Abstract
Political Peoplehood: The Roles of Values, Interests, and Identities synthesizes decades of Rogers Smith’s work, bringing together the political scientist’s ideas in a collection of some new chapters and some chapters based on previous work. It focuses on setting forth Smith’s concept of “political peoplehood” and related “stories of peoplehood.” Political peoplehood is the notion that social groups who have shared narratives and demand allegiance from their constituents are key political entities and can be understood through their stories of peoplehood. Stories of peoplehood are narratives that tie a group together and describe the type of future to which they aspire. Smith uses qualitative evidence, much of it from secondary sources, to elaborate and support his theories. For example, Smith draws on historical documents and politicians’ speeches to show how stories of political peoplehood are told, and why they are, or are not, successful.
In the first chapter, Smith lays out his “political spiral,” which is a six-stage “hypothesis about how politics generally work” (p. 32). This book focuses primarily on the spiral’s second stage: the formation of ideas, interests, and goals—or, in other words, the building of political peoplehood via stories of peoplehood. As Smith says in the second chapter, these stories use constitutive themes (based on shared characteristics, such as religion and race/ethnicity)—as well as economic and political power themes—to bring a group of individuals together and build them into a political people with shared narratives, interests, and goals.
The rest of the book uses Smith’s notions of peoplehood to shed light on political processes and illustrates how political peoplehood has operated throughout American history. Whereas the first two parts of the book are descriptive, setting forth theories (Part 1) and showing how they illuminate American history (Part 2), the third part of the book is prescriptive. In this final normative section, Smith argues for “moderate peoplehood,” which, in essence, is a critique of tribalism, a call for the recognition of people’s multiple, overlapping group identities, and a problematization of groups that demand absolute allegiance from their members. At the risk of oversimplification, the author is concerned about in-group vs. out-group conflict and suggests ways to ameliorate it.
Scholars of politics, social movements, social history, and group identities should find this book useful. Political Peoplehood would probably be most appropriate for graduate courses in political sociology and related topics, but it could also work in a seminar with advanced undergraduates.