Imagined Sovereignties: The Power of the People and Other Myths of the Modern Age [Hardcover ed.] 1107113237, 9781107113237

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Imagined Sovereignties The Power of the People and Other Myths of the Modern Age

KEVIN OLSON University of California, Irvine

32 Avenue of the Americas, New York NY 10013 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107113237 © Kevin Olson 2016 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2016 A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Olson, Kevin, author. Title: Imagined sovereignties : the power of the people and other myths of the modern age / Kevin Olson, University of California, Irvine. Description: New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015051222 | ISBN 9781107113237 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Political participation – Social aspects. | Identity politics. | Group identity – Political aspects. | Sovereignty. Classification: LCC JF799.O54 2016 | DDC 323/.042–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015051222 ISBN 978-1-107-11323-7 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Acknowledgments

page ix

1. Imagining Politics 2. “Sovereignty Is an Artificial Soul”: Ernesto Laclau and Benedict Anderson in Dialogue 3. How Do We Write a History of Normative Practices?: Castoriadis, Taylor, Foucault 4. The Problem of the People in Enlightenment France: A Short Genealogy of Political Collectivity 5. Chimeras of Political Identity: Intermediate Reflections on the Pathways of Political Imagination 6. Sovereign Imaginaries of the Revolutionary Caribbean 7. Conscripted by Modernity?: Imagining Sovereignty in the Wake of Colonialism 8. Imagining the Power of the People: Critical Reflections on the Sovereignties of Our Time

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Notes Bibliography Index

183 203 215

18 39 54 93 110 144

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Acknowledgments

I’m fortunate to have many talented and wonderful colleagues. My daily conversations with Daniel Brunstetter, Kamal Sadiq, and Keith Topper have contributed a great deal to my thinking about the themes in this book. I greatly appreciate Jason Frank’s insightful comments on the manuscript, as well as many other conversations along the way. I’d also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their mix of encouragement, rigor, and constructive criticism. For valuable comments on various parts of the manuscript, conversation, and advice, I’m very grateful to Amy Allen, Étienne Balibar, James Bohman, Maeve Cooke, Joshua Dienstag, David Easton, Eva Erman, Sarah Farmer, Raúl Fernández, Catherine Fisk, Nancy Fraser, Alexander Gelley, David Theo Goldberg, Michael Hanchard, David Ingram, Arlene Keizer, Claire Kim, Nikolas Kompridis, Colin Koopman, Cristina Lafont, Horacio Legras, Julia Reinhard Lupton, James Martel, Lyle Massey, Bill Maurer, Kirstie McClure, Sofia Näsström, Andrew Norris, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, Carole Pateman, Mark Poster, William Scheuerman, Ralph Shain, Timothy Tackett, Antonio Vazquez-Arroyo, Brian Walker, and Christopher Zurn. Robert Dreesen at the Cambridge University Press has been a joy to work with, and I’m very grateful to him for sharing my enthusiasm for this work. The Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine, is a wonderful intellectual home and source of inspiration to think otherwise. Special thanks to my colleagues in the Institute for their generous measures of stimulation and provocation. A small friend once asked what I do for a living. Grasping for an explanation she might understand, I said “I write books.” She thought about this for a second, then asked, “Picture books or chapter books?” This is a chapter book, but it does have a couple of pictures. For permission to reproduce them, I’m grateful to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and Google Labs. Those institutions as well as the Archives Nationales de France and the Newberry Library ix

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have my gratitude for access to their collections. Ghislaine and Olivier Taxy deserve special thanks for their warm hospitality and friendship during my time in Paris. Funding to pursue this project was provided by a Faculty Career Development Award from the University of California, as well as grants from the Critical Theory Institute, the Center in Law, Society, and Culture, and the Council on Research, Computing, and Libraries at the University of California, Irvine. Above all, my warmest thanks to my extended family and friends for their support and welcome distractions, especially my parents Richard and Florence and my sisters Shannon and Mikaela. And finally, Ulrike is always my first audience and most thoughtful interlocutor.

1 Imagining Politics

They turn the sovereign into a fantastic being made of interconnected pieces. It is as if they built a man out of several bodies, one of which had eyes, another had arms, another feet, and nothing more. . . . After having taken apart the social body by means of a sleight-of-hand worthy of a carnival, they put the pieces back together who knows how. – Jean-Jacques Rousseau1

This has been an era of Velvet Revolutions, Tea Parties, and Arab Springs. Ever since the depolarization of the Cold War blocs in 1989, a series of widely celebrated political events has played out across the globe, expanding the scope of democracy, self-determination, and freedom. It has occurred most recently in North Africa and the Middle East, where popular insurgencies have won hard-fought victories against hard-line governments and entrenched dictators. Although quite different from one another in culture, tactics, aims, and circumstance, these upheavals share a family resemblance. They are all seen as democratic movements based in some kind of popular unity and collective action. Meanwhile, restless energies have been at work in the United States as well. The Tea Party movement has cut a large swath through American politics in the early part of the century, seeking to liberate itself from the tyranny of a “socialist” presidential administration. The massive capital backing this libertarian insurgency is somewhat at odds with its claims to be a grassroots movement. Perhaps to relieve these tensions, the movement operates in the name of the patriotic values of the American founding. With similarly popular claims, the Occupy Wall Street movement has mobilized against neoliberal corporate finance and elite privilege. Framing itself as “the 99 percent,” this movement wears the mantle of popular universalism in opposition to the “1  percent” whose economic and political power require the power of the people as a countervailing opposition. 1

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Europe has its own concerns about the people and their powers. As the financial crisis of the early millennium spread across the Atlantic, European governments initiated unwise austerity programs that sparked widespread protest. This mobilization has occurred at times under the banner of “the people of Europe,” and at other times under the banners of component national peoples, particularly those of Greece and Spain. It provokes broader questions about the ambiguous sovereignty of the European Union: how can we conceive the fragmented and multilayered structure of European politics – as well as the protests against it – as manifestations of popular power? Can there be a “people of Europe” subtending the European Union, and if so, how does it relate to various European peoples and their distinctive cultures? If one mobilizes in the name of “the people” in Europe, which people is that, exactly? While the power of the people often evokes images of mass marches, street protests, Molotov cocktails against Soviet tanks, or the Rebel Alliance against Imperial storm troopers, the idea has migrated into many other areas of contemporary society. In recent decades, it has become connected to ideas of consumer choice in the marketplace through green consumer and ethical consumer movements. This amounts to an extension of progressive politics into new domains: boycotts, a politicization of consumption, attempts to reinject values and politics into the economic sphere, and a denial of the boundary between politics and the economy, all oriented toward bringing the economic sphere under greater popular control. At the same time, the increasing sophistication of the Internet has given the power of the people new life as a postindustrial epistemic project. The proliferation of wikis, blogs, and other forms of do-it-yourself new media amounts to a de-expertization of knowledge and commentary. In this new world, millions of ordinary voices replace the centralized authority of a few officially sanctioned ones. The novel practices that have sprung up around these new technologies promise a grassroots revolution in the production and distribution of knowledge. In all of these upheavals, we see the central importance of popular politics in the contemporary political scene. The power of the people is one of the most cherished ideas of the modern political imagination. Over the course of several centuries, it has provided the basis for countless political movements and governmental formations:  antimonarchical revolutions, anticolonial rebellions, anti-imperial separations, postnationalist movements for ethnic self-determination, and grassroots insurgencies and social movements of all kinds. It continues to provide one of our favored notions of democratic sovereignty and popular politics. It underpins the normative force of democracy and democratization, providing them with a kind of sanctity and taken-for-granted rectitude in our political imagination. In this sense, popular politics enjoys a presumption of goodness, and democratization is increasingly seen as a cure-all to thorny geopolitical, religious, and ethnic problems.

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The importance of popular politics has not been without ambivalence, however. The democratization of the Soviet Empire has gone hand in hand with the universalization of capitalism and the dismantling of the social service apparatus of the old socialist states. Although the value of political freedom seems unambiguous, citizens have borne substantial costs while the new states figure out how to regulate freshly unleashed capitalist energies. In several cases, the result has been a popular embrace of totalitarian and corrupt governments. Similarly, the democratic revolutions of the Arab Spring have been received with some confusion in the developed West. Although popular politics has a privileged status, it quickly acquires a bad taste for many observers when flavored with religious fundamentalism. This hearkens back to an earlier generation of popular revolutions – in Cuba, Chile, and Nicaragua, for example – that were greeted with enthusiasm until they took a turn toward socialism. In all of these cases, the power of the people has a strong sanctity, but at times it runs afoul of other commitments due to dissonance among deeply held beliefs. The power of the people displays similar tensions in domestic politics. Because such ideas are built deeply into our common sense, they can also be employed for cynical and instrumental purposes. Thus we see them being used even where that use seems tortuous and strained. This happens, for example, when popular politics is instrumentally appropriated in forms of “populism.” As an electoral strategy, populism presumes or recognizes the power of the people. It works by identifying a candidate or regime with popular interests and tastes, borrowing the normativity of the people through association. This borrowing can be as rich as claiming that a candidate is “of the people,” or as thin as playing off the numerical superiority of the voting individuals who would so identify themselves. In either case, the deep cultural currency and indeterminate character of popular power allow it to be instrumentalized in this way. This phenomenon provides a vivid demonstration that it is much easier to work with the cultural grain than against it, employing taken-for-granted ideas to accomplish one’s ends. The power of the people can be pressed into service as a form of justification, even when this produces considerable distortion of the underlying ideas. As different as these instances are, they share a common concern with the power of the people as a standard of legitimate politics. The power of the people tends to operate as a primary premise from which other conclusions are drawn. It anchors other values by providing an initial point from which to proceed. Yet, the events I have surveyed also give us some inkling of the ways in which this ideal is troubled by tensions and problematics. It is quite unclear why the power of the people deserves such unquestioning devotion and what we might say by way of criticizing it. As a result, it tends to be immune from scrutiny – or even worse, not seen as the kind of ideal one might think to question. This removes some of the most important issues from the table: a whole

