In this work of historically informed political theory, Kimberly
Smith sets out to understand how nineteenth-century Americans
answered the question of how the people should participate in
politics. Did rational public debate, the ideal that most
democratic theorists now venerate, transcend all other forms of
political expression? How and why did passion disappear from the
ideology (if not the practice) of American democracy? To answer
these questions, she focuses on the political culture of the urban
North during the turbulent Jacksonian Age, roughly 1830-50, when
the shape and character of the democratic public were still fluid.
Smith's method is to interpret, in light of such popular
discourse as newspapers and novels, several key texts in
nineteenth-century American political thought: Frederick Douglass's
Fourth of July speech and Narrative, Angelina Grimke's debate with
Catharine Beecher, Frances Wright's lectures, and Harriet Beecher
Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Such texts, Smith finds, highlight many
of the then-current ideas about the extremes of political
expression. Her readings support the conclusions that the value of
rational argument itself was contested, that the emergent
Enlightenment rationalism may have helped to sterilize political
debate, and that storytelling or testimony posed an important
challenge to the norm of political rationality.
Smith explores facets of the political culture in ways that make
sense of traditions from Whiggish resistance to Protestant
narrative testimony. She helps us to understand such puzzles as the
point of mob action and other ritualistic disruptions of the
political process, our simultaneous attraction to and suspicion of
politicaldebates, and the appeal of stories by and about victims of
injustice. Also found in her book are keen analyses of the
antebellum press and the importance of oratory and public
speaking.
Smith shows that alternatives to reasoned deliberation -- like
protest, resistance, and storytelling -- have a place in politics.
Such alternatives underscore the positive role that interest,
passion, compassion, and even violence might play in the political
life of America. Her book, therefore, is a cautionary analysis of
how rationality came to dominate our thinking about politics and
why its hegemony should concern us. Ultimately Smith reminds the
reader that democracy and reasoned public debate are not synonymous
and that the linkage is not necessarily a good thing.
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