Description
Book SynopsisAn argument that the people, the legitimate ground of public authority in the United States, are not a coherent or sanctioned collective; rather, they exist as an effect of successful claims to speak on their behalf.
Trade Review“
Constituent Moments is the best book on the founding of the United States to have been written in several generations. Jason Frank goes beyond American political history, opening an old question from the Leviathan: ‘The People: What?’ This question is at the heart of democratic sovereignty. Jason Frank's careful attention to canonical political theory and his attentive study of those who acted in the name of the people enables him to follow, as few could, in the footsteps of Thomas Hobbes. This is a genuinely brilliant book.”—
Anne Norton, author of
Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire“Jason Frank has written an essential work of scholarship, a book that is destined to become a primary resource for democratic theorists, scholars of American political thought, historians of the postrevolutionary era, and anyone else who is interested in seeing the politics of democratic revolution in a new light.”—
Thomas Dumm, author of
A Politics of the Ordinary”’The people is a political claim,’ says Jason Frank in this magnificent book. If that claim has power that is because American democracy is the beneficiary of a ‘constitutive surplus inherited from the revolutionary era.’ Frank adds to the surplus by tracking, mobilizing, enhancing the slippage between the people as fact and aspiration, fragmentation and ideal. Attentive to imagination, representation, and voice, he finds new resources for democratic theory in both Hannah Arendt and the crowds she mistrusted, in Whitman's homoerotic poetry but also in its (re)production, in the gothic conundra of voice and representation explored by Brown novelistically and by Rancière theoretically. Cutting across genres usually segmented by disciplinary division, Frank's text is rich in historical detail and theoretical nuance. A must-read for anyone interested in democratic theory, sexuality studies, racial politics, political theology and new realist approaches to the politics of citizenship.”—
Bonnie Honig, author of
Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, DemocracyTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction: Constituent Moments 1
1. Revolution and Reiteration: Hannah Arendt's Critique of Constituent Power 41
2. Crowds and Communication: Representation and Voice in Postrevolutionary America 67
3. Sympathy and Separation: Benjamin Rush and the Contagious Public 101
4. Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship: Theorizing the Democratic-Republican Societies 128
5. Hearing Voices: Imagination and Authority in Wieland 156
6. Aesthetic Democracy: Walt Whitman and the Poetry of the People 182
7. Staging Dissensus: Frederick Douglass and "We the People" 209
Conclusion: Prospective Time 237
Notes 255
Bibliography 301
Index 331
