The Democratic Sublime

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Frank
Keyword(s):  
Political Power ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The People ◽  
Representational Space ◽  
Political Aesthetics ◽  
Crucial Problem ◽  
Self Rule ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Collective Actor

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 representational difficulties posed by the replacement of the personal and external rule of the king, whose body was the tangible locus of authority, with the impersonal and immanent self-rule of the people, whose power could not be incontestably embodied, went beyond questions of institutionalization and law 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. This book explores how the revolutionary proliferation of popular assemblies—crowds, demonstrations, gatherings of the “people out of doors”—mediated and gave tangibility to the people manifesting itself as a collective actor capable of enacting dramatic political reforms and change. During the age of democratic revolutions, popular assemblies became privileged sites of democratic representation because they at once claim to represent the people while also signaling the material plenitude beyond any representational claim. They retain this power in part because popular assemblies make manifest that which escapes representational capture; they rend a tear in the established representational space of appearance and draw their power from tarrying with the ineffability and resistant materiality of the people’s will. During the age of democratic revolutions, popular assemblies became the locus of the democratic sublime.

The Living Image of the People

2021 ◽  
pp. 69-96
Author(s):  
Jason Frank
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The People ◽  
Wide Range

The transition from royal to popular sovereignty during the age of democratic revolutions entailed not only the reorganization of institutions of governance and norms of political legitimacy, but also a dramatic and less-examined transformation in the iconography of political power and rule. Drawing on a wide range of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century visual sources, this chapter examines the pressures of popular visualization that accompanied the victorious appearance of popular sovereignty at key moments of its emergence, and how competing strategies of imaging popular will were implicated in different conceptions of popular agency and power. The chapter is focused on the emergence of “the living image of the people,” the idea that collective assemblies, crowds, and mass protests were no longer understood as mere factious riots or seditious rebellions, but instead as living manifestations of the people’s authority, sublime expressions of the vitality and significance of popular will.

Democracy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ludvig Beckman
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Causal Effect ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Instrumental Value ◽  
The People ◽  
Collective Decisions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Egalitarian Attitude ◽  
Self Rule ◽  
Normative Issues

Democracy is a term that is used to denote a variety of distinct objects and ideas. Democracy describes either a set of political institutions or an ideal of collective self-rule. Democracy can also be short for a normative principle of either legitimacy or justice. Finally, democracy might be used to denote an egalitarian attitude. These four uses of the term should be kept distinct and raises separate conceptual and normative issues. The value of democracy, whether democratic political institutions or democratic self-rule, is either instrumental, non-instrumental, or both. The non-instrumental value of democracy derives either from the alleged fairness of majority rule or from the value of the social relationships enabled by participation in democratic procedures. The instrumental value of democracy lends support from a growing body of empirical research. Yet, the claim that democracy has a positive causal effect on public goods is inconclusive with respect to the moral justification of democratic institutions. Normative reasons for democracy’s instrumental value must instead appeal to the fact that it contributes to equality, liberty, truth, or the realization of popular will. Democracy as a principle of either political legitimacy or justice is a normative view that evades concerns with the definition and value of democracy. Normative democracy is a claim about the conditions either for legitimacy or justice of either public authority or coercion. Debates in normative democracy are largely divorced from the conceptual and empirical concerns that inform studies of democracy elsewhere. The boundaries of the people entitled to participate in collective decisions is a question that applies to all four uses of democracy. The boundary question raises three distinct issues. The first is the extent of inclusion required among the members of the unit. The second is if membership in the unit is necessary for inclusion or if people that are not recognized as members are on certain conditions also entitled to participate. The third and final issue concerns the boundaries of the unit itself.

Self-Rule and the Problem of Peoplehood in Colonial India

2019 ◽  
Vol 114 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
NAZMUL S. SULTAN
Keyword(s):  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Moral Self ◽  
Indian People ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Self Rule ◽  
Indefinite Future

This article theorizes the colonial problem of peoplehood that Indian anticolonial thinkers grappled with in their attempts to conceptualize self-rule, or swaraj. British colonial rule drew its legitimacy from a developmentalist conception of the colonized people as backward and disunited. The discourse of “underdeveloped” colonial peoplehood rendered the Indian people “unfit” for self-government, suspending their sovereignty to an indefinite future. The concept of swaraj would be born with the rejection of deferred colonial self-government. Yet the persistence of the developmentalist figuration of the people generated a crisis of sovereign authorization. The pre-Gandhian swaraj theorists would be faced with the not-yet claimable figure of the people at the very moment of disavowing the British claim to rule. Recovering this underappreciated pre-Gandhian history of the concept of swaraj and reinterpreting its Gandhian moment, this article offers a new reading of Gandhi's theory of moral self-rule. In so doing, it demonstrates how the history of swaraj helps trace the colonial career of popular sovereignty.

