Theory & Event

There is no idea more familiar—or more cherished—to Americans than vox populi: that the people speak as a polity's most central political authority. Slaves and suffragists, homesteaders and gilded capitalists, Marxists and migrant workers, Tea Party protesters and anarcho-socialists, anti-war activists and AIDS patients have all, despite their obvious differences, seized the mantle of "the people" to contest the status quo and place themselves squarely as democracy's primary agents. Yet, as Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America powerfully argues, despite its appealing simplicity this most cherished ideal is accompanied by an "inescapable yet democratically unanswerable dilemma" (2).

As Jason Frank illustrates in his elegant and rich exploration of postrevolutionary dilemmas of popular authorization, the people have been enshrined since the American Revolution as "the ultimate locus of interpretative constitutional authority … a constituent power" (45). Often cast as transcendent and mythical, the people are not only the central entity "in whose name the state governs" but also the "higher power that can resist the authority of the state" (7). However, this power, Frank reminds us, is grounded in an elusive and essentially slippery notion: namely, that those who seek to speak as "the people" do so without the reassurance of authorization because the sole authority which could legitimize their claim to speak—to wit, "the people"—can only be made present through this very act. This is a "persistent latency or virtuality," as Frank suggestively puts it, a "paradoxical political reality that the people are forever a people that is not … yet" (5). Yet, for Frank, this contingency is a source of political possibility, not limitation, which can spur us to reconceive our political practices and horizons.

To explore how this labile conception of the people was navigated and addressed across multiple sites in postrevolutionary American culture, Frank draws on an impressive and comprehensive survey of contemporary political theory, American political thought, rhetoric, history, and literature. With a reflective and measured gaze, Constituent Moments looks in turn to Hannah Arendt's portrayal of revolutionary storytelling, Benjamin Rush's reflections on sympathy and contagion in the body politic, the aesthetics and politics of Walt Whitman's democratic sublime, the dilemmas of voice and ventriloquism in Charles Brockden Brown's Gothic novel Wieland, and Frederick Douglass's powerful stagings of unsettlement. These various texts are treated by Frank in an Arendtian fashion as exemplary moments, opportunities as much to dwell in the specificity of each case as to trace "the theoretical significance of the example beyond its particular instance" (34). Thus, while these examples enable Frank to detail "micropolitical enactments" of history, politics, and culture, they are also tantalizing sites from which we can draw theoretical sustenance and inspiration (33). Specifically, they illuminate the "persistent latency" of the people not as something to be fixed or eliminated, but rather as the condition of possibility for powerful dramas of self-authorization (5). As in the book's evocative phrase, these can be seen as "constituent moments" that signal and mobilize dynamic processes of democratic participation and action (33).

Above all, it is Frank's attention to the "more improbable locations" of politics in American postrevolutionary culture (crowd actions, "licentious mobs," large public assemblies, democratic societies, and scenes of public oratory) that reveal the most suggestive implications for contemporary theory. First, with his attention to the inherent volatility of both revolutionary and postrevolutionary crowd actions and mobs, Frank provides an important corrective to Arendt's description of the American revolutionaries as liberated from the logics of sovereignty and the absolutes of constituent power. Although in agreement with many features of Arendt's conceptualization of democratic paradox and historical storytelling, Frank nonetheless contends that she did not fully appreciate how revolutionary and postrevolutionary culture wrestled with dilemmas of constituent power dispersed across a porous terrain of public authority. Remedying this oversight, Constituent...