Diversity and Conflict

Further to yesterday's thoughts on post-revolutionary instability, here is Carroll Smith-Rosenberg (who, by the way, wrote an article that I found moving when I read it for a seminar on gender history last year, "The Female World of Love and Ritual," Signs, 1975):

Diversity and conflict existed not only on the demographic and economic register, but on the discursive plane as well... [In the new republic there were] multiple divergent, at times warring, political, social, and economic discourses... During these troubled and changing times, divergent speakers battled over the meaning of even such basic political terms as "independence," "republican virtue," "citizenship," and "popular sovereignty."

... Composites of diverse and shifting personas, of the gentleman and the hardworking tradesman, the Lockean liberal and the slaveholder, the classic republican and the fiscal capitalist, identities in the new Republic were dynamic productions informed by their social location and interactions. [This Violent Empire, 2010, pp.14-18.]

I think her use of the word 'bourgeois' for the new republican elite, elsewhere in this book's introduction, is disingenuous. Also she is concerned with the concept of a centripetal nationalism, which I suspect is an obstacle more than a goal for my own work. Those disagreements make me even more glad that her speculation seems to match mine on the point quoted here. It feels better to relate to other scholarship obliquely than to face it head-on, or merely agree.