The Democratic Sublime

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.

"In a series of articles written for the Neue Rhenische Zeitung in 1850, later published by Friedrich Engels as The Class Struggles in France, Karl Marx looked back on the failed French revolution of 1848 and attempted to explain how the democratic aspirations that inspired the February assault on the July Monarchy-and promised to fulfill the dashed hopes of 1789, 1792, and 1830-also led to its termination in the reactionary popular dictatorship of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. Popular sovereignty, which had so often defined the emancipatory visions of two generations of radical activists and thinkers was now not only an obstacle to genuine emancipation, but a plebiscitary source of power for newly emergent forms of political domination. Bonapartism became, for Marx, an important way of understanding the complex internal dynamics of popular-and later "populist"-authoritarianism. It is an analysis that continues to resonate powerfully today. The national enthusiasm that propelled the revolution forward, and which overturned the hated regime of Louis Phillippe in three glorious days, had successfully established for the first time in history a parliamentary republic based in universal male suffrage. The Second Republic's provisional government was immediately thrown into a legitimation crisis, however, by the underlying sectional, parliamentary, and class conflicts lurking beneath its illusory foundation in the people's unitary will. When the popular classes of Paris returned to the barricades in June to protest the conservative government's closure of the National Workshops-and to convert the political revolution into a social revolution based in the "right to work"-they were abandoned by their fellow citizens and thousands were massacred in the streets by Cavaignac's National Guard. The "fantastic republic" built around the pretensions of national unity, Marx proclaimed, quickly "dissolved in powder and smoke." Tocqueville described the June days as a "slave's war," and in its aftermath the Party of Order quickly consolidated its power against any furthering of revolutionary aspiration"--

"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