Invisible Sovereign: Imagining Public Opinion from the Revolution to Reconstruction (New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History)

This history of early American political thought examines the emergence, evolution, and manipulation of public opinion. In the early American republic, the concept of public opinion was a recent--and ambiguous--invention. While appearing to promise a new style of democratic politics, the concept was also invoked to limit self-rule, cement traditional prejudices, stall 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 concept 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 wrapped pubic opinion in the language of constitutionalism, to more modern, "social-psychological" concepts, which defined public opinion as a product of social action and mass communication. 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. How has the idea of public opinion changed since the Revolutionary Warand how has it shaped the nation? In the early American republic, the concept of public opinion was a recentand ambiguousinvention. 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. Schmellers 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.

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.

"Even today, with sophisticated surveys and computer-produced margins of error, we have trouble gauging the elusive voice we call 'public opinion, ' but no one questions its importance in a democracy. In this insightful new study, Mark G. Schmeller sets out to recreate or approximate the nature of public opinion between independence and the aftermath of Civil War and also examine what leading Americans thought about it. Where could one detect it? How might attitudes toward it, in the abstract and concrete, have changed in this eventful period? 'As Americans contested the meaning of this essentially contestable concept, ' Schmeller explains, 'they expanded and contracted the horizons of political possibility and renegotiated the terms of political legitimacy.' He argues that what began life as something close to exceptionally American republican thought (and in a sense unchanging) became something far more malleable and subject to manipulation by means of stump-speech rhetoric, partisan newspapers, trumpeting of the importance of the self in the nineteenth century, etc. Crossing into so many discrete fields of historical research, this project has much potential as a synthesizing meta-narrative"-- Résumé de l'éditeur "Even today, with sophisticated surveys and computer-produced margins of error, we have trouble gauging the elusive voice we call 'public opinion, ' but no one questions its importance in a democracy. In this insightful new study, Mark G. Schmeller sets out to recreate or approximate the nature of public opinion between independence and the aftermath of Civil War and also examine what leading Americans thought about it. Where could one detect it? How might attitudes toward it, in the abstract and concrete, have changed in this eventful period? 'As Americans contested the meaning of this essentially contestable concept, ' Schmeller explains, 'they expanded and contracted the horizons of political possibility and renegotiated the terms of political legitimacy.' He argues that what began life as something close to exceptionally American republican thought (and in a sense unchanging) became something far more malleable and subject to manipulation by means of stump-speech rhetoric, partisan newspapers, trumpeting of the importance of the self in the nineteenth century, etc. Crossing into so many discrete fields of historical research, this project has much potential as a synthesizing meta-narrative"-- Provided by publisher