Jason Frank's Presentation on Insurgent Citizenship in American Society

The next meeting of the ICR's project on Communications, Culture, and Policy, funded by the Ford Foundation, will be held on Friday, January 30, at 1:30 p.m. in the Peterson Conference Room (231 Gregory Hall). The very distinguished speaker will be Jason Frank, Visiting Assistant Professor at Northwestern University. The title of his talk is: "Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship: Theorizing America's Democratic-Republican Societies."

ABSTRACT American social science has experienced a neo-Tocquevillian revival in recent years, exploring the myriad ways institutions on the levels of state, family, and, especially, civil society create background conditions for "healthy" citizenship in liberal democratic regimes. Following the influential work of Robert Putnam, this literature has emphasized the centrality of cohesion, regime participation, and "social capital" to a viable democratic politics. Jason Frank critically engages this trend in contemporary social scientific research and its underlying normative commitments through a historically-situated study of the Democratic-Republican Societies of the 1790's (DRS). By providing spaces through which "constant action" was enabled, and the "spirit of liberty" sustained, the Democratic-Republican Societies enacted and reenacted a republican political drama that educated citizens in the agonistic practices of free citizenship. In fact, the educative drama was arguably the most important part of the action. The DRS were not primarily sites of political deliberation, but of political declamation; their members feared first and foremost the loss of their Revolutionary birthright, their hard-won politicalness itself. Understanding the DRS's revision of prevailing practices of democratic citizenship not only critically illuminates the civilitarian norms governing some contemporary social scientific research, but, more importantly, directs attention to the paucity of such spaces of political subjectivization in contemporary political life.

Background Readings:

Reinhardt, Mark: The Art of Being Free (chapter 5)
Warren, Mark E.: Democracy and Association (chapter 4)

Jason Frank was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Northwestern University before joining the Government Department at Cornell in 2004. He is co-editor of Vocations of Political Theory (University of Minnesota, 2000), and his work has appeared in Theory & Event and Socialist Review. An essay on political enthusiasm is also forthcoming at Public Culture. Currently he is revising a book manuscript, entitled Democratic Enactment: Passion and Improvisation in Post-revolutionary America, which explores the emergence and transformation of democratic sensibilities in early American political culture.