Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic
Deliberation, in recent years, has emerged as a form of civic engagement worth reclaiming. In this persuasive book, Sandra M. Gustafson combines historical literary analysis and political theory in order to demonstrate that current democratic practices of deliberation are rooted in the civic rhetoric that flourished in the early American republic.
Though the U.S. Constitution made deliberation central to republican self-governance, the ethical emphasis on group deliberation often conflicted with the rhetorical focus on persuasive speech. From Alexis de Tocqueville’s ideas about the deliberative basis of American democracy through the works of Walt Whitman, John Dewey, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., Gustafson shows how writers and speakers have made the aesthetic and political possibilities of deliberation central to their autobiographies, manifestos, novels, and orations. Examining seven key writers from the early American republic—including James Fenimore Cooper, David Crockett, and Daniel Webster—whose works of deliberative imagination explored the intersections of style and democratic substance, Gustafson offers a mode of historical and textual analysis that displays the wide range of resources imaginative language can contribute to political life.
“Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic is an ambitious and critically innovative account of the social and participatory life of politics in the early nineteenth century. Sandra M. Gustafson offers a profoundly suggestive look at how the values of classical republicanism—and the culture of deliberation it inspired—could be retained within and adapted to popular democracy. The book provides a compelling account of the links between literary expression, rhetoric, and republican style in the period, while richly exploring how the experience of literature itself could promote a democratic ethics of deliberation. Gustafson's brilliant readings powerfully resonate with the concerns of political theorists today who ask whether or not social justice can be served by the pragmatic work and procedures of democratic institutions. This is an important and original book.”
“With characteristic depth and range, Gustafson accomplishes a major rethinking of the very meaning of democracy in early nineteenth-century American culture. The book synthesizes an incredible array of political theory and praxis, and it will prove to be a major study in the field, one that will immediately affect our own deliberations about democratic culture.”
“Boldly interweaving literary and political history, Sandra Gustafson explores the roots of American pragmatism in the discourse and practice of democratic deliberation in the early republic. Stressing the irreconcilability of absolutist imperatives and deliberative self-governance, she offers both a perspective on the past and an admonition for the future. This will be an important book for literary scholars, political theorists, and American historians alike.”
“This timely book traces and attempts thereby to resuscitate the centrality of deliberative dynamics to American political and cultural life. . . . The great strengths of this book are the comprehensiveness and nuance of Gustafson’s analysis and the relevance of her project to a nation poised, then as now, on the brink of an ideological abyss; her final chapter constructs a reading praxis wherein textual representations of debate and deliberation serve to constitute a readerly subjectivity open to the experiences and needs of diverse populations—one from which all Americans, not just literary scholars and historians, can benefit. Highly recommended.”
“Sandra Gustafson’s book Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic is a fascinating, careful, and lucid portrait of deliberative democracy in the period 1800-39.”
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One: Deliberation: A Very Brief History
i. The Idea of Deliberation
ii. Deliberation and Democracy in the Early American Republic
iii. Whitman, Dewey, and the Place of the Arts
iv. Theories of Republicanism and Deliberative Democracy
Chapter Two: Modern Republicanism in the Atlantic World
i. The Eloquence of Modern Republicanism
ii. The View from Bunker Hill
iii. Writing the Modern Republic
Chapter Three: Models of Ancient Eloquence
i. Res Publica Rediviva
ii. Eloquent Shakespeare
iii. Arguing with the Bible
Chapter Four: The Politics and Aesthetics of Deliberation
i. The Rise of Literary Oratory
ii. Daniel Webster’s Genuine Word
iii. The Frontier Humor of David Crockett
Chapter Five: Prophesying the Multiracial Republic
i. Democracy and the “Three Races”
ii. Beyond the White Christian Republic
iii. Reasoning with David Walker
iv. Listening to the Wisdom of Babes
v. Toward Multiracial Deliberations
Chapter Six: Deliberative Fictions
i. Failures of Deliberation
ii. Cooper’s Trials
Chapter Seven: How to Read Deliberatively
i. Democratic Hermeneutics
ii. The Great American Deliberative Novel
iii. Protest at Mashpee
iv. Property Matters
Conclusion: Deliberative Democracy Past and Future
Notes
History: American History
Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature
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