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constellation of problems about what the power of the people is, how it can be collectively exercised, and why it should be considered such a compelling ideal. These lacunae make it all the more pressing to take a close look at the power of the people. We need to achieve more clarity about its nuances, how it is invoked, and when it is being employed cynically to promote other ends. Popular politics is seen as simultaneously compelling and unproblematic, in spite of its considerable tensions and problems. It is uncritically assumed, indiscriminately used, diluted, and cynically twisted to a multitude of other purposes. Seemingly any aspect of democratic society can be alleged as a manifestation of popular power, even those that are least democratic. The very ubiquity of this idea drains it of meaning, dulls its critical edge, and diminishes its rhetorical and normative force. It is worth asking exactly why we see the people as having power, and whether it makes sense to export this ideal – by force or otherwise – to the rest of the “nondemocratic” world. As we have recently seen in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, one cannot simply adopt Western European models without careful thought. To the extent that European liberal democracy is a historically specific experiment, we need to ask probing questions about its conceptual heritage, its internal architecture, what is generalizable and what is specific and limited. In this book I  will interrogate “the power of the people” as a dominant concept for understanding popular politics. The critical challenge is to bring this idea back into vivid attention while stripping away the calcified clichés and associations that render it banal. We must recognize that such ideas structure the political, award agency and authorization, determine the boundaries of the possible, and valorize certain kinds of mobilizations. Thus it is important to examine their nuances and tease out their different forms and variations. This will be a story of magic, enchantment, and transformation. It tells of the magic of having one’s beliefs become reality; the enchantment of conjuring fictitious beings into active life; and the transformation of individuals into collectivities and collectivities into sovereign entities. I  bring this enchanted world to light not to make it melt away in the harsh glare of critical scrutiny, however, but to better understand the ways in which it enchants us. By rendering the familiar foreign, we gain critical perspective on something that surrounds us every day. Because of its stature as a cornerstone of the Western self-understanding, the power of the people has the potential to obscure as much as it reveals. Indeed, there is a stark contrast between the overwhelming prevalence of this image and the degree to which we understand what it actually means. As a taken-for-granted account of the political, the power of the people significantly forecloses detailed understandings of what is being proposed. Its uncritical use can obscure other kinds of power and a variety of political ideals that may or may not fit under the heading of “democracy.” Indeed, one of “the people’s” primary “powers” is justification: it tends to end conversations

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rather than stimulate them. A properly critical view would disrupt such cynical and strategic justifications, revealing hidden strategies of power by reopening dialogue about what popular politics is and why. This line of criticism should start with our favored concepts and most obviously intuitive metaphors. Only by subjecting these received ideas to scrutiny, can we think in new and different ways about popular politics and the cluster of concepts connected to it. This project requires a better critical understanding of a whole host of concepts in which normative force is attributed to collective identities. This includes peoples, nations, crowds, masses, mobs, social movements, publics, and dispersed networks of communication and opinion. It encompasses the various powers, sovereignty, rectitude, or sanctified agency they are perceived to have. It asks how we understand the normative force of social movements, how such collectivities acquire normative force, and what kind of normative force they acquire. To some extent, this project requires a return to past languages and deployments. It is a recuperative enterprise, seeking to unearth ways of thinking that we have forgotten and clear away paths not taken. At the same time, it is a project of liberation. I will try to open up a space of indetermination in our thinking about popular politics. This will be by means of revealing tensions and problematics that have been there from the beginning. All of this has the virtue of taking something that seems simple and obvious and revealing it to be complex, unstable, and filled with tensions, problematics, and complications. This effort of problematization will take the form of a simultaneously critical and historical investigation. It brings important contemporary work on collective identity and political imaginaries into dialogue with the archives of popular politics. My studies here will probe a span of eighteenth-century-French history, a period of Haitian history immediately before the Revolution, and Haitian constitutional history in the nineteenth century. They are aimed at our collective imagination: the way popular politics forms into political imaginaries that set the terms of our political relations and constitute institutions and practices. They reveal the processes through which political norms are created, highlighting the unique, incomplete, and in-process character of political normativity. All of this emphasizes the pliability and plasticity of our notions of popular power. By drawing out these details, I hope to disaggregate overly stylized ideas about popular politics. My goal is to focus attention where the real action is – our collective imaginaries and their sources – and to open up new possibilities for imagining popular politics.

Folk Paradigms of Politics Why do we believe in ideas like “the power of the people,” and what exactly is it that we believe in? These ideas have become such a commonplace that we forget they are creatures of our own invention. Even in an era when natural

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rights and self-evident truths (“We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .”) have been thoroughly discredited, the image of popular sovereignty retains a tight hold on our collective imagination. The power of the people functions as a folk paradigm of political belief. It is a set of shared ideas about how politics ought to be conducted and on what it ought to be based.2 Like other forms of socially current, culturally embedded belief, it holds together in its own special way and circulates widely in a relatively unquestioned matter. At times, such folk beliefs may go entirely unrecognized because they are so thoroughly taken for granted. Yet they bind our conduct, precisely because we find them so natural and true. In this sense, such beliefs have an important function. They structure our relations with one another, organize cooperative endeavors, and provide us with a shared body of knowledge about the social world. These beliefs have both factual and normative content: they postulate a meaningful collectivity that we refer to as “the people,” endowing it with particular forms of power. To say that the power of the people is a shared and taken-for-granted idea is not the same as saying that it is universally accepted or universally agreed upon. Acceptance is a voluntaristic concept. It describes ideas that a given person is willing to embrace after coming to understand them in a careful way. My concern with ideas like the power of the people is rather the opposite: it is not given careful attention or thematized for judgment. Instead, it is part of the wallpaper of our shared world, something that we see without seeing. It is so deeply embedded in our cultural common sense that it escapes notice. Even when we do notice it, it is a commonplace that is immunized from careful scrutiny. It is not subject to acceptance or rational consideration because, for the most part, it bypasses the channels of such consideration. Neither is the power of the people universally agreed upon. There are people who are aware of this idea and disagree with it. They fight an uphill battle, however, in making their agreement known and arguing for it. They face the challenge of bringing something to attention that, for most people, is invisible. In contemporary democratic cultures we see the people as having power, and that is the end of the story. Why would anyone need to discuss this further? Even if they can successfully thematize these issues, such critics face a second challenge: arguing against something that seems to be true. The naturalization of the power of the people runs so deep that the burden of proof is much higher to those who would oppose it, to the extent that their arguments even make sense. If Sir Robert Filmer tried to persuade a contemporary audience that kings have a natural sovereignty based on their shared descent from Adam, while the supposed liberty of the people is unnatural, he would face baffled incomprehension. There are people today, of course, who have ideas of natural hierarchy and deny that the people possess any special authority. Their arguments struggle for acceptance against the overwhelming, silent consensus of a more pervasive set of commitments, however, that privilege notions of egalitarianism and popular power.

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The power of the people is not alone in this character. It is one of a small group of concepts that are deeply submerged in our cultural common sense and have a foundational character in discourse and practice. Ideas like the freedom of the market, individual autonomy, equality, and liberty are high on the list. Like the power of the people, there is neither consensus about the particulars of these ideas nor universal acceptance of them. What sets them apart is their naturalization in our collective imaginaries. They circulate freely and often in conflict with one another. They can be invoked at will, twisted and turned in various ways, and put to many uses, often quite cynically. They are mobile cultural fragments that travel independently of one another and are assembled in a variety of ways. These elements form larger imaginary constellations, but in an unfixed and sometimes contradictory way. They can coincide, cohere, and/ or clash with one another. One faces an uphill and counterintuitive battle to argue against them, however. They are culturally entrenched in a rather nonrational, unarticulated manner. Because of their deeply situated, heavily naturalized character, such ideas have a disproportionate influence on our politics. As a result, they merit close attention. When certain items of belief become fixed points around which we arrange the rest of our world, they take on a dogmatic character and occlude critical insight. Our thinking about popular politics shows such tendencies in at least four ways. These are not universal or always-present characteristics. Rather, they are polymorphous and transposable elements, Leitmotive that form recognizable tendencies in our thinking. We can refer to them as four dogmas of popular politics. 1. Folk foundationalism. The idea of an independent, self-legitimating people, nation, or community has an enormous hold on our thinking. Collectivities like the people are often perceived to act with natural rectitude. When the people take to the streets, when they declare their will in an election or voice a consensual opinion, we hold them to be inherently correct. We see politics as most rightfully conducted by groups like the people, and their actions in this domain carry a moral weight not borne by individuals or institutions. There is a strong naturalism in this kind of thinking. The power of the people seems so natural that it often passes our attention unnoticed. It becomes part of the largely unthematized, unreflexive, habitual thought and action that routinize our everyday activities. The natural rectitude of the people is not an explicitly held view. Rather, it is a diffuse orientation that confers a presumption of correctness. This is largely an unreflective attitude, an unquestioned, basic assumption, a form of taken-for-granted legitimacy. It has a character of undeniability, so that one can go no deeper than this determination. It is a freestanding, unchallengeable idea. Something like this attitude undergirds democracy as a particular manifestation of the power of the people. It shows up, for instance, in many of the areas I  have just mentioned:  revolutions against monarchies, rebellions against colonial regimes, struggles against empires, and all kinds of other social

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movements and political insurgencies. More prosaically, the judgment of a jury or the weight of public opinion, when they are viewed as expressions of “the will of the people” or “the voice of the people,” has a presumption of rectitude. The same holds for international adventures that seek to impose democracy or inculcate democratic values in a culture that does not possess them. The reasons for such a move are not carefully articulated, because their value is thought to be obvious and axiomatic. Something similar holds in the academic domain. Democratic theory, for instance, assumes the rectitude of democracy as an operative premise. Since at least Robert Bellarmine and Francisco Suárez, various strands of Western political culture have held that something underlies and legitimates democratic politics. At different points in history this function was fulfilled by divine right, natural law, or a contract built on natural freedom and rationality. It was held to be independent of the state, in the sense that popular power institutes and legitimizes government and continues to exist after government has been dissolved. Ideas of divine right and natural law have passed out of our cultural frame of reference, yet residues of this way of thinking persist. We continue to hold democracy as a natural solution to political problems and a natural evolutionary trend in world politics. Even the more radical strands of democratic theory often assume the rectitude of popular mobilizations and insurgencies, focusing their attention on opening up new forms of the political and defending it against the ossifying tendencies of philosophical rationalism. This work, like its more mainstream counterpart, tends to draw unreflectively on the deep bases of popular politics in our culture. To the extent that this happens, it amounts to an uncritical romanticization of popular politics rather than a critical interrogation of its potential. Not only is the power of the people seen as having a freestanding natural rectitude of its own, but that rectitude can also be used to justify other acts, schemes, procedures, institutions, and practices. In these cases, it serves as a normative foundation. This kind of foundationalism is often not explicit or carefully worked out. On the contrary, the power of the people is used without acknowledging that fact, calling it into question, or wondering whether such a form of informal, folk justification is warranted. Thus, in many ways the folk paradigm is crypto-foundational. It serves as an implicit, disguised, unrecognized foundation. This can occur in a quite informal manner: through linkages and associations that are implied, operate in symbolic ways, or form part of our common sense about politics. In this manner, the natural rectitude of the people is extended beyond the people itself. It is foundationalism of a sophisticated and subtle sort, in which normative contents are subtly extended and connected. Here the “foundation” does not function as a pediment that must be solid before construction can proceed. It is more a kind of anchor, umbrella, or post hoc rationalization for practices already under way. In this mode it justifies all manner of things: popular uprisings, democratic reforms, principles of openness and transparency in public policy, and so on.

