Oxford University Press The Democratic Sublime: On Aesthetics and Popular Assembly

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. Review [P]erceptive and engaging...Through readings of figures as disparate as Alexis de Tocqueville and Carl Schmitt, Edmund Burke and Auguste Blanqui, Rousseau and Glenn Ligon, each chapter offers a world of conceptual possibilities for future political thought. The book eludes capture like the popular assemblies that constitute its subject. It outpaces any single summary, any single reading, which may contribute to its long shelf life. ― Harrison Diskin, Los Angeles Review of Books 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 o