Mark G Schmeller

Invisible Sovereign

Imagining Public Opinion from the Revolution to Reconstruction

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

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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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Seitenzahl: 256
• Erscheinungstermin: 15. Februar 2016
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 231mm x 157mm x 20mm
• Gewicht: 454g
• ISBN-13: 9781421418704
• ISBN-10: 1421418703
• Artikelnr.: 44026052

Autorenporträt

Mark G. Schmeller is an associate professor of history at Syracuse University.