Abstract
The crises of the American republic—from climate change to economic inequality to overextended empire—make the subject of political imagination pressing. What future do we want for ourselves? How do we reconcile that vision with empirical reality? Political imagination concerns the scope and shape of the possible. Democratic theorist Jason Frank makes conflicts over political imagination the center of his scholarship. This symposium focuses on his recent work. That work helps us address two significant challenges in democratic struggles over political imagination. First, how does a democratic people wanting to make a new start, to revolutionize the polity, orient itself to the founding myths of society, especially when those myths—such as that of the American founders—have such a strong hold on public imagination? Second, how can a democratic people recover the transformative power and possibility of the idea of “the people” that authorized the work of the founders, and that may authorize their supersession? This introduction outlines the contours of the Polity symposium on “Political Imagination and The Problem of Founding: The Work of Jason Frank” and provides background on Frank’s scholarship.
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Notes
Debra Javeline, “The Most Important Topic Political Scientists Are Not Studying: Adapting to Climate Change,” Perspectives on Politics 12 (June 2014): 420–34; Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, 4th edn. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014); Jeanne Morefield, Empires without Imperialism: Anglo-American Decline and the Politics of Deflection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Rebecca U. Thorpe, The American Warfare State: The Domestic Politics of Military Spending (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Herbert J. Storing, What the Anti-Federalists Were For: The Political Thought of the Opponents of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
Sheldon S. Wolin, “insightfully explores the relationship between power and powerlessness in modern political experience”, in Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics 12 (September 2014): 564–81.
Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” ([1856] 1891–92), in Poetry and Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), 308.
My formulations on political desire are indebted to Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), Chapter 3.
Jason Frank, Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 7–8.
Ibid., 8.
Ibid., 39. For an instructive discussion of the theoretical significance of Constituent Moments, see Morton Schoolman and Kennan Ferguson, “Series Editors’ Introduction,” in Jason Frank, Publius and Political Imagination (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), xiii–xxi.
Frank, Publius and Political Imagination, 21.
Ibid., 60.
Ibid., 62–63.
Ibid., 138–39.
Jason Frank, ed., “Introduction: American Tragedy: The Political Thought of Herman Melville,” in A Political Companion to Herman Melville, (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013), 8–9.
Susan McWilliams, “Finding Foundings: The Case of Fabius,” Polity 47 (October 2015): 542–49, at 546.
Lawrie Balfour, “Reading Publius with Morrison and Melville,” Polity 47 (October 2015): 550–57, at 550.
Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).
Jack Turner, “The Constitution of Radical Democracy,” Polity 47 (October, 2015): 558–65.
“The Meaning of Love in Politics: A Letter by Hannah Arendt to James Baldwin,” HannahArendt.net, http://www.hannaharendt.net/index.php/han/article/view/95/156, accessed on November 13, 2014.
Jason Frank, “Democratic Imagination at the Brink,” Polity 47 (October 2015): 566–75 at 566.
Ibid., 574.
Frank, Constituent Moments, 254.
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Thanks to Cyrus Zirakzadeh, Roger Karapin, Leonard Feldman, and the anonymous reviewers at Polity for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this symposium.
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Turner, J. Introduction: Crises of the Republic. Polity 47, 535–541 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2015.25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2015.25