Politics as a Plural Noun

Abstract: Since the beginnings of the professional historical writing, scholars who call themselves historians of politics have defined their field narrowly, as the history of electoral politics, political parties, and state actors. Over the same long period, a rich and growing body of scholarship has implicitly challenged this Procrustean understanding of public life. With notable exceptions, however, most of this latter work has defined itself as something other than “political history,” attaching itself to fields like social history, the history of reform, or the history of the public sphere. This bifurcation has been particularly pronounced in the scholarship on the early American republic. The essays in this forum challenge this siloing of the past, framing a variety of grass-roots public activities in the early republic as interventions in “politics” and governance. Following and extending the logic of the essays, these comments call for redefining what counts as “political,” urging scholars of public life to think of politics as an expansive and endlessly varied category of human endeavor that engaged the energies of the enfranchised and the disenfranchised alike.They also consider how such a reconception affects the coherence of the field of political history. Acknowledging the plurality of politics tends to fragment the field; still, a fragmented political sphere was and remains tied together by debate, common concerns, and overlapping struggles to win the support of the state and a broader public. As they explore the multiplicity of politics, historians can and should pay close attention to the tissue that connects them.