INVENTING THE PEOPLE : The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America<i> by Edmund S. Morgan (Norton: $18.95) </i>

America’s states are united not only by a document, the Declaration of Independence, but by a set of common political assumptions. Approaches toward the death penalty and abortion differ from state to state, of course, but most of the remaining distinctions--a few digits in tax rates, drinking ages or driving speeds--are minor. Does this mean we all agree? Of course not. Our country, founded on pluralism, is proud of its restless marketplace of ideas. Instead, argues Edmund Morgan, professor of history emeritus at Yale, government creates the perception of agreement. “The popular governments of the U. S. and Britain rest on fictions as much as the governments of Russia and China,” he writes. Not surprisingly, these “fictions” support the interests of the few in the name of the many.

Were Morgan to have merely profiled creative, conniving politicking, this would be a compelling history. But this book is unique because Morgan recognizes that people’s consent cannot be easily forced. “Human beings,” he writes, “if only to maintain a sense of self-respect, have to be persuaded.” Morgan’s theories about the creation of consent are the most interesting in the book, creatively integrating ideas from anthropology, psychology and religion. Amazingly, the best way to encourage a peasant to defer to nobility, as Morgan sees it, was to make that peasant a member of the nobility--for a day, that is. Carnivals are a good example: “It was a time for the mouse to eat the cat,” Morgan writes, “the sheep to eat the wolf, the rabbit to shoot the hunter . . . By turning the world obviously and deliberately upside-down for a time, the carnival gave everybody the opportunity to recognize and accept what was right-side-up when the festivities were over. Mice do not really eat cats . . . and plowmen, if they know what is good for them, do not try for more than a day to act as though they were noble lords.”

“Inventing the People,” however, calls attention to the need for more books on how dissent is quelled and deference is cultivated. Morgan covers a brief period in 18th Century English history and the U.S. is studied only as an afterthought to the British experience. Alternative forces encouraging deference, such as public education and the economy, are not explored. An inquiry into equitable representation in the 20th Century is especially needed, for computer polling has given us the ability, if not the inclination, to move closer to direct representation.

THE MOTION OF

LIGHT IN WATER

Sex and Science Fiction Writing

in the East Village, 1957-1965

by Samuel R. Delany (Arbor House/Morrow: $18.95)

Science fiction novelist Orson Scott Card has observed that Samuel Delany’s science fiction books “create a world that I do not want to leave.” Most science fiction fans who have tried to read a work like “Dhalgren,” however, have found Delany’s worlds all but impossible to enter. This polarity of interest is not surprising, for Delany’s writing is rarefied and dense. He is as fascinated with style as he is with science, as interested in how other cultures might communicate as in how they might think. These pages, however, reach out to a wider readership. Describing his life-style as a young gay man, a bohemian in Greenwich Village in the 1960s, and a gregarious student at the Bronx High School of Science, Delany is clear and compelling. He whimsically discusses, rather than indulges in, literary experimentation. Theorizing about what the most compressed kind of language would be like, for instance, he comes up with a system where entire words can be conveyed in syllables. Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech comes out to something like, “Hyrnyroriyop.”

One wonders, however, if “The Motion of Light in Water” deserves all of the accolades it has received: Gregory Benford, for instance, describes it as “the most open, shocking, fascinating literary memoir of our time,” while Robert Silverberg says it is “a remarkably candid and revealing study of . . . an extraordinarily appealing human being.” While his life is no doubt fascinating, Delany seems too steely cool and controlled in these pages to open up. He often identifies himself as being black and gay, for instance, but only hints at his feelings of alienation; he speaks of some of his homosexual encounters but doesn’t tell us about the scarcity or abundance of affection he feels for men; he admits checking into a mental hospital and telling the psychiatrist, “I feel like I’m coming apart at the seams,” but this is the first and last we hear of such desperation. As in many science fiction novels, the ideas in these pages are vibrant, the emotions, invisible.

SCAR STRANGLED BANGER

by Ralph Steadman (Salem House: $29.95) British illustrator Ralph Steadman seizes the full power of his medium in these pages, using his billowing, bulging, wildly subjective art to lash out against the familiar targets of leftists. The effect, as one critic has put it, is like “inserting your eyeballs into an electric outlet.” It’s easy to dismiss Steadman’s sparse text in these pages as threadbare. “I think it’s fair to say that Americans are . . . a dying breed,” he writes, while in another section, shocked by the fundamentalist movement, his prose turns Gonzo: “Perish the Orwellian nightmare-mongers and banish the brain-grinders.”

Yet it’s difficult to remain unaffected by his art. His street beggar, with a beard and mustache resembling stitches and a dark, gaping mouth opening like a tear in paper, is inspired and highly expressive. And his portraits of Oliver North, his neck wrapped in a flag, impaled by a cross, with blue stars and white rockets shooting from his head while red stripes dissipate into blood, are powerful polemics. On the whole, though, “Scar Strangled Banger” lacks the self-effacing appeal of Steadman’s earlier work with Hunter Thompson. Then, Steadman was as inspired by George Booth’s portrayals of human awkwardness as by Thompson’s political agenda. This work, however, harks back to George Grosz’ grim and savage depictions of people in pre-Hitler Berlin: amorphous faces clashing with sharp, “rational” pen lines, skewed at odd angles and colliding, like the country’s collective consciousness, in a jumble.

THE HARPER ATLAS OF WORLD HISTORY

edited by Pierre Vidal-Naquet (Harper & Row: $29.95) The 1980s has seen a spate of picture-based history books which are graphics-savvy, organizing the writing around the illustrations rather than the other way around. Being wooed, no doubt, is another generation of readers raised on TV. This new atlas, translated from the French, is one of the most thoughtful melanges of words and images. A good way to test the graphics’ skill of historical atlases is to see how they depict war. Many try to follow the course of an entire war in one diagram; thus we get a flurry of arrows and moving borders that looks like a Salvador Dali painting.

The Harper Atlas, in contrast, spotlights only the most important maneuvers, using separate diagrams for each. Rapidly developing conflicts are followed with innovative techniques: a flow chart, for example, explains the Cuban Missile Crisis by comparing possible actions to actual decisions. The atlas is exceptionally adept at depicting Asian and European history. The section on India’s factionalism is richly informative, for instance, while the overview of Southeast Asia is devoid of the polemics and misinformation put out by the superpowers. The translation is stylish for the most part, though in spots there are glitches, resulting in oddly nonsensical phrases such as, “the spectacular Tet offensive . . . put paid to American policy.”