Book Review

This erudite book by a historically well informed political scientist challenges and historicizes the assumption that democracy and rational argument necessarily imply one another and that reasoned debate defines a democratic polity. Instead, Kimberly K. Smith argues that from the American Revolution to the late antebellum years a crucial transition occurred in which passion, loyalty, courage, and violence (mob actions and riots) became devalued and marginalized from a public sphere in which multiple discourses had contested and coexisted with rational argument.	1
Smith begins by examining the spectrum of attitudes toward mob actions and riots during the eighteenth century. The political elite, with some dissenters, gradually rejected autonomous popular eruptions, relegating them "to the category of violence (irrational, passionate, and 'blind'), thus obscuring both the expressive and instrumental dimensions of riots and the role of passion and violence in politics." Out of the Revolution emerged a vision of democracy as a "realm of nonviolent, rational interaction represented by the practice of public argument."	2
In developing the argument that this ideal took hold during the antebellum era, Smith revises Paul Gilje and other historians who attribute the decline of traditional popular rioting to the triumph of middle-class values and concern for property rights. From this vantage point, Smith offers new insights on the emergence of urban police forces, as well as several related topics.	. . .