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Academics have not been immune to this tendency. Even while foundational projects of all kinds have been discredited in recent decades, an undercurrent of folk foundationalism persists in our political thinking. There have been an increasing number of proposals to base human rights and social justice on democracy. Following this path, a politics of human rights or a politics of justice would draw on the natural rectitude of democracy, resolving normative problems that philosophers have not succeeded in resolving through other means.3 That is not to say that such projects are misguided, only that they usually assume the normative rectitude of popular sovereignty as a starting point on which other arguments can be based. Like any form of dogmatism, the damages of folk foundationalism can be reckoned in terms of its tendency to narrow and ossify our thinking. It occludes a differentiated understanding of the various forms of popular politics and their different concentrations and sources of normativity. When the power of the people is taken as unproblematically foundational, we ignore the rich cultural and ideational content of our ideas about popular politics, the way it has been figured in so many diverse and colorful ways in the storytelling, myth, legend, self-identity, memory, and imagination of Western societies. We blind ourselves to the complexities of epistemology, culture, problematic authorization, and self-constitution that are so characteristic of politics. To ignore these dimensions is to leave ideas of politics profoundly depoliticized and misunderstood. And yet, folk foundationalism has also become the basis for our most closely held political beliefs. An operational assumption of this book, which I hope to redeem as the discussion proceeds, is that folk foundationalism is both a critical lacuna and the functioning normative basis of popular sovereignty. I will argue that our most fundamental political ideals are built on this kind of thinking. Therefore, constitutive tensions are structured into the very bases of democracy: blindnesses about the political origins of these ideals, misunderstandings about the assumptions made in granting normative status to popular politics, and romanticization of popular politics that discourages close scrutiny. 2. Collective political identity. Popular politics is a politics of groups. These are conceptualized in a variety of ways. They typically have a broad and nebulous form, sometimes conceived universally (all of the people) and sometimes more narrowly (the people of a particular domain, the common people, the suffering people). Against this background, it is clear that my focus on the power of the people is shorthand for a whole family of related ideas. Other large, (quasi-) universal collectivities are also a vital part of this discussion. The nation is the most celebrated of them. More specific movements and manifestations are also important:  crowds, mobs, protests, mobilizations. These smaller, localized groups have a more ambiguous normative status. Crowds, masses, and mobs tend to be viewed with suspicion if not alarm. However, they can be thought correct if they represent a more oceanic collectivity. A crowd in itself has no particular normative sanctity in our imagination. When it represents “the people,”

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however, it exemplifies something bigger and more important. Similarly, protests, marches, and sit-ins are often seen as manifestations of the people, and in those circumstances they bear a presumption of natural rectitude. This raises important questions of identifying which collectivities matter for politics. The size, composition, and other characteristics of a collectivity are important determinants of whether it is recognized as rightfully exercising some kind of popular power. The most universal and diffusely bounded collectivities (peoples, nations) tend to be the ones whose rectitude is most easily taken for granted. When the power of the people is manifested in the actions of a smaller, more localized group, its significance becomes more problematic. Scale clearly matters when it comes to the association between rectitude and collective identity. In this sense, universalism is an important trait of some collectivities and a crucial part of their normative logic. It is, most generally, an ascription of diffuse boundlessness to which we attribute a special status. Yet this is by no means a simple matter. As Étienne Balibar has argued, political universalism is complex and problematic.4 The very idea is subject to many different formulations and connotations. As a result, the relation between universalism and natural rectitude is by no means fixed or stable. Political collectivities can be diffuse and imprecisely bounded in other ways as well. Collectivities like publics are despatialized and do not have easily established membership or location. Yet we attribute normative force to them as well, in the form of “public opinion” or “the voice of the people.” 3. Revolutionism. Consider the following series of numbers: 1649, 1688, 1776, 1789, 1848, 1871, 1917, 1956, 1968, 1989. We are predisposed to look for a mathematical relationship, yet something else stands out. We parse these numbers as a set of dates representing iconic punctuations in the fabric of “normal” politics. The Eurocentrism of this list is problematic. Yet it also illustrates my broader point, that we select particular, often iconic moments of political exceptionality to represent the political in its purest form. These images of revolution associate very specific forms of collective identity with ideas of natural rectitude. They are the unstable, ineffable ones found in revolutionary mobilizations and insurgencies, typically crowds and mobs mobilized in protest. Here we have an image of the people in the streets, demanding justice or opposing authority. They act through a series of disruptions and forceful reorderings. In this vision, the people come together to oppose institutionalized powers and constitute new ones. Such images of dramatic conflict and outdoor assembly are our most vivid representations of the power of the people. They are often accorded special sanctity as “foundings” or “new beginnings.” This aspect of the folk paradigm shows our collective attention to be particularly captivated by certain kinds of political phenomena, events, values, and collectivities. It raises the question whether this is a result of the inherent importance of those phenomena, or their vivid character. If the answer is the latter, it signals a distortion in our thinking about politics. Political insurgency

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takes many forms, the power of the people can manifest itself indoors as well as in the streets, and not every assertion of popular power topples the government and institutes a new order. Focusing too much on revolutionary change can obscure the longer lines of continuity across eras, societies, and cultures. From this perspective, we can see how the collective imaginary is often distracted by shiny objects while neglecting the everyday. Thinking about popular politics as revolution causes us to lose sight of the ways in which it is deployed in many less visible and dramatic ways in everyday life. For all of these reasons, it is important not to privilege revolution in our understanding of popular politics. In this sense I fully agree with Jason Frank’s comment that we must “deflate the dramatically exceptional significance of the founding moment while simultaneously infusing the democratic everyday with the possibility of the extraordinary.”5 I would only add that it is not just the exceptional significance of the founding moment that we must deflate, but also the heroic character of armed conflict and the drama of political upheaval. More useful is to examine moments of novelty and change counterweighted by lines of continuity in all political processes, seeking, as Frank put it so well, to discern what moments of the extraordinary infuse daily politics. I will argue this point while discussing two important revolutions in the chapters to come. I will examine them within the broader context of their time, showing that they are characteristic of longer-term material, political, and conceptual changes. I will also argue, though, that such revolutions play an important hermeneutic and interpretive role. They constitute ruptures in the fabric of the everyday, problematizing mundane practices and forcing certain forms of politics to the center of our attention. During such periods, normally unseen aspects of the political imagination are thematized for discussion. Political ideas and practices are open to interpretive scrutiny in ways that give us new access to them. New ideas are articulated for public consideration, providing glimpses into developing forms of thought. For all of these reasons, such periods of upheaval have a profound epistemic value, bringing into critical focus phenomena so familiar that they normally pass unnoticed. 4. Westphalianism. A  fourth tendency is somewhat at odds with the third. Whereas revolutionism is oriented toward spontaneous, diffuse, and temporary manifestations of popular power, we also have an opposing tendency to map popular power onto fixed territories, jurisdictions, and populations. With a nod to the current discussions about the origins of the sovereign nation-state, I  will call this “Westphalianism.”6 It is the phenomenon of thinking about popular politics as spatial, bounded, and localized in a particular territory. The analogy is with the treaties ending the Thirty Years’ War, which allegedly replaced the permeable and overlapping boundaries of medieval regimes with defined territories, delineated borders, and mutual recognition of sovereignty. Gone were the poorly defined, fluid political alignments of the Middle Ages; in their place arose the modern, sovereign nation-state. The Westphalian ideal,

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in Richard Falk’s compact phrase, is “a state-centric, sovereignty-oriented, territorially bounded global order.”7 I am less interested in the historical particulars of this development than the way it models certain ways of thinking about popular politics. Whatever one might say about the origins of the modern nation-state system, what concerns us here is its imaginary significance: the way it shapes our thinking about sovereignties. Westphalianism is a silent bias in our imagination of popular politics. It frames the power of the people in particular and characteristic ways to reconcile collective identity and universalism. It provides conceptual means to talk about the people as a potentially boundless collectivity that, nonetheless, has particularity and meaningful agency. This is accomplished by mapping collective identities onto territory, space, and jurisdiction. As a tendency of thought, Westphalianism implies that it is natural for the power of the people to exist on a national scale. Departures are eruptions and corrections to this more pervasive order. Smaller- and larger-scale manifestations of power are temporary deviations from the norm, which are in need of stronger justification because they are not rooted in the order of nation-states. Spatial extension is the signature characteristic of the Westphalian imaginary. Above all, the Westphalian system has become synonymous with the idea apportioning sovereignty according to geographical territory. It uses a strong notion of sovereignty that confers decisive, final authority over that territory.8 The feudal system of sovereignty existing before the modern nation-state was importantly relational rather than spatial.9 The modern nation-state, in contrast, maps sovereignty directly onto space and consolidates its control over that space. While Westphalianism may have originated in an era of monarchies, it influences our thinking about popular politics in many ways. Most strikingly, it is the cornerstone of our modern conception of popular sovereignty. The Westphalian mapping renders membership and jurisdiction spatially identical. It allows a particular group to serve simultaneously as a sovereign people and as subjects of the law. Through this form of spatial delimitation, the people are subject only to laws that they have authored or consented to. Sovereignty can thus take the form of self-rule. The power of the people is properly exercised within a territorially defined sovereign state. Wendy Brown argues that this kind of spatialization also makes possible a kind of affective identification with a bounded, defined political community.10 She focuses on recent movements of securitization and wall-building that shore up the psychic boundaries of the state for its citizens. A similar phenomenon can be observed in Benedict Anderson’s account of nationalism. He cites maps as a key form of representation that cause people to think of themselves as belonging to a common nation.11 Here the nation is mapped, quite literally, onto a state in a particularly Westphalian manner. The idea of a nation (one

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of the principal collectivities in which the power of the people is expressed) becomes implicitly spatial and Westphalian through this route. Westphalianism leads to dogmatic thinking about popular politics in a number of ways. A defined territory provides a readymade way to delimit membership in the polity, both in terms of political participation and subjection to the law. It thus seems to solve problems of legitimacy, because the territorial boundary creates a group of people who are simultaneously subject to the laws and their authors. The flip side of this conceptual convenience, however, is a set of tensions between democracy and territorially defined membership. These become paradoxical when the two elements are brought together in attempts to determine the limits of membership through democratic means.12 To the extent that the people is identified with the state, forms of popular politics deployed on other scales are occluded from view and possibly delegitimated. Westphalianism becomes a kind of conceptual trap in this case, one that captures the imagination to such an extent that it limits our thinking. We see the power of the people as underpinning the legitimacy of the state, and forget the somewhat arbitrary character of that assignment. It is in this sense that the fixity of Westphalianism competes with the spontaneity of revolutionism. Westphalianism can also create other biases in our conception of sovereignty. Wendy Brown shows how it emphasizes ideas of sovereignty as control at the expense of other conceptions like sovereignty as political action.13 By focusing our attention on the sovereign control of borders and territory, it distracts attention from other ways of thinking about the people and its powers.

