Overview

"The transition from royal to popular sovereignty during the age of democratic revolutions--from 1776 to 1848--entailed not only the reorganization of institutions of governance and norms of political legitimacy, but also a dramatic transformation in the iconography and symbolism of political power. The personal and external rule of the king, whose body was the physical locus of political authority, was replaced with the impersonal and immanent self-rule of the people, whose power could not be incontestably embodied. This posed representational difficulties that went beyond questions of institutionalization and law, extending into the aesthetic realm of visualization, composition, and form. How to make the people's sovereign will tangible to popular judgment was, and is, a crucial problem of democratic political aesthetics. The Democratic Sublime offers an interdisciplinary exploration of how the revolutionary proliferation of popular assemblies--crowds, demonstrations, gatherings of the ""people out of doors""--came to be central to the political aesthetics of democracy during the age of democratic revolutions. Jason Frank argues that popular assemblies allowed the people to manifest as a collective actor capable of enacting dramatic political reforms and change. Moreover, Frank asserts that popular assemblies became privileged sites of democratic representation as they claimed to support the voice of the people while also signaling the material plenitude beyond any single representational claim. Popular assemblies continue to retain this power, in part, because they embody that which escapes representational capture: they disrupt the representational space of appearance and draw their power from the ineffability and resistant materiality of the people's will. Engaging with a wide range of sources, from canonical political theorists (Rousseau, Burke, and Tocqueville) to the novels of Hugo, the visual culture of the barricades, and the memoirs of popular insurgents, The Democratic Sublime demonstrates how making the people's sovereign will tangible to popular judgment became a central dilemma of modern democracy, and how it remains so today."

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Reviews

The Democratic Sublime is learned, lyrical, and profound. Speaking to and beyond the emergencies of our moment, Jason Frank excavates a buried appreciation of democracy as resting not mainly in norms or institutions but in the political body of the people. Sensitively probing thinkers ranging from Burke, Tocqueville, and Rousseau to Ranciere, Lefort, and Wolin, this book recovers the sensuous beauty of the politics of popular assembly as an essential element of democracy's value, and perhaps what keeps it alive against the odds. -- Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley Democratic theorists like to think that they know 'the people' when they see them. But how do 'the people' make themselves visible? In this illuminating and brilliant book, Jason Frank convincingly argues that political theorists need a more aesthetic approach to analyze popular manifestations. Focusing on the age of democratic revolutions, Frank deftly studies the many appearances of the people in philosophical works and on rebellious streets. -- Dan Edelstein, author of On the Spirit of Rights Democracy is a collective thing animated by seemingly irreconcilable lineages. While political science typically deals with institutions and procedures pretending to represent the will of the people, it has obscured democracy's more decisive dimension: people recognizing their own embodied and collective presence as the foundation of political life. With Jason Frank's masterful inquiry into the Democratic Sublime, we have a book and concept that enables us not only to see democracy for what it is but also to understand that democracy is an act of collective 'commoning' that can't be separated from our aesthetic imagination. A major achievement: it assembles collective movements of past and present just as much as it synthesizes the theories, ideas, and images through which they make sense. -- Stefan Jonsson, author of Subject Without Nation, A Brief History of the Masses, and Crowds and Democracy Two hundred years before the Internet, democratic theory was already grappling with a peculiarly virtual object called 'the people.' The Democratic Sublime is a brilliantly vital genealogy of the promises and the panics stirred up by the visceral appearance of this new sovereign form. Now that the enchantment of power can no longer be treated as a premodern throwback, Jason Frank shows us how and why, revolutionary or reactionary, it has always been inseparable from the democratic project. -- William Mazzarella, author of The Mana of Mass Society This book is an important addition to a growing and important re-examination of the bases of democratic politics. Frank elaborates a notion of a democratic sublime in order to provide an account of a possible viable and democratic association of popular sovereignty and political aesthetics. This book might be thought of as written contra those scholars who are made anxious about over-expression of enthusiasm in politics ('Schw rmerei' as Kant called a version of it). Such are the inheritors of those who hold that democracy requires 'a touch of anomie' in order to function properly. I learned from it. -- Tracy B. Strong, University of Southampton

"""The Democratic Sublime is learned, lyrical, and profound. Speaking to and beyond the emergencies of our moment, Jason Frank excavates a buried appreciation of democracy as resting not mainly in norms or institutions but in the political body of the people. Sensitively probing thinkers ranging from Burke, Tocqueville, and Rousseau to Ranciere, Lefort, and Wolin, this book recovers the sensuous beauty of the politics of popular assembly as an essential element of democracy's value, and perhaps what keeps it alive against the odds."" -- Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley ""Democratic theorists like to think that they know 'the people' when they see them. But how do 'the people' make themselves visible? In this illuminating and brilliant book, Jason Frank convincingly argues that political theorists need a more aesthetic approach to analyze popular manifestations. Focusing on the age of democratic revolutions, Frank deftly studies the many appearances of the people in philosophical works and on rebellious streets."" -- Dan Edelstein, author of On the Spirit of Rights ""Democracy is a collective thing animated by seemingly irreconcilable lineages. While political science typically deals with institutions and procedures pretending to represent the will of the people, it has obscured democracy's more decisive dimension: people recognizing their own embodied and collective presence as the foundation of political life. With Jason Frank's masterful inquiry into the Democratic Sublime, we have a book and concept that enables us not only to see democracy for what it is but also to understand that democracy is an act of collective 'commoning' that can't be separated from our aesthetic imagination. A major achievement: it assembles collective movements of past and present just as much as it synthesizes the theories, ideas, and images through which they make sense."" -- Stefan Jonsson, author of Subject Without Nation, A Brief History of the Masses, and Crowds and Democracy ""Two hundred years before the Internet, democratic theory was already grappling with a peculiarly virtual object called 'the people.' The Democratic Sublime is a brilliantly vital genealogy of the promises and the panics stirred up by the visceral appearance of this new sovereign form. Now that the enchantment of power can no longer be treated as a premodern throwback, Jason Frank shows us how and why, revolutionary or reactionary, it has always been inseparable from the democratic project."" -- William Mazzarella, author of The Mana of Mass Society ""This book is an important addition to a growing and important re-examination of the bases of democratic politics. Frank elaborates a notion of a democratic sublime in order to provide an account of a possible viable and democratic association of popular sovereignty and political aesthetics. This book might be thought of as written contra those scholars who are made anxious about over-expression of enthusiasm in politics ('Schwärmerei' as Kant called a version of it). Such are the inheritors of those who hold that democracy requires 'a touch of anomie' in order to function properly. I learned from it."" -- Tracy B. Strong, University of Southampton"

Author Information

Jason Frank is the Robert J. Katz Chair of Government at Cornell University, where he teaches political theory. He has published widely on democratic theory, American political thought, modern political theory, politics and literature, and political aesthetics. His previous books include Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America (Duke University Press, 2010), Publius and Political Imagination (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), and A Political Companion to Herman Melville (University Press of Kentucky, 2013). His research has appeared in Political Theory, Modern Intellectual History, The Review of Politics, and Public Culture, and his political commentary has been published in such outlets as the Boston Review and the New York Times.

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