Rogers Smith has long been a leading theorist and empirical analyst of the role of ideas, ideals, and narratives in political life. His interest in peoplehood and in the related themes of citizenship and membership goes back to his second book, Citizenship without Consent, coauthored with legal scholar Peter Schuck (1985), which explored the tension between birthright citizenship and consensual understandings of membership. Smith’s best-known book, Civic Ideals (1997), showed in rich detail how liberal, republican, and ethnoracially, religiously, or otherwise ascriptive understandings of membership have been intertwined in differing combinations at differing moments of American history. His subsequent Stories of Peoplehood (2003), pitched at a more abstract level, distinguished economic, political, and “ethically constitutive” narratives of political belonging. The book gave special attention to the latter, which offer the most powerful and enduring—though also the most problematic and exclusionary—underpinning for political community.

The present book builds on and extends the analyses of Stories of Peoplehood. It brings together previously published work (in significantly revised form), as well as some new work. The first part comprises four theoretical chapters. Chapter 1 provides a broad defense of the interpretive study of political ideas, a defense articulated as a variant of a historical institutionalist theory of politics. Chapter 2—the theoretical core of the book—develops a theory of the “politics of peoplehood,” focused on the role of what Smith now calls simply “constitutive themes” in stories of political peoplehood. Chapter 3, coauthored with Meral Ugur Cinar, draws on literary theories of narrative structure to argue that national narratives articulated at key founding moments—once they are crystallized in textbooks, monuments, festivals, and so on—continue to inform and shape debates in much later and substantively different contexts. Chapter 4 analyzes the intertwining of personal stories and stories of peoplehood, focusing empirically on the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns.

The second part of the book comprises two historical essays on American peoplehood: one focusing on the shifting meaning and valence of the language of universal individual rights and the other on rival narratives of American peoplehood, especially as they have been articulated through the intertwining of “constitutive themes of religion, race, and gender” (p. 146). The final three chapters are unabashedly normative. Chapter 7 argues for abandoning the deep-seated tropes of exceptionalism—long enlisted on behalf of both progressive and conservative agendas—and providentialism in favor of a more “moderate, malleable, and multiple” understanding of American peoplehood. The final two chapters consider the implications of the general principle that states have special obligations to those—including noncitizens—whose “identities, aspirations, and interests have been coercively constituted” by the actions of the state (p. 220). Chapter 8 argues that the principle obliges the United States to “extend special opportunities for membership to Mexicans” (p. 220); Chapter 9 argues that it also generates special obligations toward residents of current or former colonies.

Political Peoplehood is impressively wide-ranging. Like Smith’s other work, the essays in this book bridge the divides between historical and contemporary work, between empirical and normative analysis, and between the political science subfields of political theory and American politics. Unusually for a collection of essays, the chapters fit together very nicely, enriched by cross-resonances between chapters, yet without too much overlap. Smith has taken evident care to integrate the essays into a coherent overall framework.

I have learned a great deal from the book, and I find most of Smith’s substantive arguments convincing. I am not entirely persuaded, however, by his expansive understanding of “political peoplehood.” Criticizing accounts of peoplehood that focus on race, ethnicity, and nation, the author defines political peoples as “any and all human associations, groups, and communities that are commonly understood to assert that their members owe them a measure of allegiance against the demands of other associations, communities, and groups” (p. 2). On this understanding, strong claims to political peoplehood are advanced not only by nation-states (or by nationalist movements challenging those states) but also by some religious leaders, economic and social movement organizers, radical feminists and environmentalists, and others (p. 40): “It is the fact that these associations, groups, and communities are perceived to advance claims to governing authority in competition with others that makes them ‘political’—and the more demanding the claims, the more political the group” (p. 2).

Smith provides a compelling account of why such associations, communities, and group should be regarded as political, but he does not specify why they should be regarded as peoples. The category “political” receives sustained examination; the category “peoplehood” does not. To my mind, it is not helpful to think of radical feminists or environmentalists (or of “labor movements, social movements, nongovernmental organizations, [and] cities” [p. 5]) under the rubric of peoplehood. Not all political projects—even those that advance strong claims to allegiance and authority in the context of struggles against other political projects—are projects of peoplehood.

Peoplehood, as I understand the category, involves more than the demandingness of political claims. The claim to constitute a “people” is a specific kind of political claim, not simply a claim to a certain degree of allegiance or commitment. If one limits one’s attention to (roughly) the last two centuries, it is a kind of claim that is shaped by the intertwining of 1) understandings of popular sovereignty and democracy, 2) understandings of the diversity of languages, religions, cultures, peoples, and nations, and 3) the ongoing reorganization of political space along putatively national lines. In this context, I would argue, a “people” is understood as a group that is (relatively) stable, enduring, distinctive, encompassing, self-reproducing, and (at least ideally) self-governing. Stable and enduring: Claims to peoplehood are not made on behalf of rapidly changing social movement projects, no matter how radical and uncompromising their political claims (though some social movements may, of course, claim to represent peoples). Distinctive: Claims to peoplehood generally presuppose an understanding of a pluralistic and diverse world of multiple “peoples,” each with its own distinctive character. Encompassing and self-reproducing: Claims to peoplehood are made in the name of communities understood as in some sense “complete” rather than sectoral, and as capable, at least ideally, of reproducing themselves and their distinctive cultural characteristics over time. Self-governing: Claims to peoplehood usually involve, implicitly or explicitly, a claim to some kind of self-governance. (Smith’s notion of variation in both strength and breadth of claims is helpful in conceptualizing the space of variation in such claims to self-governance.)

If this understanding of what it generally means in political practice to claim to constitute “a people” is roughly correct, then while Smith is certainly right to emphasize that claims to peoplehood are not limited to nation-states—they are often made in the name of nonstate ethnic, racial, national, indigenous, regional, and in some cases religious groups—the analytical payoff for defining the notion of “political peoplehood” as broadly as Smith does is unclear, especially since his own substantive analyses focus on a much narrower range of cases where the category of peoplehood indisputably applies.

This conceptual disagreement aside, Smith’s focus on peoplehood is much to be welcomed. At a moment of heightened populism in Europe and the United States, a focus on stories of peoplehood—especially on the powerfully resonant constitutive themes of race, gender, and religion—is indeed more timely than ever. For whatever else populism might involve—and forms of populism are extraordinarily diverse—it always involves an attempt to define, delimit, and characterize “the people,” in implicit or explicit contrast both to “the elite,” represented as out of touch with and as incapable of speaking for “the people,” and to other “peoples.” And Smith’s suggestions about the occasions on which constitutive themes—rather than economic or political themes—will come to the fore in stories of peoplehood seem eminently plausible (if not easily testable): Such themes are likely to be prominent “when the provision of economic and political power benefits seems uncertain or clearly deficient” (p. 63) and “when the ideas, institutions, and practices expressive of established constitutive themes are threatened” (p. 65).

In short, Smith’s book (like its precursor volume) has much to teach us about the centrality of narratives to political struggles; about the power—and the danger—of constitutive themes in stories of peoplehood; and, not least, about our obligation, as citizens, to enter the fray and to seek to rearticulate stories of peoplehood in ways that can counter the exclusionary implications of prevailing constitutive themes, while still providing a compelling account of political belonging.