Jason Frank’s profound and important new book, The Democratic Sublime, reenergizes the study of democratic power by showing how its most vibrant form is popular assembly. Crowds, barricades, protests, rallies, and demonstrations actively create democracy through the “physical assemblage of popular collectives in public space” (p. 2). Popular assemblies work to generate the people in action, constitute the grounds of popular legitimacy, and even produce the people as a political subject. As such, they are even more essential to democratic practice than the deliberative processes or institutional structures of legitimacy highlighted in many democratic theories of constituent power. Messy, unauthorized, and sometimes tumultuous, political assemblies can seem an embarrassment to ideal theories of critical or rational deliberation. They are thus generally deemphasized or ignored: the focus on deliberation overshadows the centrality of passionate spectacle and sensorial improvisation to democratic life, while the priority given to laws and norms elides the importance of bodies pressed together in public.

The Democratic Sublime asks how assemblies came to represent the people’s authority: how did a crowd appear not as a wild riot but as a collective will? Frank argues that imaginative renderings of the people are crucial, as “imaginary investments of peoplehood mediate the people’s relationship to their own political empowerment—how they understand themselves to be a part of and act as a people” (p. 5). Primarily focusing on nineteenth-century democratic revolutions, Frank carefully excavates how the “we” of popular assembly was imaginatively figured, how the people became “tangible to the senses” when there were no prior guideposts for their emergence. In this, Frank makes a second key intervention in the study of democracy: the best way to apprehend the manifestation of the people is through aesthetics. The people often appear as a collective through the senses, and aesthetics mediate the paradoxical project of identifying the people in advance of their becoming. Because the people are not unitary or singular but multiple and shifting, never all in one place and always exceeding their boundaries, Frank examines works that differently imagine and sensorially manifest this fluctuating and elusive subject.

In the revolutionary age, the emergence of democracy required new feelings of shared power, new performances of collective action, and new attachments to strangers: this heady mixture constitutes the core of what Frank calls the “democratic sublime.” The democratic sublime names the collective fantasies and potent, disruptive affects that shape people’s felt experiences of democracy and their role in creating it. It is varyingly expressed in photography, fiction, etchings, memoirs, festivals, and paintings, as well as in theoretical writing on lived sensorial experiences, although the sublimity of the people always exceeds any given representation. By focusing on the sublime the book asks a fundamentally aesthetic question—how the people appear—and answers it using Schmitt’s and Rosanvallon’s theories of popular manifestation (chapter 1); Rousseau’s assemblies and festivals (chapter 2); “living images” of popular will during the revolutionary age (chapter 3); Burke’s writings on the sublime and the horror of democratic authority (chapter 4); aesthetic renderings of French insurrectionary barricades (chapter 5); Tocqueville’s interest in democratic affects yet terror of collective agency (chapter 6); and the daily, lived manifestations of democratic appearance elaborated in Jacques Rancière’s philosophy and the contemporary artist Glenn Ligon’s paintings (Afterword).

The Democratic Sublime highlights visual culture as central for “how to image and envision the people as a collective actor” (p. 25). The sublime images Frank examines often depict bodies in motion while massed together—including etchings of the French revolution, Ligon’s paintings of Black gathering, and that most famous political image, Hobbes’ frontispiece to Leviathan. Frank argues that Hobbes’ frontispiece is not just an illustration but an interpellation, which offers a new visual iconography of power that redirects the affective investments of its readers. The image petitions readers not primarily to experience awe in kingly splendor but to sense themselves among the people pressed together as the sovereign body; the frontispiece both visually shifts the sensorium of sovereignty and cultivates openness to collective peoplehood before the text even begins. The Democratic Sublime also explores other aesthetic realms: it investigates the more ineffable role of affect by analyzing the relationship between democracy, awe, and horror in Burke, and the terror of collective history expressed by Tocqueville. These displeasurable sensations capture some of the overpowering sublimity of revolutionary democracy, even when they emanate from those who fear democracy’s overturning of traditional authority or erasure of individual agency.

Drawing on Rousseau—the first modern theorist of the assembly—Frank also creatively examines the democratic experience of sound, asking what popular sovereignty sounds like. Rousseau’s assemblies and festivals create a “spectacle of collective self-regard … where the gathered people revel in their own public appearance,” yet Frank notes, provocatively and counterintuitively, that in the Social Contract the self-regard of popular assembly is often mute (p. 61). It is configured neither as a deliberative body, nor even a raucous meeting, but as a relatively silent collective in awe that it is the foundation of sovereign power. Through the spectacle of silent assembly the participants feel themselves together as a self-engendered popular will, and gain “the sublime experience of collective co-presence” (p. 45). Yet I found that this muted collective confounds the exercise of sovereignty: What is a collective will if it doesn’t ultimately determine, or govern, or articulate a will? How do people figure a common purpose in silence? If sovereignty is arguably about the decision, how are collective decisions made here?

