The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828. By Saul Cornell. (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Pp., xvi, 327. Maps. Cloth, $55.00; paper, $19.95.) American historians today love underdogs. Whereas our predecessors lavished attention on statesmen and generals, we now cast our spotlights on the unappreciated or overlooked, especially those who challenged now discredited norms of respectability and deference. The consensus emerging among historians of early America, as indicated by Jon Butler's new synthesis, Becoming America (2000), peels away the pretentious gentility of earlier portraits to reveal a boisterous and ribald popular culture taking shape in defiance of authority and tradition. Surely this is a propitious moment for taking a fresh look at those lovable losers of the early republic, the Antifederalists. It is clear from The Other Founders that Saul Cornell relishes the carnivalesque plebeian populism that sometimes sparked Antifederalist riots. If Americans failed to produce cat massacres, they did at least hang and bum in effigy Federalists such as James Wilson. Spontaneous popular uprisings, such as the 1787 protest against the Constitution in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791, gave honest working men a chance to thumb their noses at effete elites, and so give us a chance now to salute their heroic efforts. Unfortunately, compelling as that morality play may be to our own sensibilities, it cannot be sustained by the historical record. As Cornell's careful and subtle analysis makes clear, there are at least three problems with the attractive portrait of Antifederalists as plebeian democrats. First, the personnel and programs of those who opposed the Constitution varied so widely that it is difficult even to identify who they were and what they stood for. Only their common fears of centralization united Antifederalists. Plebeian democrats from the backcountry, such as William Petrikin, had little in common with wealthy, elite critics of the Constitution from New England and the South, such as Mercy Otis Warren and Arthur Lee, or even with middling democrats from New York and Pennsylvania, such as George Clinton and Melancton Smith, who championed commerce and economic growth. Moreover, the contributors to Antifederalist discourse who exerted the greatest influence, and whose writings were most often reprinted and distributed, tended to articulate middling or elite, rather than plebeian, arguments. Not only were Federalists outraged by the Carlisle riot and the Whiskey Rebellion, but almost all Antifederalists likewise condemned their erstwhile allies' lawlessness and, with William Findley, Albert Gallatin, and even William Manning, railed against the dangers of mobocracy. The fear of anarchy, Cornell writes, prompted middling democrats to create a loyal opposition rather than encouraging extralegal action (141). Second, most Antifederalists shared a commitment to what Cornell, taking his cue from Jurgen Habermas, calls the emerging public sphere. Whereas the anonymous print culture of that arena challenged and eventually displaced the politics of personal patronage and deference that preceded it, the premium placed on reasoned argument-even when advanced through satirical or raw-boned prose-did not jibe with a politics of violent protest. The ideal of deliberation that Cornell skillfully and painstakingly pieces together from the mass of Antifederalist writings required balancing and filtering different interests in order to achieve the common good, a still-vital republican ideal. Only a few Antifederalists, such as James Winthrop, ever articulated a straightforward politics of self-- interest; far more common in Antifederalist tracts were claims that the necessary balancing and filtering could be done better at the local or state rather than the national level. …