Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic

Gustafson Sandra M.

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.

Reviews

"'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" – Elisa Tamarkin, University of California, Berkeley

"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" – Philip Gould, Brown University

"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" – John Brooke, Ohio State University

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