Tales of Two Cities: Common Good, Common Ground, and the Practice of History

Abstract

In The Public City, Philip J. Ethington has advanced a deceptively simple thesis: that in 1850 San Francisco's public experience was characterized by a political construction of social life, but that by 1900 this fundamental understanding of society had been displaced by a social construction of political life. By means of this enormously powerful and delicately balanced equation, Ethington here challenges a working principle shared by generations of historians and sociologists: that political behavior is socially determined. The for his research and analysis is San Francisco's public sphere, a carefully delineated place of discourse which included the newspaper, the marketplace, and the site of deliberation in a restricted representative democracy. Mid-century San Francisco was a town born in violence, marked by exploitation, inhabited by many men, few women, and fewer families. Ethington suggests that because the city lacked a substantial private sphere, its public sphere may have taken on an exaggerated significance. He characterizes the city's political expression as romantic republicanism, steeped in the classical drama of public conflict between heroes and villains contesting vice and virtue, and employing theatrical rhetoric to marshall the efforts of all men in triumphant pursuit of an indivisible public good (p. 129). Ethington decodes the organized violence of duels and executions as allegories of manliness and vengeance on the political stage. He offers fresh examinations of the much-discussed Vigilance Committees, noting the rationalization of shocking violence through Ciceronian republican precedent, and