The Democratic Sublime

Reviews / Votes

The Democratic Sublime is at its strongest when the author is calling democratic theory to task for the ways in which aesthetic questions related to civic imagination, popular emergence, and democratic excess have been unjustly neglected. * David W. McIvor, Theory & Event * [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 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 ('Schwaermerei' 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 *