Description: An intelligent, engaging, and in-depth reading of the nature of the state and the establishment of the modern political order in the mid-nineteenth century.
Previous studies have covered in great detail how the modern state slowly emerged from the early Renaissance through the seventeenth century, but we know relatively little about the next great act: the birth and transformation of the modern democratic state. And in an era where our democratic institutions are rife with conflict, it's more important now than ever to understand how our institutions came into being. Stephen W. Sawyer's Demos Assembled provides us with a fresh, transatlantic understanding of that political order's genesis. While the French influence on American political development is well understood, Sawyer sheds new light on the subsequent reciprocal influence that American thinkers and politicians had on the establishment of post-revolutionary regimes in France. He argues that the emergence of the stable Third Republic (1870-1940), which is typically said to have been driven by idiosyncratic internal factors, was in fact a deeply transnational, dynamic phenomenon. Sawyer's findings reach beyond their historical moment, speaking broadly to conceptions of state formation: how contingent claims to authority, whether grounded in violence or appeals to reason and common cause, take form as stateness.Brief description: Stephen W. Sawyer is Ballantine-Leavitt Professor of History, cofounder of the History, Law, and Society Program, and director of the Center for Critical Democracy Studies at the American University of Paris. He is editor of the Tocqueville Review and associate editor of the Annales. History and Social Sciences.
Review Quotes: "An engaging, insightful, and lucid book that is likely to make a significant contribution to a number of fields. The unique way Sawyer combines a critical history of French democratic thought with an engagement with the broader literature on the democratic state and a deep knowledge of the practical questions posed by the advent of democracy in nineteenth-century France are what make Demos Assembled both important and original."-- "Michael C. Behrent, Appalachian State University"