I might suggest, in the spirit of the democratic sublime, that even if the assembly is silent it could articulate collective will in different aesthetic registers. Rousseau himself offers this possibility in his famous one-scene lyrical drama Pygmalion, written the very same year as The Social Contract (1762). Pygmalion is where Rosseau invented the now-global melodramatic form; mélodrame—in Rousseau’s coinage—addresses audiences with expressive gestures, and with emotive music (melos) that communicate more potently than words alone the feelings and power of a moment. They convey inner sentiments outward that connect people to one another through powerful identifications. With Pygmalion in mind, perhaps a coordinating power for Rousseau’s assembly is found in the participants’ inventive gestures that together help form collective will. Could there be new gestural practices that help the people determine their common purpose? Drawing on Pygmalion is complicated insofar as it is a theatrical scene, and as Frank shows, Rousseau fears the passivity induced in theater, where spectators are pandered to for applause rather than motivated to establish new collective subjectivities. Yet all theatrical affects need not be excluded from politics, for as Rousseau suggests through Pygmalion, gestures and melos assist the subjective transformations needed for democratic citizenship. Might they help cultivate nondiscursive ways of determining collective will?

If The Democratic Sublime shows how assemblies “made the people’s presence available to the senses” then, as that quote suggests, other senses can be just as powerful as vision, sound, and affect for shaping collective assembly. I wonder: How do people touch in popular assembly? How do they smell, and what kinds of new smells and touches are generated when the people become the protagonists of politics? For one, there must have been a lot of body odor at the barricades, certainly more than in a deliberative chamber or a Habermasian democratic café. The July revolution of 1830, which Frank brilliantly explores, was in midsummer and likely a hot stinker. The revolutionary barricades were constituted in part by the lubricating sweat of moving and odorous bodies pressed up against other sweaty strangers. This extra-close but impersonal intimacy surely smelled distinct from both perfumed kingly splendor and from the relatively more scrubbed odors of constitutional deliberation. As Frank notes, the sublime is never about beauty and order as much as about intensity, astonishment, and overwhelming affect. Perhaps a focus on touch and smell can deepen our understanding of democracy’s sublime as a funky potent brew culturing a new democratic sensorium. Popular manifestation would therefore include the aromatics of overclose bodies, newly experienced not as disgusting rabble but as individuals intensely fermenting into public collectivity.

Most of the book excavates the history of popular manifestation in and around the nineteenth century, especially in France, but also includes contemporary examples like the Egyptian revolutionary assemblies in Tahrir Square and Ligon’s art. They each beautifully illustrate Frank’s claim that popular assemblies are imaginatively brought into being all the time. This leads me to end with a final question about new yet more troublesome popular gatherings: Was the Capitol Riot sublime? Its participants manifested a reconfigured “we the people” that aimed to take sovereign power back from those they envisioned to be its usurpers. Many Americans imagined their act as an incarnation of popular will. The problem of the Capitol riot was not merely that it enacted violence against state power, since that kind of violence has been part of barricades and other forms of popular revolutionary manifestation in the past. The bigger problem is its claim to speak for the people, whom it manifests through whiteness, heteropatriarchy, and xenophobia. How can we best interpret a claim of popular manifestation made by a “we” we reject, that practices a politics we refuse? How do we deny it without recapitulating a Burkean condemnation of the horror and disgust of crowds we don’t support arrogating power for a people we don’t align with? What resources within the democratic sublime can help us distinguish revolutionary from reactionary manifestation?

It is a testament to the capacious inventiveness of The Democratic Sublime that it opens to new interpretations of democratic will and pressing questions of popular manifestation. It insists that democracy’s sublime is more affectively intense than typically depicted, and also more fully and deeply embodied. Frank’s historical approach to politico-aesthetic realms revivifies past appearances of the people, while it also and crucially instigates new ways to imagine the power of assembly today. Indeed, it encourages us to see, hear, touch, and feel democracy anew. This galvanizing book is a major intervention that remakes democratic theory through its learned, and uncompromising, focus on imagining the appearance of the people, and excavating democracy’s affectively overpowering, indeed sublime, manifestations.