Introduction: on studying stories of peoplehood; Part I. Explaining the Political Role of Stories of Peoplehood: 1. Elements of a theory of people-making; 2. The role of ethically constitutive stories; Part II. Constructing Political Peoplehood in Morally Defensible Ways: 3. Ethically constitutive stories and norms of allegiance; 4. A pioneering people.
Assesses the role of 'stories of peoplehood' in building and binding political societies.
Rogers M. Smith is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published over seventy articles and is author or co-author of the following books: The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America (with Philip A. Klinkner, 1990); Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (1997); Citizenship without Consent: The Illegal Alien in the American Polity (with Peter H. Schuck, 1985); and Liberalism and American Constitutional Law (1985, rev. ed. 1990).
'Rogers Smith's fresh and incisive intervention in debates about national solidarity exemplifies the combination of historical depth and theoretical acuity that have made Smith one of the most respected and influential political scientists of his generation.' David A. Hollinger, University of California, Berkeley, author of Postethnic America 'Rogers M. Smith is the most original political scientist of his generation. His previous scholarship has transformed understanding of the American political tradition. In Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership, Professor Smith achieves a comparable revision of the idea of nationalist sentiment. In a book of formidable erudition and learning, Smith succeeds brilliantly in reviewing the vast literature on nationalism, reformulating it into a highly innovative and important thesis about peoplehood and demonstrating the analytical purchase of the derived 'ethically constitutive stories' as an approach to building better societies. Written in elegant prose, Smith's argument is illustrated with a dazzling array of examples, historical and contemporary, imagined and real. Many social scientists declaim the need for scholarship engaged with real political and social problems but few succeed as impressively as Rogers Smith does here. This is political science for our times, applying rigorous analysis to compelling moral challenges. I cannot recommend the book too strongly to social scientists, political theorists and historians. Desmond S. King, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of American Government, University of Oxford
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