Description: What is the hangman but a servant of law? And what is that law but an expression of public opinion? And if public opinion be brutal and thou a component part thereof, art thou not the hangman's accomplice?Writing in 1842, Lydia Maria Child articulates a crisis in the relationship of democracy to sovereign power that continues to occupy political theory today. Is sovereignty fundamentally inimical to democracy? Or might a more fully realized democracy distribute, share, and popularize sovereignty, thus blunting its exceptional character and basic violence?Drawing on Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, along with work by Gustave de Beaumont, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, Greiman tracks the crises of sovereign power as it migrates out of the state to become a constitutive feature of the public sphere. Bringing together literature and political theory, she argues that the antebellum public sphere emerges as a spectacle with investments in both punishment and entertainment.
Brief description: JENNIFER GREIMAN is Assistant Professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY.
Review Quotes: In Democracy's Spectacle, Jennifer Greiman advances a complex, nuanced, and original argument about the contradictions of antebellum popular sovereignty and their virulent expression in public spectacles, and in writing and theorizing about such spectacles. This searching study will be compelling reading for those wondering about the roots of our current failures of political imagination.-----Jonathan Elmer, Indiana University