Problematizing Popular Politics The four dogmas I have described shape the folk paradigm in various ways. None is present all the time, and they can be found in varying association with one another. At times they inflect our thought with misperceptions and distortions: foundational or absolute claims, fixations on particular forms of collective identity, conceptual blinders caused by territorial boundedness, or a dogmatic belief in the fresh start of political revolutions. I  call them dogmas not simply because they are largely fixed and unchallenged points in our thinking, but because adherence to them lends one’s imagination a dogmatic character, clinging to customary beliefs and practices in spite of their dysfunctionality. I will problematize each of them in this book, showing how they limit our political imagination and distort our understanding of our own political inheritance. By exposing these unrecognized points of ossification, I  hope to open the imagination to a wide variety of other political alternatives. The most profound blindnesses occur when we misrepresent popular politics to ourselves, when the psychic agendas at work cause us to misrecognize or ignore the critical limitations of our thinking. Wendy Brown identifies such a phenomenon in state sovereignty. She characterizes the roots of the problem as “Declining protective capacities of the state, diluted nationhood, and the

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increasing vulnerability of subjects everywhere to global economic vicissitudes and transnational violence . . . .”14 For Brown, this picture of decreasing state authority and diminished capacities is accompanied by anxieties that arise from psychic identification of the self with the state, as well as more tangible loss of sovereignty for subjects. This has resulted, she claims, in compensatory movements to seal borders, build walls, and control illegal immigration. These all appear as reactions to deeper anxieties. In this sense, many contemporary phenomena surrounding the symbolism of state sovereignty are driven by desire, wish-fulfilment, frustration, and insecurity. Ultimately, Brown’s interest turns on the symbolic construction and shoring up of state sovereignty, particularly the ways it is manifested in fantasies and forms of wish-fulfilment driven by deeper psychic needs. It is at this abstract level that my project most clearly parallels Brown’s. Popular politics, I  will show, is traversed by all kinds of other agendas. For example, I  will trace the way eighteenth-century French discourse about the power of the people is driven by an “incitement to discourse,” a deep-seated, broadly social discomfort with conceptual problems in the project of popular sovereignty. I  will argue that it has produced all kinds of chimerical constructions – fabulous constructs of political identity that possess some kind of sovereignty. In general, we will see that folk foundationalism often has a fantastic character, both in its tendency to imagine things as we wish them to be, and in its tendency to construct objects of the imagination that become very real for us and have constituent force in our politics. Our shared imagination of popular politics says much about our underlying desires, collective self-image, and the cultural-historical processes through which they have developed. The answer to dogmatic thinking about popular politics is a critical investigation of its forms and varieties. In this book I seek out some of the ways in which such ideas become fixed in our consciousness and taken for granted as features of our shared world. This is a book about the processes through which we imagine political normativity. It tries to make visible the discursive, conceptual, representational, and material bases of popular politics, asking how we understand their critical, innovative, and liberatory potential. These forms of normativity lie at the heart of many areas of contemporary interest. They are central to the politics of exception, insurgency, constituent power, calls for unconstrained political freedom, the noisy energy of social movements, and the unruly assertion of antidemocratic revolutions. I will argue that these highly valorized, often romanticized moments are much more of a mystery than we usually think. They are products of an elaborate achievement in Western cultures: the imagination of popular sovereignty as a political ideal. The idea of normativity has a particular importance here. It refers to the binding or obligatory character of our political ideas. Normative ideals imply a sanctity, an aura of specialness that causes us to orient our behavior and beliefs in the ways that they specify. As I have noted, notions of market freedom, autonomy, liberty, equality, and popular sovereignty all have this character in

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contemporary Western politics. We see them as having a kind of natural rectitude, so we draw on them to justify other ideas and to make other arguments without feeling the need to dig any deeper about the reasons that one might find them so compelling. This compelling character is their normative force. In this book, I am concerned with the normativity of popular politics – the question of why we find grassroots mobilizations, popular movements, and the power of the people so compelling. I do not believe that the reasons for this are rigorously rational. They were not laid out in some definitive treatise in a self-consistent, deductive manner, persuading us to adopt them because of their compelling logic. Rather, the normative bases of popular politics are products of long cultural and historical processes within a broader field of practice. I will take this as an interpretive premise for the moment, but coming chapters will bear it out quite clearly. The questions I have raised cannot be answered at the level of abstraction at which political theory usually functions. If the normative bases of politics are not (purely) philosophical, they cannot be specified in a purely philosophical way. Instead, they must be traced out within particular cultural and historical contexts. This historical thesis will chart my course in the pages to come. I will follow a line of practice starting at the end of the age of monarchy. It is formed around a set of chronic and chafing problems about sovereignty. This line of problematization has two interlocking foci: the normative problem of who is entitled to be sovereign, and the socio-ontological problem of who could wield sovereign agency. Put another way, the problematic is simultaneously about normativity and collectivity, and especially about the conjunction of the two. If we cannot say that this ensemble of ideas is the product of a linear, rational argument, we must consider other ways of accounting for its shared and binding character.

The Archive of Popular Politics To make the historical argument I  have just sketched, I  will tap into the rich archive of discourse, thought, and practice about popular politics. My approach will be broadly genealogical, in the sense that I  am interested in problematizing our ideas about politics and revealing their complexity and indeterminate character. I will not offer a complete history of the power of the people, but will examine several exemplary points in its development. These moments are chosen to elucidate features of our contemporary thinking. To do this I will combine the kind of conceptual argumentation practiced in political theory with careful interpretation of often marginalized and ignored archival resources. The result is a hybridized genealogy, one that combines focused historical investigation and theoretical argumentation. I will look to Michel Foucault for inspiration in the broad outlines of this project, particularly his insights about problematization as a way of revealing tensions within a set of practices. Since Foucault was never a theorist of the imaginary or collectivity, though, I will turn to others for help. Cornelius

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Castoriadis and Charles Taylor provide insights about the political imagination; and Ernesto Laclau and Benedict Anderson have much to say about the formation of collective identities. By emphasizing the contingent and problematic character of popular politics, I join sympathetic allies like Étienne Balibar, Jason Frank, Bonnie Honig, and Paulina Ochoa Espejo. My intervention follows a different path from their work, however, by focusing specifically on the taken-for-grantedness of our ideas of popular power and moving that phenomenon to center stage as an object of investigation and problematization. This approach poses different challenges than those faced by Foucault in his studies of the human sciences, “total institutions,” and practices of the self. I will focus greater attention on the material dimensions of political practice, particularly where tensions occur between materiality and discourse. I will also travel a considerably different path from Foucault by developing a historically differentiated conception of political imagination, highlighting the normative dimensions of the power of the people and showing how political ideals arise out of various problematics and practices. This provides insights about the collective character of norm-creation as part of the routine social, political, and intellectual life that constitutes a society’s political imaginaries. This attention to issues of collective identity, shared imaginaries, and normative force provides a more critically acute account of the power of the people. After considering these theoretical and methodological challenges in detail in Chapters 2 and 3, I will turn to the archive of popular politics for much of the remainder of the book. I will examine three key points of inflection in this history. The first, detailed in Chapter  4, is a forty-year period of intellectual and constitutional history in eighteenth-century France (1755–1795). That period spans a varied history of political regimes and modalities:  enlightenment, absolutist monarchy, revolution, and republic. I will argue that long lines of cultural and conceptual continuity connect these events and reveal common problematics at work. The second moment, the topic of Chapter 6, examines a period of political ferment before the Haitian Revolution (1780s). This other great revolution of the eighteenth century provides us with an excellent view of political imaginaries under development and in conflict. The third moment, detailed in Chapter 7, is a period of Haitian constitutionalism for forty years after the Revolution (1804–1843). Taken with Chapter  6, these events provide a snapshot of the revolutionary Caribbean from the 1780s to the 1840s. I begin when Haiti was still a French colony named Saint-Domingue and trace the development of Haitian political thought and culture all the way to its somewhat troubled postcolonial form in the mid-nineteenth century. Here we see some striking innovations in political thinking, including a repurposing of French Revolutionary doctrines to support rebellion against France. I will use these moments as a way of drawing out important themes and developing a conceptual vocabulary for studying the normative foundations of popular politics in all of its diversity. This is not an exhaustive account, but an attempt to develop our thinking through engagement with specific practices

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and events. In this regard, I will argue that a very well-known example, the celebrated political culture of eighteenth-century France, is often misunderstood, while a relatively untapped archive, the one documenting Haitian colonization and independence, has much to teach us. My attraction to France and Haiti lies partly in the simultaneous connections and contrasts between them. In the eighteenth century, this metropole and its crown-jewel colony were like a pair of binary stars:  each exerted a powerful gravitational force on the other and made the other wobble in its orbit. They were distant yet profoundly interrelated. Examining them together allows me to make a number of important points about popular power and the imagination of politics in a specifically modern, global, and postcolonial context. It teaches us much about the simultaneous distance and similarity between metropolitan Europe and the colonial Caribbean. Enlightenment France was the originary site of a powerful strand of modern political thought, based on a nascent form of French republicanism. I  will show that this project was full of tensions that were never satisfactorily resolved. Here we see French politicians and thinkers trying to cope with problems of sovereignty and popular unity at the close of the Age of Kings. I believe that their very lack of resolution provided some of the energy that pushed that project forward. At the same time, Haiti highlights other contradictions that resulted when this heritage was deployed in conjunction with slavery and colonialism. The substantial ideological divisions leading up to the Haitian Revolution reveal problematics located at the intersection of slavery, race, and coloniality. Later, the complicated relations between a French colonial past and an unstable political present come together in Haiti’s postcolonial constitutional history. Here Haitian legislators try to stabilize a postcolonial order and deal with divisive problems of race, class, and nativity. Their efforts show us much about the interplay between colony and metropole, the migration of concepts from one to the other, and, ultimately, the paths of political imagination after colonialism. They reveal different sources and forms of political modernity. These dynamics have been noted by others, particularly Charles Mills and Laurent Dubois, but we still have further to go in appreciating the tense interconnections and psychic difficulties that resulted from being a democrat and a colonist at the same time.15 I will focus on the way these problems have shaped our understanding of the normative bases of popular politics. In sum, France and Haiti provide a complex, nuanced archive for studying the ways in which popular powers are imagined. Traces of our contemporary imaginaries can be found in the laws, documents, and practices of these earlier times. In the course of articulating specific forms of sovereignty, they embody more abstract forms of thinking about popular politics, ones that are still with us today in forceful, constitutive, and problematic ways.

