Robert W. T. Martin's engaging new book discovers a body of early American thought that he calls “dissentient democracy” theory and constitutes “a democracy that values dissent as an essential core element” (2). He explores it by examining the writings of prominent and obscure leaders and institutional and political events during the early Republic and shows that many Americans of the time viewed dissent as vital for a healthy democracy. Martin evocatively argues (as we should perhaps hope from an author whose subject matter is dissent) that his study is timely because Americans today have lost an appreciation of dissent and are worse off for it, and he hopes that his book will help “restore the centrality of dissent to our inherited tradition, our current political theory, and our future democratic practice” (2).

After introducing his theory and placing it within the literature on democratic thought in the first chapter, Martin explores the contours of dissentient democracy theory in six readable chapters that focus on key early American events, institutions, and thinkers. Chapter 2 examines insurgencies of the era – Shays's rebellion, the Whiskey rebellion, and Fries's rebellion – to ascertain how Americans initiated and viewed major incidents of dissent. Martin dissects publicly and privately stated rationales for the rebellions and government responses to them and finds that dissent – even in violent and insurgency forms – “was widely understood in early America as legitimate in certain contexts,” thus necessitating the closer look he takes at it in subsequent chapters (23).

Chapter 3 focusses on the debate over the Constitution in 1787–89, with Martin arguing that although the Federalists – the proponents of the new government – did not address the role of dissent for a healthy democracy, the Anti-Federalists “demonstrated in practice the importance of dissent to American popular government,” and in their writings “had begun to explore a host of related issues: the dangers and advantages of nonattributed speech, the conceptual as well as practical obstacles to robust opposition, and the powerful hegemony of the status quo and the elites it benefits” (81). Some Anti-Federalist voices, Martin finds, envisioned a sort of formal system for dissent in America consisting of “a communication network that would go beyond the post and the press to establish interconnected associations of like-minded critics of government” (81).

Chapter 4 discusses the creation and demise of over fifty democratic societies that emerged in 1793 and 1794. During the first years under the new Constitution, these clubs, which were modeled on England's parliamentary reform associations and consisted of members who were “generally more radical and plebeian adherents of the emerging Democratic–Republican party,” arose to safeguard American liberties (84). Though short-lived and squashed by Federalists, Martin finds that in a few years these clubs “had managed to flesh – in both theory and practice – the essential elements of a democratic public sphere, and they had even begun to conceptualize a new mode of leveraging dissent in the face of the advantages of the status quo” (89).

The remaining chapters focus on the writings of key dissenting thinkers. Chapter 5 traces James Madison's evolving thought in this area and Martin finds that he believed “a robust, active public opinion, invigorated by dissent,” was important for “governance that was both democratically legitimate and morally correct,” and that dissent was to be not only “defensive” by keeping officials in check through elections, but also “directive” in identifying political problems and suggesting solutions to them (145). Chapters 6 and 7 focus on lesser-known early American thinkers – John Thomson, Tunis Wortman, William Manning, and Thomas Cooper – who perhaps pushed dissentient democracy theory the furthest, even at times suggesting the utility of any type of dissent (including violent forms) for a robust democracy, with Cooper, for example, going “so far as to insist that false dissent is even more important to democracy than are passive truths” (179.) These last two chapters are in some ways the most interesting and novel contribution of the book, since they focus on thinkers rarely, if ever, evaluated by political theorists.

Martin's work in recovering early American dissent is an enjoyable read accessible to specialist and nonspecialist alike and of scholarly interest to the democratic theorist as well as the more general student of early US politics. It leaves us with much to think about on this topic and I will note two related themes. The first is with regard to conceptualizing dissent, which Martin does as “any practice – often verbal, but sometimes performative – that challenges the status quo (the existing structure of norms, values, customs, traditions, and especially authorities that underwrite the present ways of doing things)” (3.) The issue with defining dissent so broadly is that in doing so it can perhaps explain more than it can obscure and pertain to any action or thought contrary to an interpreted political status quo, thus making it difficult to apply it analytically with both precision and universality (in other words, a political action or statement may appear to one scholar as a form of dissent, whereas another analyst may view it as a form of consent). Second, and related to this theme, Martin teasingly asserts (though offers little analysis on this point) that dissent has been underappreciated since the early Republic and is perhaps especially so today, but given his broad definition of it is this true? How about, for example, the Civil War, the civil rights movement, and the Occupy Wall Street movement? Do not these events constitute a respect for dissent akin to that acted out and described by early Americans? Thanks to Martin's excellent text on this topic we have quite a bit to dissent over (how could I resist that?) in exploring the role of dissent for a democracy.