Commons Democracy: Reading the Politics of Participation in the Early United States

by Dana D. Nelson

Overview

Commons Democracy highlights a poorly understood dimension of democracy in the early United States. It tells a story that, like the familiar one, begins in the Revolutionary era. But instead of the tale of the Founders’ high-minded ideals and their careful crafting of the safe framework for democracy—a representative republican government—Commons Democracy examines the power of the democratic spirit, the ideals and practices of everyday people in the early nation. As Dana D. Nelson reveals in this illuminating work, the sensibility of participatory democratic activity fueled the involvement of ordinary folk in resistance, revolution, state constitution-making, and early national civic dissent. The rich variety of commoning customs and practices in the late colonies offered non-elite actors a tangible and durable relationship to democratic power, one significantly different from the representative democracy that would be institutionalized by the Framers in 1787. This democracy understood political power and liberties as communal, not individual.

Ordinary folk practiced a democracy that was robustly participatory and insistently local. To help tell this story, Nelson turns to early American authors—Hugh Henry Brackenridge, James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Montgomery Bird, and Caroline Kirkland—who were engaged with conflicts that emerged from competing ideals of democracy in the early republic, such as the Whiskey Rebellion and the Anti-Rent War as well as the enclosure of the legal commons, anxieties about popular suffrage, and practices of frontier equalitarianism. While Commons Democracy is about the capture of “democracy” for the official purposes of state consolidation and expansion, it is also a story about the ongoing (if occluded) vitality of commons democracy, of its power as part of our shared democratic history and its usefulness in the contemporary toolkit of citizenship.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823268405
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	12/15/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	232
File size:	962 KB

About the Author

Dana D. Nelson is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People and National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men.

Table of Contents

Commons Democracy: An Introduction

One. Telling Stories: Vernacular versus Formal Democracy

Two. Between Savagery and Civilization: The Whiskey Rebellion and a Democratic Middle Way

Three. The Privatizing State: The Pioneers and the Closing of the Legal Commons

Four. Settler Self-Governance: Democratic Politics on the Frontier

Five. From Nothing to Start, Into Being: The Anti-Rent Wars, the Indian Question, and the Triumph of Liberalism

Conclusion: "The Wayward Multitudinous People

Editorial Reviews

"Commons Democracy is an exhilarating and compelling account of early U.S. forms of participatory democracy that have largely disappeared from critical view behind the shadow of the dominant account of the Founders' creation of formal electoral democracy."—Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Northwestern University

"Nelson focuses in this book on a dynamic aspect of U.S. history, one that is already quite relevant in our own time and that promises to be increasingly so in the future."—John Ernest, University of Delaware

"An important contribution, at a vital moment, to renewing appreciation of democracy as the awkward practice of sharing power to shape common existence."—Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley

"Nelson's powerful rereading of the early republic's literary tradition is not just about getting the past right. She hopes that her depiction of the post-Revolutionary United States will help move us beyond what Garrett Hardin called the "Tragedy of the Commons" in 1968."—Journal of Social History

"Nelson's Commons Democracy deserves the attention of a wide range of early republic scholars, especially those interested in literature, democracy, and the political practices of ordinary Americans. This vigorously argued book offers a coherent paradigm for understanding an important part of the early American democratic tradition. The field would do well to run with Nelson's framework and explore the full range of commons democracy in the early republic."—Reviews in History

From the Publisher

...not only is Dana Nelson's field unexpected but so is her creative and welcome approach to studying early American democracy, that is, through the lens of literary texts, with most of them, in fact, critical of that to which they gave voice. Her use of literature to explore that which otherwise might go unobserved is something sorely and long needed...

Early American Literature

...highly recommended as an initial foray for students—especially at the undergraduate level—into the thickets of the American novel’s reception of the political system in the Early Republic.

Amerikastudien / American Studies

An important contribution, at a vital moment, to renewing appreciation of democracy as the awkward practice of sharing power to shape common existence.

University of California, Berkeley - Wendy Brown

Commons Democracy is an exhilarating and compelling account of early U.S. forms of participatory democracy that have largely disappeared from critical view behind the shadow of the dominant account of the Founders’ creation of formal electoral democracy.

Northeastern University - Elizabeth Maddock Dillon

Nelson focuses in this book on a dynamic aspect of U.S. history, one that is already quite relevant in our own time and that promises to be increasingly so in the future.

University of Delaware - John Ernest