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 rule of the king, whose body was the physical locus of political authority, was replaced during this period with the impersonal self-rule of the people, whose power could never be incontestably embodied. How to make the people's sovereign will tangible to popular judgment, was, and is, a crucial and recurring problem of democratic politics.
The Democratic Sublime, a new book book by Jason Frank, the John L. Senior professor of at Cornell University, offers an interdisciplinary exploration of this question by examining the revolutionary proliferation of popular assemblies during this period--crowds, demonstrations, gatherings of the "people out of doors"—and how they came to be central to ideas of popular representation during the age of democratic revolutions. Frank argues that crowds allowed “the people” to manifest as a collective actor capable of enacting dramatic political reforms and change, and, as such, became privileged sites of democratic representation. Engaging with a wide range of sources, from canonical political theorists (Rousseau, Burke, and Tocqueville) to the novels of Hugo, from the visual culture of the barricades and the memoirs of popular insurgents to contemporary works of democratic theory, 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.
The book has already been recognized and well received in multiple fields and disciplines beyond political theory and political science. A number of reviews and podcast discussions have appeared around the book, as well as two symposia organized by the intellectual and cultural history consortium at NYU and Columbia and Northwestern's Center for Global Culture and Communication. The journal Democratic Theory has planned a published symposium around the book that will appear later this year.