Popular Manifestation

2021 ◽  
pp. 19-40
Author(s):  
Jason Frank
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Claude Lefort ◽  
The People ◽  
Political Problem ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Collective Actor

While contemporary democratic theory has explored the paradoxes of peoplehood and the dilemmas of authorization and legality that follow from them, this chapter focuses on a related but conceptually distinct problem: the question of how popular sovereignty’s authorizing entity, the people, publicly appears, how it makes itself tangible to the senses, how the people takes shape as a collective actor when no formal rules and procedures for identifying popular will exist, or when these rules and procedures are so deeply contested as to be effectively deauthorized. This chapter examines how this issue emerges in the work of two seminal theorists of modern democracy who have written extensively on the French Revolution—Carl Schmitt and Claude Lefort—only to be redirected from the aesthetic-political problem of manifestation to the political theological problem of incarnation.

On the Demos and Its Kin: Nationalism, Democracy, and the Boundary Problem

2012 ◽  
Vol 106 (4) ◽  
pp. 867-882 ◽  
Author(s):  
ARASH ABIZADEH
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Cultural Nationalism ◽  
The Self ◽  
Traditional Theory ◽  
Ethnic Nationalism ◽  
The People ◽  
Collective Self ◽  
Self Rule ◽  
National Boundaries

Cultural–nationalist and democratic theory both seek to legitimize political power via collective self-rule: Their principle of legitimacy refers right back to the very persons over whom political power is exercised. But such self-referential theories are incapable of jointly solving the distinct problems of legitimacy and boundaries, which they necessarily combine, once it is assumed that the self-ruling collectivity must be a prepolitical, in principle bounded, ground of legitimacy. Cultural nationalism claims that political power is legitimate insofar as it expresses the nation's prepolitical culture, but it cannot fix cultural–national boundaries prepolitically. Hence the collapse into ethnic nationalism. Traditional democratic theory claims that political power is ultimately legitimized prepolitically, but cannot itself legitimize the boundaries of the people. Hence the collapse into cultural nationalism. Only once we recognize that the demos is in principle unbounded, and abandon the quest for a prepolitical ground of legitimacy, can democratic theory fully avoid this collapse of demos into nation into ethnos. But such a theory departs radically from traditional theory.

Rousseau’s Silent Assemblies

2021 ◽  
pp. 41-68
Author(s):  
Jason Frank
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Living Body ◽  
The People ◽  
Collective Self ◽  
Sovereign Authority ◽  
Metaphysics Of Presence ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
Self Rule

This chapter examines the centrality of popular assemblies to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory of popular sovereignty by taking seriously the role they play in “maintaining sovereign authority,” which can only be done by sustaining or reenacting the source of that authority: the living body of the people themselves. Rousseau’s sovereign assemblies are often taken to be the clearest expression of his investment in what Jacques Derrida called a “metaphysics of presence.” Even as Rousseau’s sovereign assemblies provide the foundation of collective self-rule, however, the occasion through which the people’s will is expressed as law, they also serve an underappreciated ritual function, giving reenacted form and continuity to the very people whose will is expressed through them. The assembly form is the necessary—and necessarily hidden—supplement from which the people’s seemingly unmediated will is derived. The sovereign assembly is at once the source of the people’s collective autonomy, and the heteronomic support which provides its ongoing conditions of possibility.

Participatory constitution-making: Introduction

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-178
Author(s):  
Sujit Choudhry ◽  
Mark Tushnet
Keyword(s):  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
Constituent Power ◽  
Popular Participation ◽  
The People ◽  
The Will ◽  
Hypothetical Consent ◽  
Elected Representatives ◽  
Constitution Making

Abstract At least since the late eighteenth century, constitutions have been understood as emanations of the will of “the People,” as the ultimate expression of an inherent popular sovereignty. In the form of theories of constituent power, accounts of constitutional foundations blended notional or conceptual “descriptions” of the People, which anchored the political legitimacy of constitutional orders in the idea of hypothetical consent, with empirical claims that the nation’s actual people were represented in constitution-making processes through elected delegates and thereby were the authors of and gave consent to its fundamental law. As part of the third wave of democratization, there was an important shift in what popular participation consisted of—from indirect participation by elected representatives to direct, popular participation in the constitution-making process. As a matter of constitutional process, this led to the growing practice, and expectation, that major constitutional changes should be ratified through referenda.

Popular Resource Sovereignty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leif Wenar
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
Resource Curse ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
The People ◽  
Rich Countries

Article 1 of both of the major human rights covenants declares that the people of each country “shall freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources.” This chapter considers what conditions would have to hold for the people of a country to exercise this right—and why public accountability over natural resources is the only realistic solution to the “resource curse,” which makes resource-rich countries more prone to authoritarianism, civil conflict, and large-scale corruption. It also discusses why cosmopolitans, who have often been highly critical of prerogatives of state sovereignty, have good reason to endorse popular sovereignty over natural resources. Those who hope for more cosmopolitan institutions should see strengthening popular resource sovereignty as the most responsible path to achieving their own goals.

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