2 “Sovereignty Is an Artificial Soul” Ernesto Laclau and Benedict Anderson in Dialogue

For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE (in Latin CIVITAS), which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was intended; and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body. –Thomas Hobbes1

The well-known frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan speaks volumes about the image of sovereignty that dominates our contemporary political imaginaries. A well-groomed monarch stands up to his waist in a rolling rural landscape. He holds the symbols of his office in his hands: a crozier on one side, a sword on the other. This sovereign rules his flock like a shepherd, but with a clear monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Everything seems in order until one notices his garment. What appears at first to be nobbly wool is in fact no garment at all: the monarch, on closer examination, is made of people. This is an image of the composition of sovereignty. It vividly illustrates Hobbes’s contractarianism, in which the sovereign derives his absolute power from an initial contract among the people.2 The sovereign is “made” of his subjects in the sense that he draws legitimacy from their agreement. As Hobbes famously described it, this sovereign rules a commonwealth that is but an artificial man, “in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body. . . .” The commonwealth has various manlike characteristics – acting with the agency and judgment of one man – but on closer examination, that unity is revealed to be the product of elaborate artifice. This image is rich beyond the bounds of Hobbes’s conception of monarchy. We can execute a conceptual change of perspective, reversing the metaphorical relation between parts and the whole. The gestalt shift produces a rather different view of sovereignty. Rather than seeing a monarch made of people, we now see a people forming a collective whole that metaphorically takes on the 18

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shape of a person. Such a people cannot literally become a single individual, but in the political imagination they form one will and one indivisible agency. In this inverted view, conceptions of popular sovereignty – ones Hobbes would reject – endow the people with properties usually attributed to individual sovereigns. Like the older monarchical tradition, such formulations of “popular” sovereignty take their force from the idea of free action by a unitary will. They simply scale this notion of individual self-determination up to a macrosocial level, endowing the idea of “the people” with the same kind of normative force possessed by an individual sovereign. When we look at the frontispiece from this angle, we see the aggregation of the people into a collective macrosubject, one capable of ruling just like a single person. This reversed reading of Hobbes’s image graphically illustrates a great paradox of popular sovereignty. The warrant of sovereignty had previously been located in the King’s body. Regardless of the problems with this idea, which we know were many, it had the advantage of representing sovereignty and agency at the same physical locus.3 The King, as a unitary agent, was sovereign over himself and his subjects. This materialist conception of sovereignty became quite strained, however, when it was transposed unto the populace. Now there was no clear locus of agency, no self-determining entity that could unify agency and sovereignty. As a result, attempts to do so became increasingly analogical and metaphorical – and in this case, fictive and representational. Over the next several chapters, I will argue that the strained character of ideas like “the power of the people” arises from the fact that the people is not a naturally occurring entity, but an object of epistemic and political creation. It works as a representational fiction, encouraging citizens to imagine themselves as members of a collective with a unitary political will. In spite of its imaginary character, however, this “artificial man” does describe an important aspect of the modern political imaginary. We treat the artificial man of the modern-day imaginary as having an artificial soul just like Hobbes’s sovereign. We see collective political identities like the people as having important powers. This idea of the people has been put forward as a source of popular sovereignty in a long political tradition stretching back at least to republican strands of the Enlightenment, if not to seventeenth-century England and even before. Many forms of collectivity have political valences. Crowds, multitudes, mobs, and masses have public manifestations and political effects.4 In spite of their public and political import, however, these forms of collectivity are rarely thought of in positive terms. They connote danger, chaos, and lack of coherent direction. In contrast, peoples, publics, and nations stand in a much more favorable light. They are forms of collective identity seen as endowed with collective power and sovereign self-direction. But why? Why are some forms of collective identity cherished while others are feared? To answer this question, it is worth considering some of the ways in which sovereignty and collective identity have been associated. It is not at all obvious what connection

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ought to hold between the two. It is neither clear which collective identities should be important for politics, nor which ones can be attributed normative significance. Consider, for instance, Hobbes’s characterization of sovereignty as an “artificial soul.” It is no accident that he chooses this metaphor. The soul is a mystical entity that is nowhere present, yet serves enormous explanatory functions. Indeed, Hobbes is quite hostile to the idea in its theological deployment, which he characterizes as “the Ghosts of men deceased.”5 Yet he uses the soul in this explanatory role for political purposes, with similar problems. Hobbes devotes a great deal of attention to the formation of collectivities – the bases of contract that form the “artificial man” – but he does little to show how this contractual construct would then exhibit sovereignty. The artificial soul fulfills this function with little explanation. There are clear reasons why Hobbes needs to rely on a rhetorical shortcut of this sort. His social ontology is built around instrumentally calculating individuals. It is quite difficult, from this standpoint, to show how such individuals could come together to constitute a collectivity with the kind of moral or normative force that amounts to sovereignty. Contract is too thin a basis: it constitutes collectivity, but only as an aggregation of self-interested preferences. What is lacking is a form of collectivity that could bear a normative status. An account of some shared basis for norms and practices, for instance, might fill this function. It would breathe normative life into a collectivity, explaining how it could take on an intentional unity that allows it to determine its own fate. Without such a middle term, Hobbes’s conception remains quite “artificial,” unable to provide a plausible explanation for the transition from atomized individuals to collective sovereignty. These insights open up a whole set of questions about folk foundationalism and other uncritical views of popular politics. In this chapter I  will ask how well some of our best theories interrogate such unreflective approaches to politics. I will examine two influential ways of assembling the artificial man of the people:  those of Ernesto Laclau and Benedict Anderson. Both views take seriously insights like Hobbes’s, that the commonwealth is an artificial entity whose origins and inner workings require explanation. They represent an approach to political identity that sees peoples as a product of stories, narration, symbolic representation, cultural politics, political mobilization, insurgencies, and discursive claims. These views share a commitment to showing that collective identities like “the people” are complex products of social, political, and linguistic construction. Under this broad rubric, though, Laclau and Anderson diverge in important ways. Their differences lie in productive contrast, revealing symmetrical shortcomings in their efforts to conceptualize political collectivity. Each provides critical leverage against dogmatic thinking about popular politics, but ultimately encounters problems of his own. These problems tell us a great deal about the ways in which the artificial man of the people has an artificial soul.

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Populist Reason Ernesto Laclau delivers a jolt to dogmatic thinking about popular politics. He emphasizes the highly constructed and politicized character of peoples while describing the psychological dimensions of the ways they are imagined. Laclau’s view of popular politics is strongly inflected by a critique of collective identities. He thinks of them as important but misleading reifications. A “people,” from his perspective, is not a determinate collectivity but a form of representation. It refers to a set of linguistic and political acts that are unified into a seemingly substantial collectivity through great effort. Collective identities are artificial, incomplete, and fragile achievements rather than naturally existing entities. From this perspective, the processes that construct identity tell us more about politics than do the identities themselves. Laclau views peoples as constructed through processes of linguistic unification. They are complex assemblages of speech acts  – political demands levied against some institutional authority. Such demands are unified by creating relations of equivalence among them. Each will have particular, individual features that other demands do not share. Within an antagonistic political environment, however, similarities can be constructed across such differences. They are created by showing that an array of demands is opposed to a common adversary. Unification relies on this shared structural position toward a common power, displacing thicker, more substantive similarities in content or agenda.6 The adversary shared by a given set of demands is itself linguistically constituted. It is an object of description, that against which a set of demands stands because it has failed to satisfy them. This antagonism is a necessary structural feature of unification.7 It creates the conditions under which demands can be constructed as sharing common features and thereby unified in their commonality. Laclau says that this process of unification is started by connecting a set of demands to some common first demand. This provides a shared core that allows each subsequent demand to be connected to the chain. A demand can serve this function only when it is drained of meaning, however, remaining only as a name. Such an empty signifier has no inherent limits in what it can signify; it can therefore stand for all other demands in the chain. In this way, the empty signifier becomes the name for an entire series of unified demands.8 The most important part of this process is the one in which a set of demands, unified by association with an empty signifier, comes to be understood as the identity of a group. Specifically, this form of unification allows the empty signifier to be seen as a popular identity. Laclau describes this as the “moment of crystallization that constitutes the ‘people’ of populism.”9 This identity, understood as popular in character, then becomes a node around which further demands can be unified. Laclau’s characterization of popular politics as “populism” is not accidental. Because of the instrumental nature of popular politics in his view, populism and popular politics are indistinguishable. This

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characterization has the advantage of elucidating important forms of populist politics, but it has the corresponding drawback of leaving many other things out of view. Laclau notes that as more and more demands are unified, the identity of the whole becomes more and more diffuse. The similarity between unified demands is increasingly diluted by the differences remaining between them. One way to overcome this centrifugal tendency is to identify an emerging people with a political leader.10 In this way the name unifying a movement is associated with a personality rather than a demand. The Peronists, named after Juan Perón, are one of his favorite examples.11 Since the name of a chain of demands is an empty signifier, this personalization of a chain of demands is in character with other forms of popular collectivity. The name of a collectivity could take the name of a person just as well as it could be named for any other demand. The difference, Laclau notes, is that a person provides a particularly powerful and stable form of identification around which a broader identity can form. Here it is tempting to flesh out the reasoning behind Laclau’s observations a bit further. Presumably this sort of discursive solidification is powerful not just because it furnishes a name, but because of the charismatic associations with the actual person. These traits could be appealing precisely because they embody the person-ness of a single agent. Such a substitution could appear to resolve, in a symbolic sense, some of the problems with popular identities I described above. A collectivity does not have the unity and agency that an individual has; by unifying a popular movement around a person’s name, the collectivity symbolically adopts some of the unity of the individual’s identity. This strategy uses a kind of linguistic legerdemain to resolve the problem of replacing the king with a more diffuse collectivity. If we think of the collectivity as centered around a person, it could appear to have some of the missing characteristics of royal agency. This, of course, would be a conceptual crutch rather than an actual solution; but in that sense it would be consistent with Laclau’s treatment of popular politics as a linguistically constructed phenomenon. One of the most potent characteristics of Laclau’s view is the way it captures the ambiguous and changing character of political identities. For him, identities are formed in a complex field of intersecting and shifting antagonisms.12 Demands can be incorporated into more than one identity, so their political meaning becomes equivocal. Groups cease to have identity as soon as their demands are satisfied, because they lose the antagonistic basis of that identity. As a result, peoples are never fully consolidated, always under political negotiation, and asserted strategically in an attempt to pursue various aims. They are, as Laclau puts it, hegemonic articulations, ones aimed at consolidating identity and enacting political goals against the background of a changing political landscape. Laclau’s great insight is to transpose questions of collective political identity into the realm of signification and representation. He shares the vision

