Amazon.com description: Product Description: The accepted political wisdom in American political theology is that the founding fathers set up a representative republic to avoid the excesses of a populist citizen's democracy. The basic premise of the accepted wisdom is that individuals, in their capacity as citizens, are too volatile and unreliable in judgments about civic affairs, and any type of citizen's democracy would likely end up in ''mob-rule.''Sean Wilentz, in his monumental work, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, has called this other tradition the 'democratic impulse.' Wilenz asks: 'How had the Jacksonian ascendancy shaped, for better and for worse, the democratic impulses that had arisen out of the American Revolution and had evolved so furiously after 1815?' While not usually acknowledged in the polite company of academic historians, this other tradition has a very legitimate claim as the correct interpretation of the American history of exceptionalism, meaning that the American experiment is an exceptional event in human history.