01=Mark G. Schmeller
Author_Mark G. Schmeller
Category=JPWA
Category=N
Category=NHK
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
political thought
public opinion
United States history
Product details
- ISBN 9781421418704
- Weight: 476g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 11 Apr 2016
- Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
Mark G. Schmeller is an associate professor of history at Syracuse University.
