| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 133.1

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| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 133.1 | The History Cooperative

BOOK REVIEWS

For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s. By Ronald P. Formisano. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. viii, 315 pp. Notes, index. $35.)
Ever since popular sovereignty replaced parliamentary sovereignty, citizens have contested its implications. Popular sovereignty meant that the people retained power, limited only by its possessors' choice not to wield it. It potentially justified citizens' perpetual, direct intervention in public affairs, and the people used their unlimited power to ratify hard-to-amend constitutions. As a result, subsequent behavior would be measured against these constitutions. Temporary majorities, no matter how large, were not "the people" and could not violate the people's will as represented in their constitutional statements.	1
Formisano argues that populism was the result of the constraint of the democratic conception of popular sovereignty. Populist movements arose when groups believed that their republican values and institutions were threatened. Populists hoped to use their sovereignty to alter conditions so that the requirements for citizenship—defined differently by various movements—were available to those they considered to be citizens.	. . .

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