Democratic Sublime: On Aesthetics and Popular Assembly - Paperback

by Jason Frank (Author)

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.

Author Biography

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.