Government by Dissent: Protest, Resistance, and Radical Democratic Thought in the Early American Republic

[...]Martin's primary goal-one that he, for the most part, achieves-is to chart the late-eighteenth-century emergence and contours of theories of dissentient democracy, of political propositions that justify dissent as a necessary, beneficial component of democratic life. According to Martin, Democratic-Republican Society participants believed "it simply made sense that a system of popular sovereignty required mechanisms for popular input to reach decision makers" (86).