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Jason Frank
Gary S. Davis Assistant Professor in Political Thought
Cornell University
3:00 p.m.
5670 Haven Hall
Publius and Political Imagination
ABSTRACT: The Federalist is commonly read as a preeminent example of political realism. However, alongside Publius' familiar arguments against the enthusiastic imagination--its tendency to inflame the passions, betray the intellect, and subvert political authority--are constructive appeals to the imagination's role in reconstituting the public authority so shaken during the post-Revolutionary years. The Federalist relied on an implicit theory of the imagination--partly vernacular but also taken from Hume's Essays--to make the case for constitutional ratification. This essay explores three central aspects of The Federalist's restorative appeal to the imagination: the public veneration required for sustaining political authority across time; the strategies for shifting citizen loyalty from the state and local level to that of a newly energized federal government; and the aesthetically alluring portrayals of national unity. These three aspects of Publius' argument make up the core of the Federalist aesthetics of rule.
Jason Frank (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University) is the Gary S. Davis Assistant Professor in the History of Political Thought in the Government Department at Cornell University. His primary field is political theory and his research and teaching interests include democratic theory, American political thought, politics and literature, the philosophy of political inquiry, and historiographical theory.
Professor Frank's most recent research focuses on the political discourses of late eighteenth-century America. He is particularly interested in how competing attempts to ground public authority in "popular voice" in the years following the American Revolution revealed paradoxes in democratic theory and engendered improvisational enactments in democratic practice. Professor Frank's research works at the intersection of contemporary democratic theory and contextual historical analysis.
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The Michigan Colloquium in Political Theory is sponsored by the College of Letters, Sciences and the Arts, the Rackham School of Graduate Studies, and the Department of Political Science. |