In Paine's absence: The trans-Atlantic dynamics of American popular political thought, 1789--1804

This dissertation traces the international traffic in people, ideas, and texts which shaped the public political discourse of the early American republic. Drawing on recent intellectual and cultural histories of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, this project demonstrates the extent to which the ideological transformations of the 1790s interacted with broader, Atlantic-wide processes. By grounding its analysis in the newspapers, penny pamphlets, and debating societies which appeared in unprecedented numbers in that decade, this dissertation also incorporates new actors into the intellectual history of the early republic.; Examining how Americans across the socio-economic spectrum responded to the radicalism and conservatism of the age of democratic revolutions sheds new light on the origins and nature of Jeffersonian democracy. Each chapter reconstructs a trans-Atlantic conversation into which Americans were drawn. The first chapter demonstrates how a Painite, French-inflected discourse about the "citizen of the world" infused popular politics. The second chapter analyzes how the backlash against this popular cosmopolitanism formed a crucial part of an emerging discourse of American nationalism. The third chapter examines popular conceptions of property rights and economic equality, arguing that 1790s democrats produced a critique of free market capitalism that was neither pre-modern nor proto-Marxist, but rather drew on Lockean natural rights discourse and Adam Smith's political economy. The final chapter reconstructs the radically participatory and inclusive visions of politics which emerged amidst a debate over the nature and role of public opinion and the public sphere in a representative democracy.; Just as the failure of the French Revolution truncated these radical conversations in Europe, America experienced a similar reaction against late enlightenment political theory; yet America's more moderate reaction came to be called "democracy." The respectable and electable Jeffersonian democrats of 1800 defined themselves not only against "aristocratic" Federalists, but also against the "Jacobinical" and "foreign" principles of those American, Painite democrats who had once been so influential. Thus from the vantage point of 1802 when Paine returned from Europe a reviled man, the 1790s did not look like a decade of progress toward an increasingly democratic American future.