Philosophy & Rhetoric

Who knew that the twenty-first century might turn on a battle over the legitimacy of democracy? As norms of deliberation and legislative compromise erode, and as a global struggle between democratic and autocratic rule is waged both between and within nations, a strange form of political theater emerges: all sides claim to represent the will of the people, which is expressed in images of populist demonstrations that are seen by their opponents as dangerous embodiments of irrationality. It should be no surprise that violence is waiting in the wings.

Despite the historical specificity of the present conflict, it is not new. Although focused on the French Revolution, Jason Frank's carefully argued study of the aesthetics of popular assembly resonates with contemporary concerns regarding political spectacles, populist movements, and whether or how democracy might prevail. Frank's objective is not to restore anything but to challenge left and right critiques of "the people" in order to recover a "lost radicalism of democracy" (xii). By reexamining one of modern democracy's origin stories, Frank zeros in on popular assembly as "a distinctive—and distinctively powerful—mode of democratic representation" (xiv). One result can be more clarity about why populism—and its mix of democratic self-assertion and delegitimation—has such a hold on democratic regimes today. Another, and Frank's hope, is that paying more attention to the aesthetic contours of "the people" can lead to a rebooting of the political imagination—a rebooting, I would add, that is desperately needed if democracy is to become more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable. [End Page 418]

Frank begins with the assumption that democracy depends on more than "enlightenment and education": beyond rational-critical speech, it also requires distinctive illusions of collective belonging (see also, e.g., Allen 2004, chap. 2). "At the heart of modern democracy's fantasy space," he argues, "lies its enigmatic constituent subject: the people" (3). But where are the people? What do they look like? Democracy's constituent subject has an image problem: the people can't be seen as a whole. Thus, the problem of envisioning the people "haunts the history and theory of modern democracy" (5).

Frank becomes something of a ghost hunter, working carefully through theory and history to see what has been lurking around the corners and in the attic, more felt than observed. Through careful parsing of Judith Butler, Claude Lefort, Jacques Rancière, Carl Schmitt, and others, he constructs a theoretical framework for identifying a process of democratic belonging that is persistent, contested, and aesthetic. This dynamic field of political representation then is explored through his historical example.

The French Revolution is taken up through its exponents, interpreters, and one of its visual figures. Rousseau is up first, as he comprehends both the historical transformation and its constitutive problem. Rousseau sees popular demonstrations as ritual performances essential to the transition to democracy and to the expression of democratic legitimacy. Instead of being props for the king or mobs of rebellion, the crowd becomes the people as the people become a self-aware actor in history. But there is a crucial deficiency that other actors don't have: as a sovereign subject, the people are silent. The general will, beyond representation, is a spontaneous, authentic, and unmediated self-assertion that can be expressed only in part and must be enjoyed as sensate experience. This "mute eloquence" (64) of the assembly and a corresponding "collective self-absorption" (61) has obvious benefits for those who would usurp power, but it also opens a space for a more productive concept: the aesthetic resources that Frank labels the "democratic sublime."

The next chapter captures this aesthetic in the "living image of the people" as it involved "a dramatic transformation in the iconography of political power and rule" (69). The people came to be understood not as an incarnation of the general will but as "a surplus of democratic immanence, the physical manifestation of...