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of Hobbes’s frontispiece in this regard but radicalizes it even a step further. Hobbes prefaced Leviathan with a trompe-l’oeil illustration of a sovereign who, on closer inspection, is made of people. Laclau describes a people that, on closer inspection, is made of . . . words. Like Hobbes’s image of the sovereign, Laclau’s notion of the people is a thoroughly constructed one. It is built from political demands – literally, words. Laclau goes quite a bit further than Hobbes in this sense, because for him the people form a composite entity made of components very different in type from the whole to which they belong. Laclau’s view poses considerable challenges for dogmatic thinking about popular politics. It frames collective identities as constructs all the way down. Both the antagonistic enemy and the features shared by a chain of unified demands are products of linguistic construction. Collective identities, built on this basis, are products of artifice. In this sense, the entire political field is discursively constructed. It is thus much less tempting to attribute foundational significance to popular politics. This view undermines foundationalism by de-essentializing identity and pushing processes to the fore. The politics of identity now occupies our attention. A great advantage of this view is the way it virtualizes political identity. Laclau describes unified sets of demands that are attributed peoplehood only secondarily and with some effort. He shows how identities are consolidated through politics, yet remain pliable and subject to change. By emphasizing the contingent and political character of collective identity formation, Laclau’s work undermines naturalized conceptions of the people and uncritical notions of collective identity. It views identities as in process, unstable, yet having political agency. Thus it does not assume unity and agency, nor does it dismiss collective identity as a fiction. This view highlights the plasticity and portability of popular politics. It is a phenomenon that can crop up in many different guises in many different arenas. In the specific form that Laclau refers to as populism, which is to say, as a discursively mobilized instrumentality, there can be leftist populisms, fascist populisms, conservative populisms, and so on, all claiming the power of the people in spite of their radically different demands and agendas. These same features of Laclau’s account also despatialize collective identity in important ways. If identity is built by unifying demands, it has no particular spatiality. The only requirement is that the component demands are seen as opposed to a common foe, not that they are articulated within any location, domain, or jurisdiction. As a result, a “people” has no particular physical location. This poses a substantial challenge to Westphalian thinking by making it impossible to map the people onto specific territories. Laclau’s view also has an admirable epistemic sophistication. The politics of identity is understood through a careful dissection of the rhetorical and political processes that give rise to it. This is a linguistic turn of a subtle kind, one that encompasses many different elements: discursive acts, the politics of claims-making, psychic drives, signifiers, names, unfulfilled desires, political

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antagonisms, and collective identities. Laclau pulls this material together in an elegant picture of the identity-constituting effects of words. He shows how ideas and words can take on real force, shaping forms of political membership and collective agency. The glue that holds these elements together is the epistemic element itself: the account Laclau gives of how forms of speech can constitute identity. Finally, it is worth noting the subtle displacement of normativity in this view. Identities that coalesce out of unified demands form from a particular set of viewpoints, constructed against a common opposition. Yet these identities represent themselves as “popular,” thus as “peoples,” framing their collectivity as universal when it is partial and sectarian.13 Laclau says this is both a characteristic feature of peoplehood and a characteristic fiction. No people can have a universal character, because a group that is all-inclusive and identical with an entire society is a fiction or counterfactual goal, never a real possibility. Groups can only ever be parts of this more idealized totality. This insight has profound consequences. It implies that no people can truly represent an entire society. Moreover, any claim of this type is, on Laclau’s terms, mistaken or duplicitous. Universal identities and claims made on their behalf are false universalities.14 No political movement can represent the claims and interests of society as a whole, and anything calling itself “the people” is a partisan collectivity masquerading as a universal. It is no surprise, then, that Laclau’s references to the “people” are always suspended between quotation marks. While revealing the overreaching character of claims about the people, Laclau further deflates these claims in important ways. He executes a change of perspective that views the people as part of the more general phenomenon of a discursive-popular politics. Without remarking on the importance of this change, he problematizes the special normative status that is often attributed to collective identities. For Laclau, peoples are an interesting phenomenon that occurs within discursive politics, rather than sacred or natural imperatives to be honored. This corrective reminds us to view the normative force of collective identities as an important subject of scrutiny rather than something we can take at face value. It problematizes tendencies to attribute a natural rectitude to the people. In spite of its rich insights, Laclau’s paradigm-shifting view also has some significant limitations. It is, as I noted earlier, limited by the instrumentality it attributes to popular politics. By equating popular politics with the more narrow and derivative phenomenon of populism, it either rules out of bounds or fails to consider other ways in which the people might have power. In an important sense, Laclau’s dissolution of identity also goes too far. He is so concerned to avoid hypostatizing identities and render them fluid that he verges on dissolving political subjects entirely. Demands are Laclau’s primary units of analysis, and his emphasis is linguistic through and through. How these elements relate to human subjects is somewhat less clear, however. Demands

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seem to function as free-floating linguistic claims rather than expressions of individual subjects. While Laclau obviously thinks of demands as made by people, the details of that connection are not clearly specified. When he describes the formation of collective identities out of demands, it is not obvious in what sense individuals are incorporated into these identities. It is correspondingly unclear what kind of entity “a people” is – or to put the point more bluntly, whether “a people” actually contains any . . . people. This problem can be seen most clearly in the series of transitions Laclau postulates from forms of speech to forms of political identity. His account has a broad sweep, transubstantiating speech acts into forms of collectivity. It is rooted in the assumption that demands can be transformed into felt, lived forms of collective political identity. Such a transformation would have to bridge a rather large typological gap, however: between chains of demands and collectivities of people. Seeing a set of demands as equivalent to one another is considerably different from seeing oneself as a member of a group. When viewed through this lens, Laclau’s theory could be seen as operating on the basis of a category mistake.15 It could be said to mistake a process of linguistic unification for the collective identities of actual groups.

Imagined Communities To see how one might avoid such problems, it is useful to take a contrasting perspective on collective identity. Benedict Anderson’s celebrated account of nationalism puts routine, everyday practice front and center. It traces the rise of “imagined communities” that lead people to think of themselves as sharing a common nationality.16 This account shows how forms of national self-identification and collective solidarity are created through prosaic, material aspects of colonial practice, combined with cultural and technical innovations in European modernity. Anderson’s work illustrates the sense in which our collective vision of ourselves is not a disembodied linguistic phenomenon, but one that is deeply physical, mundane, and material. The development of print capitalism plays an important role in Anderson’s account. Novels and newspapers are printed and distributed on a heretofore unprecedented scale. They help to fix and standardize the meaning of the vernacular languages in which they are published, putting those print-languages on a much more important footing because of their widespread circulation.17 At the same time, the implicit temporality of the items being published  – novels and newspapers – provides the basis for a sense of community among anonymous members of the reading public.18 The narrative conventions of the novel allow for disconnected threads of action to be represented as simultaneous. They are joined by their common embedding in the novel’s narrative, rather than any interaction they share in the world of the novel. Even though the people in this story might not know one another, they carry on lives parallel to one another in a new form of simultaneous temporality.

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Similarly, readers of mass-produced newspapers share an identity through their participation in common rituals of media consumption and their representation as a reading public. The newspaper employs narrative conventions similar to the novel. It embeds seemingly unrelated events in a common matrix of temporality: “everything important that happened on this day.” The result is a powerful representation of simultaneity and togetherness for the people and events discussed, one that includes the people reading about them as well. In Anderson’s view, a diffuse, though real, sense of community is created by these mundane practices of consumption and representation. Anderson details other devices of representation that contribute to a sense of simultaneous togetherness as well. Censuses, maps, museums, and memorials enumerate populations, fix borders, and memorialize the great moments in an allegedly collective history.19 Here Anderson traces the diversification of practices for representing a nation:  not simply through the entrenchment of vernacular languages by print capitalism, but through other forms of representation as well. Maps are printed using the same technologies as novels and newspapers. They represent bounded, named territorial zones that shape people’s thinking about the identity of the political entities to which they belong.20 Censuses are also printed. They tend to reify particular ideas about the nation’s population. Museums and memorials enshrine official versions of a common history, especially those justifying colonization or propagating images of a shared nation. In sum, these devices contribute to imagining a nation by representing its spatial boundedness, defining the character of its population, and endowing it with a history. Forms of representation are not the only formative influence on nationalism in Anderson’s view. Other concrete practices of colonial subjects are important beyond their reading habits. The career and educational pathways of young native-colonial bureaucrats exercise a crucial influence in this account.21 Promising young men move from their birthplace in the colonial periphery to education or jobs in colonial centers, back to the periphery, again to imperial cores, and back. This results in identification with others sharing similar trajectories. Because these students and bureaucrats are ultimately restricted to posts in their home colonies, their identification is with members of their own colony rather than with those of other colonies or with the imperial core. Such shared lifecycles produce feelings of community among colonial subjects even though they are largely strangers. Because these subjects are the educated elites of the colonial administration, they also become the intelligentsia of future nationalist movements. The materiality of Anderson’s analysis and its emphasis on concrete practices make a major contribution to our understanding of collective identity formation. First and foremost, his focus on the collective imagination is the most important aspect of his work. Anderson shows that nationalism is not simply an idea, but a viscerally felt, shared reality for those imagining it. From the outside, we see it as a contingent feature of modern cultural development,

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but from the inside it is experienced as something tangible and vividly present. By emphasizing the “imagined” character of the nation, Anderson reframes a number of important questions about it. He executes an epistemic shift in our view of political collectivity by characterizing it as an element of our shared imagination. We stop taking claims of nationalism at face value, realizing that political entities such as nations are creatures of our own fabrication. Second, Anderson’s insights about the imagined character of nationalism are matched by his careful constructivism in showing how it is assembled. He emphasizes the effects of concrete, material practices on the shared imagination. The career trajectories of colonial administrators, the narrative conventions of new writing genres, and the standardizing force of print in the age of its mechanical reproducibility are all very material aspects of colonial history that cause people to imagine themselves as sharing a nation. The sustained emphasis on material practices in this narrative provides a fine-grained account of the origins of nationalist ideas. It shows that such ideas have a history and conditions of possibility, and undermines naïve naturalism about them.22 Third, the insightful connections Anderson draws between imagination and practice give his work real force. Mundane, material practices collude with new forms of temporality and simultaneity to change how people think about collective identity. Anderson’s careful tracing of these influences on the collective imagination is an aspect of his work whose importance cannot be overestimated. We could refer to this as an account of the materiality of the imagination. By emphasizing how thoroughly rooted our imagination of community is in daily practice and aspects of material culture like publishing and reading, Anderson keeps it from being psychologized. That is to say, imagined communities are not just in our heads – they are not just mental phenomena of a virtual, ephemeral, and internal nature – but are part of the construction of our common, physical world and the way we act in it. Anderson has a natural kinship with Michel Foucault in this sense, though he advances far beyond Foucault in his treatment of collective identity formation, a conspicuous lacuna in Foucault’s work.23 In each of these ways, Anderson provides a contrast with Laclau. His account of collective identity tries to explain why compatriots would share a sense of belonging to the same identity. This is based on shared practices and life experiences, in contrast to Laclau’s instrumental account of unifiable demands. Anderson’s view of identity formation is generated out of actual histories and is interpreted from a specific set of documents and archives. This has the advantage of particularity and historical detail, compared with Laclau’s more schematized account of political claims-making. Finally, Anderson’s account emphasizes the physical, material practices that go into imagination: print capitalism, circuits of travel, and the shared temporality of the daily newspaper. It thus has a richer conception of practice than Laclau’s, which tends to focus more narrowly on the discursive character of political

