Commons Democracy: Reading the Politics of Participation in the Early United States by Dana D. Nelson (review)

The discipline of history, argues James Turner, emerged to provide context necessary to understand texts, especially classical and Biblical ones. Over time, history became a discipline with its own content and practices.¹ In Commons Democracy, Dana Nelson, a literary scholar, uses history in its philological manner, providing a new context to make sense of the novels of the early republic by rereading them in light of recent historiography. She offers a thoughtful reappraisal of how early novelists understood American democracy. In some ways, this is an odd book to review in this journal since Nelson's source material is not the stuff of social history. But Nelson's questions, and the insights Nelson mines from her sources, are valuable to historians interested in the political practices of ordinary Americans.

At the heart of her argument is the idea of "commons democracy." Invoking E. P. Thompson, Nelson argues that European settlers brought with them vernacular customs that predated the American Revolution and continued to inform political life after it. They participated in political commons where they contributed to and benefited from each other's efforts. "Commons are produced, regulated, and maintained both in and as local vernaculars," Nelson writes (6). They are sustained not by norms alone but require "daily practice" (7). As Nelson underscores, recent historical scholarship has helped uncover those practices. She builds on scholars who have studied plebian traditions, popular constitutionalism, and rural protest to illuminate how early American novels sought to make sense of these traditions.

Her story begins with Andrew the Hebridian, a character in J. Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer. Andrew the Hebridian is usually used to demonstrate the transformation of European peasants into Americans who own their own labor. But, Nelson points out, Crèvecoeour goes out of his way to show that Andrew the Hebridian's immigrant success story was possible because he lived in a community that chose to provide time and energy to help him succeed, most notably by helping him build his house. He was not the self-made individual but the individual embedded in a "commonwealth formed in communal labor" (2). Americans' collective practices were threatened by liberalism, which emphasized individual rights, property ownership, and self-interest, Nelson argues. Although her depiction of liberalism is thin, her discussion of commons democracy, both historical and literary, is rich and delightful.

The first major text to be discussed is Hugh Henry Brackenridge's multivolume Modern Chivalry. Often read as an elite dismissal of ordinary citizens, Nelson argues that Brackenridge sought a "middle way" (Brackenridge's phrase) between the formal institutions of liberal government and the less predictable actions of the people out of doors. Modern Chivalry emerges as a nuanced discussion about the virtues and vices of elite and ordinary politics. To Brackenridge, ordinary citizens could be rash, ignorant, and impulsive, but distant elites' rules lacked local context and legitimacy and often placed elite interests over popular ones, a lesson he learned by trying to mediate between the crowd and elites during the Whiskey Rebellion. "By locating political power neither in citizens nor institutions but in representation itself," Nelson concludes, Brackenridge "advocates for a practice of political representation far more broadly and complexly conceived than that made possible by the simple process of election." In Nelson's depiction, Brackenridge's political theory is one in which elite formalism needs to be disrupted from time to time by outbursts from below. Ordinary Americans appear as merry pranksters who insert "chaotic human variety into what, at the Federal level, always threatens to become an abstractly thin representation of the polity" (83).

Further chapters develop these themes. James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers is less about rugged individualism than the erosion of plebian customs. Nelson argues that frontiersman Natty Bumppo did not celebrate individualism nor rights but a prior set of norms governing the allocation of...