Abstract
The political thought of the Founders is essential to understanding American politics: their thinking was embodied in state institutions and set the conceptual parameters of much subsequent political debate. Examining early American political thought allows us to better grasp the fundamental orientations of American political institutions and ideas, and can therefore also illuminate their democratic limitations. Historically situated democratic theory of the kind that I have pursued returns to the political thinking of the Founders not to uncritically praise it, but to better understand its persistence in the present, reveal its hold on the contemporary political imagination, and glimpse political possibilities beyond its horizon. The Federalist offers a canonical case in point, and the essays in this symposium have pushed me to clarify and develop my own thinking on the Founders’ authority and its limits; on the relationship between founding, violence, and exclusion; and on the distinctions between radical democracy and liberal constitutionalism.
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Notes
Martin Diamond, “Democracy and The Federalist: A Reconsideration of the Framers’ Intent,” American Political Science Review 53 (March 1959): 52–68, at 53.
See, for example, Chiara Bottici, Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Yaron Ezrahi, Imagined Democracies: Necessary Political Fictions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and the essays in Nikolas Kompridis, ed., The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014).
Garry Wills, Explaining America: The Federalist (New York: Doubleday, 1981).
Jason Frank, Publius and Political Imagination (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 1–9, 56–59, 153–54.
Susan McWilliams, “Finding Foundings: The Case of Fabius,” Polity 47 (October 2015): 542–49, at 544.
The Federalist, ed. Jacob E. Cooke (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 594. On authors and founding authority in The Federalist, see also Simon Gilhooley, “The Framers Themselves: Constitutional Authorship during the Ratification,” American Political Thought 2 (Spring 2013): 62–88.
McWilliams, “Finding Foundings,” 545.
Ibid., 545
Ibid., 547
Rogers Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); see, for a brief example, Sheldon Wolin’s interpretation of The Federalist in “The People’s Two Bodies,” Democracy 1 (January 1981): 9–16.
Lawrie Balfour, “Reading Publius with Morrison and Melville,” Polity 47 (October 2015): 550–57.
Balfour, “Reading Publius with Morrison and Melville,” 552.
Ibid.
Ibid., 553
The Federalist, 368.
Cited in Frank, Publius and Political Imagination, 83.
Jack Turner, “The Constitution of Radical Democracy,” Polity 47 (October 2015): 558–65, at 561.
Turner, “Constitution of Radical Democracy.”
Marc Stears, Demanding Democracy: American Radicals in Search of a New Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 5. He is citing John Dewey’s “Democracy is Radical,” Common Sense 6 (1937): 10–11.
Turner, “Constitution of Radical Democracy,” 565.
Ibid., 565.
Foucault invokes the “blackmail of the Enlightenment” in “What is Enlightenment?” in The Essential Works of Foucault, Volume I: Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997).
Turner, “Constitution of Radical Democracy,” 565.
Ibid., 563.
Balfour, “Reading Publius with Morrison and Melville.”
I elaborate on this point in “Pathologies of Freedom in Melville’s America,” in Radical Future Pasts: Untimely Essays in Political Theory, ed. Rom Coles, Mark Reinhardt, and George Shulman (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014), 435–58.
Turner, “Constitution of Radical Democracy,” 562.
Jürgen Habermas, “Constitutional Democracy: A Paradoxical Union of Contradictory Principles?” Political Theory 29 (August 2001): 766–81.
Duncan Bell, “What is Liberalism?” Political Theory 42 (December 2014): 682–715, 689.
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Frank, J. Democratic Imagination at the Brink. Polity 47, 566–575 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2015.23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2015.23