Since the American Revolution, there has been broad cultural
consensus that "the people" are the only legitimate ground of
public authority in the United States. For just as long, there has
been disagreement over who the people are and how they should be
represented or institutionally embodied. In "Constituent Moments,"
Jason Frank explores this dilemma of authorization: the grounding
of democratic legitimacy in an elusive notion of the people. Frank
argues that the people are not a coherent or sanctioned collective.
Instead, the people exist as an "effect "of successful claims to
speak on their behalf; the power to speak in their name can be
vindicated only retrospectively. The people, and democratic
politics more broadly, emerge from the dynamic tension between
popular politics and representation. They spring from what Frank
calls "constituent moments," moments when claims to speak in the
people's name are politically felicitous, even though those making
such claims break from established rules and procedures for
representing popular voice.
Elaborating his theory of constituent moments, Frank focuses on
specific historical instances when under-authorized individuals or
associations seized the mantle of authority, and, by doing so,
changed the inherited rules of authorization and produced new
spaces and conditions for political representation. He looks at
crowd actions such as parades, riots, and protests; the
Democratic-Republican Societies of the 1790s; and the writings of
Walt Whitman and Frederick Douglass. Frank demonstrates that the
revolutionary establishment of the people is not a solitary event,
but rather a series of micropolitical enactments, small dramas of
self-authorization that take place in the informal contexts of
crowd actions, political oratory, and literature as well as in the
more formal settings of constitutional conventions and political
associations.
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