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claims-making. In each of these ways, Anderson taps the advantages of a historical and material account of practice, as compared with a view that hews more strictly to language. Anderson’s view has other assets as well. He incorporates elements of very different scales in understanding collective identity formation. The concrete practices Anderson discusses have global extension. They produce communities that feel immediate to their members, even though these communities exist on a large and abstract scale. This combination of the local and the global, the immediate and the abstract gives his account great explanatory reach. In this sense, he provides us with an alternative critical approach to Westphalianism as a tendency in our thinking about popular politics. Rather than despatializing identity as Laclau does, Anderson shows how it has complex, transnational origins. Even the strongly Westphalian phenomenon of nationalism, according to him, is based on experiences beyond the scale of the nation-state. This is less of a thorough-going challenge to Westphalianism than that of Laclau, but it reveals some of its arbitrary character. Another beauty of Anderson’s work is the way it dissolves politics into a broader picture of practice. Politics is very much present in the grand strategies of colonial empires, the local community-building of the colonial press, and so on, but it is never given an overly dominant role in the calculus of identity formation. Anderson’s geospatial practices of solidarity are responses to centuries of colonialism, but not in a simplistic way. Rather, the bigger political landscape constitutes the environment within which lives are lived, outlooks and habits are formed, and identities created. For Anderson, politics is a shaping force and a backdrop, but not the main point. The importance of this can be seen in contrast to a more pointedly political vision like Laclau’s. He theorizes politics as constituted by antagonism. In his view, political interaction consists of demands issued toward sources of power across an antagonistic frontier. Politics is always about strategy, hegemony, and power in this vision. It takes an oppositional form and is instrumental to the satisfaction of demands. This constrains what Laclau can consider as an explanation of collective identity formation. Based on such ideas, this theory lacks the ability to go beyond a demand-satisfaction conception of politics. It is bound by an implicit conception of self-oriented action based on subjective preferences. In contrast, Anderson considers a wider palette of possibilities. His approach is not committed to specific conceptions of politics or, for that matter, to the salience of politics compared to other causes. As a result, his account is open to a plurality of factors that shape collective identity. All of these aspects of Benedict Anderson’s work provide rich grounds for rethinking the power of the people. We could expand upon his insight that nations are imagined as sovereign, taking it beyond the bounds of nationalism. If the nation can be imagined as sovereign, then popular sovereignties can easily be imagined on many different scales:  beyond the limits of

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national boundaries in postnational and supernational politics, and at levels far below the nation, where groups struggle to assert forms of local control within nation-states. Although Anderson specifically addresses the question of nationalism, his work has much broader consequences. It is important to see imagined communities as a phenomenon distinct from a purely nationalist imaginary, particularly in its latter-day, Westphalian, statist forms. It is a contingent feature of a specific, culturally dominant political imaginary, but it is applicable to many other forms of political identity as well. To employ these advantages to their fullest extent, we must also consider what is missing from Anderson’s account. A rather large omission is hidden in plain sight. That is the almost complete absence of reflection on either “imagination” or “community” in a book that draws its title from those two ideas. Anderson limits his focus to the tangible effects of a set of material practices. Rightly or wrongly, he avoids theorizing the forms of collectivity created by these practices or the ways collectivity is imagined because of them. As a result, we have a finely grained account of the varying practices that lead people to think and act as members of nations, but no reflection on what that means at the level of tangible effects on individuals: how imagination functions as a practice of collective meaning, or how communities take shape through socialization, subjectification, the construction of personalities and dispositions, and the creation of truths and knowledges about forms of collectivity. Here, a contrast with Michel Foucault is informative. Foucault, like Anderson, is a great analyst of the irreducible materiality of practices and the minute specificity of particular regimes of practice. He goes beyond Anderson, though, to theorize the ways these regimes of practice matter: how they create truths that are really forms of imagination. Foucault’s remarks about the relations between truth and practice are always piecemeal and never fully satisfactory, but they give one a start at thinking about how the two might relate to one another. Something similar would help to push further in Anderson’s project. It would allow us to say more precisely what it means for a community to be imagined.

Collective Identity, an Elusive Object of Desire Ernesto Laclau makes some provocative remarks about the ways communities might be imagined. He draws on Jacques Lacan’s work to develop an account of collective identity formation. Laclau describes democratic demands as formed around objets petit a, objects that are desired as a way of satisfying some primal lack. For Lacan, these objects are the aims of desires that are themselves partial substitutes for the lost relationship between child and mother. The unity and security that are lost when a child individuates from its mother are channeled into partial desires for other substitute objects, typically body parts like the breast, but also other objects that promise fulfillment.

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These “partial objects” are always unsatisfactory substitutes for a more primal, unrecoverable fullness. Laclau says that popular politics exemplifies this process as well. He is quite forceful on this point: “There is no populism without affective investment in a partial object.”24 In his terms, this means: No social fullness is achievable except through hegemony; and hegemony is nothing more than the investment, in a partial object, of a fullness which will always evade us because it is purely mythical (in our terms: it is merely the positive reverse of a situation experienced as “deficient being”). The logic of the objet petit a and the hegemonic logic are not just similar; they are identical.25

Laclau portrays politics as structured by psychic processes similar to those that shape individual psyches and motivate individual actions. Citing Joan Copjec, he claims that psychoanalytic categories constitute a “general ontology.”26 In this sense, the general form or schema of ego psychology would apply to the political realm as well. The question is how exactly Laclau sees Lacanian psychological categories as translating into political terms. Does the theory of drives and affective attachments describe politics directly? Does it constitute a more general ontology that includes both psychic processes and politics? Or is this simply a structural homology, one in which two processes appear to be very similar while having distinct and independent origins? 1. The simplest interpretation would see political demands as a direct expression of partial desires. It would claim that the various things we desire are motivated by some deeper, more cosmic sense of lack. Because the objects we focus on are only incomplete substitutes for a deeper lack, they never truly satisfy us and we continue to pursue new objects. The political domain is a means for their satisfaction. We link our demands with those of others as a way collectively to satisfy our individual, by definition unsatisfiable, desires. This collective pursuit carries a libidinal charge that it acquires from our desires themselves. Such a theory explains the deep-seated sources of an individual’s demands and connects them with collective action as a means of satisfaction. In this view, collectivity is motivated by subjective desires and rational self-interest. It thereby gives us a cogent explanation of an individual’s motives to join a collectivity. While this view is strong in explaining why individuals would want to form part of a larger group, it is correspondingly weak at explaining in what sense they might do so. Because it is rooted in a self-interested individualism, it has difficulty explaining how collective identity could be formed that is anything more than an aggregation of self-interested individuals. Such individuals act collectively for motives that are, in the end, only individual. When collectivity is merely a means of satisfying deeply self-interested desires, individuals would have no reason to identify themselves with the larger whole in a more

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profound, psychic sense. This interpretation accounts for a commonality of pursuits, but not for the imaginary identification with that community that Benedict Anderson describes. 2. At times Laclau seems to describe almost the opposite view. He implies that individuals who make affective investments in objects of desire sometimes take as their object the idea of a complete, fully reconciled society. He says that we pursue “the moment of the mythical fullness for which we search in vain: the restoration of the mother/child unity or, in political terms, the fully reconciled society.”27 In the longer passage quoted above, he refers to “social fullness” as a goal invested in a partial object, whose satisfaction will always evade us. In these passages Laclau seems to claim that popular politics is structured by a desire to create a complete community or a universal popular identity. Thus, he says, “the construction of the ‘people’ will be the attempt to give a name to that absent fullness.”28 This construction is political in character and consists of a hegemonic group representing itself as “a universalistic totality” – that is, as the complete community itself.29 In the background lies the implication that no political community can be complete in the way we imagine it, yet we desire social wholeness and attempt to create it. From this point of view, popular identities are formed out of a psychically driven search to create a fully unified, complete social order. Our inherent inability to succeed in this endeavor merely ensures the frustration and continuation of the effort. On this interpretation, Laclau would be making a rather striking claim about the desires and motivations of actual individuals. It would postulate a deep drive, rooted in feelings of primal lack, toward overcoming the perceived incompleteness of society. It is not entirely clear what this completeness might consist in: it could be an end to social tensions, antagonisms, and exclusions; or it could be the formation of a collective identity that is truly all-inclusive. The associated desire might be analogous to Freud’s conception of an “oceanic feeling” in which a person seeks to return to the total fusion with the universe characteristic of infancy, a state that Freud colorfully describes as “something like the restoration of limitless narcissism.”30 This state would be narcissism without limit because the borders between self and other would dissolve, leaving one to identify everything and everyone with oneself. If this were Laclau’s position, it would be an adventurous and interesting hypothesis. Viewed from the perspective of popular politics, however, it still appears rather reductive and individualistic. Here Laclau would be claiming that people sometimes channel their partial desires toward inclusion and social harmony, seeking greater completeness through their relation to a social whole. This explanation would give a fairly rich account of the imaginary creation of community. Political collectivities like the people would result when a deep drive toward sociality and collectivity is shared among members of a group. This kind of shared drive would not be a fundamental instinct toward sociality, exactly – say, of the kind postulated by evolutionary behaviorists. Rather,

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it would locate the drive toward sociality in a displaced feeling of lack that originates with the relation between child and mother. Thus, sociality would be a kind of misplaced search for something else, rooted in the psychic needs of the individual. From this perspective, we still have a reduction of social phenomena to individualism and instrumentality. As a result, the whole hypothesis comes to seem rather reductive and speculative. 3. Finally, we could read Laclau as describing a structural paradigm for political demands. Here the mother-child relationship establishes a general model of lack and desire, where desires are seen as frustrated attempts to satisfy a more profound, generalized lack. This model, Laclau might claim, is structurally isomorphic to an individual’s relation with society. In this view there would be no deeper reflection on the origin of individual desires, no postulated relationship between one’s primal differentiation from the mother and specific, political desires. Rather, the model would describe political phenomena in a more general sense, providing a schema for understanding their structural similarities to psychic processes. This interpretation would be consistent with Laclau’s characterization of society as a structure that is “not fully reconciled with itself,” one “inhabited by an original lack, by a radical undecidability that needs to be constantly superseded by acts of decision.”31 Here the lack that leaves social relations under-determined could be seen as homologous to the lack that characterizes desire. We would understand society as inherently incomplete and thus open to decision and politics, just as we understand an individual’s relation to self as incomplete because of differentiation from the primal mother. The incompleteness of the individual psyche motivates us to pursue objects of desire in a vain effort at completeness. Similarly, the incompleteness of society implies that human choices are under-determined and leaves us free to determine them. As a generalized schema, this interpretation produces some interesting insights. Because it draws only analogies between desire and politics, however, it is correspondingly poor at explaining the motivations and psychic investments that people have in politics. In this purely structural interpretation, psychic processes do not drive politics; they are only heuristic models with no causal role. As a result, this view draws intriguing analogies between politics and individual drives and motivations, but does not meaningfully connect them. It does not account for the psychic bases of political normativity and collective identity formation  – the very phenomena that Laclau sets out to explain by drawing on Lacanian ideas.32 Nor is the analogy between the individual psyche and society structurally exact: people may desire various objects to compensate for a deeply felt lack of personal completeness, but they experience the incompleteness of society merely as a form of under-determination and freedom. At best, this is a thought-provoking comparison, not a robust structural model or the project that Laclau sees himself as undertaking.

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Each of these interpretations has some plausibility as a reading of Laclau. None, however, successfully accounts for the phenomenon of collective identity. None makes clear how the existential and affective dimensions of peoplehood can arise by forging links between demands. As a result, a gap remains in this account between language, discourse, and demands, on one hand, and the existential meaning and normative import of collective identities, on the other. This gap challenges us to more successfully connect discourse and identity. The problems that Laclau encounters here may not arise from the lack of clarity in his approach, but from its basic premises. The idea that political collectivity is driven by deep-seated desires suffers from the same instrumentality and individualism as his broader conception of politics. It reduces sociality to personal insufficiency. This excludes many important phenomena, including the ones that Benedict Anderson characterizes so vividly:  the accumulation of fellow-feeling among people who do not know one another, as a result of contingent, mundane material practices. Anderson captures the directionless diversity of this phenomenon in ways that Laclau’s explanations seem to short-circuit. Rather than providing an explanation for how collective identities might form, Laclau’s view seems to take us in the wrong direction. What we need is a more complex, pluralistic, and non-teleological view that can amplify and refine the picture Anderson has already given us.

The Artificial Soul of the People In the end, both Laclau and Anderson have problems accounting for collective identity. Laclau is the more successful at problematizing identity, while Anderson is more successful at detailing its actual historical development. However, neither account completely does the work we want it to. In the metaphor I drew from Hobbes, neither fully shows how the artificial man of political community comes together as a collective identity. These difficulties are important, because our ultimate focus is not on the artificial man but his artificial soul. This is the question of what normative force we should attribute to collective identity. Should we see political collectivities as self-determining, autonomous entities, and if so, why? Should we think of the people as having some kind of power? In Hobbes’s terms, the crucial question is whether the artificial man has an artificial soul, what its character might be, and how it animates his artificial body. Ernesto Laclau has an instrumental view of politics, oriented toward the fulfillment of demands. This is a conception of collective power in a sense: the power to pursue individual aims collectively. Although he makes insightful comments about the psychological dimensions of collective identity, they are not successful in accounting for the construction of a collective power. They do not describe a form of sovereignty, but rather certain individual dimensions of the formation of an oppositional group. It is a fundamentally antagonistic

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view of the political that is based on mobilization, hegemony, and the play of oppositional forces. This view does not itself privilege any normative agenda. It does not distinguish right or wrong or legitimate or illegitimate, but only power and counterpower. This is not to say that Laclau sees all politics as equivalent, however. His notion of populism has a normative privilege not shared by other forms. The question is how Laclau can account for this different status. He claims that populism is constituted when a set of demands comes to be identified with some empty signifier: A certain demand, which was perhaps at the beginning only one among many, acquires at some point an unexpected centrality, and becomes the name of something exceeding it, of something which it cannot control by itself but which, however, becomes a “destiny” from which it cannot escape. When a democratic demand has gone through this process, it becomes a “popular” one . . . It is only then that the “name” becomes detached from the “concept,” the signifier from the signified. Without this detachment, there would be no populism.33

This passage identifies populism with a particular process of signification in which connections are drawn between demands. It implies that the use of an empty signifier as the name for a chain of demands is not only a necessary characteristic of populism, but a sufficient one. A popular identity – populism as such  – is constituted “when a democratic demand has gone through this process.” It is not clear, however, why we would consider the identities produced by this process “popular” rather than merely collective. Populism is equated with the process of unifying identities, but Laclau does not fully explain why such a process would make an identity popular. As a counterexample, one might imagine an aristocratic class with a clear sense of group identity, formed by unifying demands against some institutional authority (“Cut taxes now!”), but seeing itself as quite distinct from, and superior to, “the people.” This would be collective identity without populism. It shows that we need a way to distinguish the production of collective identities in general from the narrower set of cases that we would characterize as “populist” or “of the people.” This is a problem of the normative criteria of popular politics – collective identity per se is not normatively special, popular identities are. The question is about what creates the normative phenomenon lying at the heart of popular politics: what makes popular demands special, compared with mere collective mobilization in a politics of force or coercion? Laclau does provide some insights for thinking about this problem. He notes that the demands he calls democratic “are formulated to the system by an underdog of sorts – that there is an equalitarian dimension implicit in them,” and further, “that their very emergence presupposes some kind of exclusion or deprivation (what I have called ‘deficient being’).”34 These demands are made toward a power that has the ability to satisfy them, and they are made from

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a position of less power. Populism arises, then, when the identity formed is an “underdog” in relation to a source of authority. In this vein, we might suppose that the disdainful class of aristocrats is not sufficiently disempowered, even though they may have demands that are frustrated or unfulfilled. Here we would suppose that the underdog status is a separate and additional criterion of popular politics, distinguishing cases of mere identity formation from ones that have specifically popular import.35 Underdog status gives us an intuitive index of the difference between popular and nonpopular movements. It relies on a rather under-specified notion of disempowerment, though, to distinguish generic cases of collective identity formation from more specifically popular ones. In this sense, it would be useful if we could sharpen the lines of this idea by specifying more crisply what it means to be an underdog. One strategy would define the status in structural terms. An underdog, in this sense, could be characterized as a relation that an individual has to institutional sources of power. Since the power to satisfy demands is key to Laclau’s view, an underdog would be someone structurally disempowered relative to the satisfaction of his or her demands. An underdog would then be anyone whose demands can only be satisfied by raising them antagonistically toward an institutional source of satisfaction. It is a position structurally defined by an antagonistic relation to power. Other subject positions, lacking this antagonistic relation, would not be popular.36 This notion is appealing because it provides some clarity about what it means to be an underdog. Putting such an idea to critical use, we could say that the disdainful aristocracy is not composed of underdogs because its members are not structurally disempowered relative to the institutions that can satisfy their demands. Either they can make the institution do their bidding (they have power over it and are thus not antagonistic toward it) or they have alternative means of satisfaction. As a result, the aristocracy might be a collective identity constituted by unifying its demands, but it would not be a popular identity. This interpretation provides a clearer definition of popular politics by adding an additional criterion to the mix: an identity group’s structural relation to power. This structural definition clarifies different political positions in a field of power. From this point, though, the task still remains of explaining why some of those positions should be accorded special status. The idea of an underdog takes us some way toward being able to say why the people ought to be seen as having a special power. It still relies on unspoken resonances of underdogness, though – perhaps ideas of disempowerment or subordination. In other words, this idea clarifies the task at hand but does not accomplish it. Benedict Anderson does not fare any better at accounting for the people’s artificial soul. At the beginning of Imagined Communities, he briefly remarks that nations are imagined not only as communities but as sovereign.37 This remark is framed as parallel to, and of the same status as, that making up the

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subject of the book  – that nations are imagined as communities. However, Anderson doesn’t elaborate on what sovereignty means in the context of an imagined community, nor does the book provide an argument for his claim. He points toward something of this sort by noting that the rise of nations occurred at the same time that the divine right of kings was being denaturalized. This is an accurate observation, particularly in light of the remarks I made at the beginning of this chapter about the awkward transformation from king to people, but it merely notes a temporal association. The actual practices Anderson details  – the temporality of print genres, the career trajectories of colonial administrators, and so on – provide a striking explanation for the vivid sense of community experienced by national citizens. They do not, however, account for any sense of collective political agency, sovereignty, or popular power that might be imagined as characteristic of nations. It is tantalizing to think what might be said about sovereignty on Anderson’s behalf. Working from his perspective, we could see sovereignty as implicitly imagined in the formation of a national community. This idea would go a long way toward explaining why we see such communities as collectively self-determining political entities. It would help us to understand why nationalism has furnished such a powerful rallying point for separatist and independence movements. At a more abstract level, such an account would explain how we make the transition from thinking that a certain group of people is like us, to thinking that all of us together are, or should be, “a people” endowed with powers of self-determination. It would, in short, show us how the formation of collective identities is also sometimes a process that endows these collectivities with a presumption of rectitude or sovereign force.

Sovereignty’s Imaginary Scene I have examined two important conceptions of collective political identity. Taken together, Laclau and Anderson move us a long way toward understanding the anatomy of the artificial man with an artificial soul. Each of these visions admirably traces the circumstances that create and reproduce collective political identities. Borders, maps, stories, and political practices create forms of collective identification with political significance. These accounts are particularly distinguished by their epistemic sophistication. They do not assume the existence of collective identities but try to account for it in ways that are sensitive to the dynamics of knowledge and imagination that shape our understanding of membership and belonging. Ernesto Laclau problematizes dogmatic thinking about popular politics in important ways. He takes our understanding of collective identity formation through a linguistic turn, accounting for the construction of identity categories as a matter of discourse. This view suggests that the idea of social fullness is in various ways desired, impossible, and/or instrumentally employed in politics. Collective identities, from this perspective, are fragile achievements that can

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never be truly universal. At best, they reflect our desire for a more complete community; at worst, they form a false universalism claiming to speak for the whole. Although this view is undercut by its reliance on Lacanian psychology, Laclau’s problematization of collective identity and universality is tantalizing and instructive. These parts of his thinking go farthest beyond the taken-for-granted conceptual landscape to rethink the basic terms and ideas of popular politics. The fine-grained materialism of Benedict Anderson’s work provides a contrast to Laclau’s emphasis on language. Anderson catalogs the prosaic, everyday practices that shape identity formation, showing how they are interconnected with macrosocial factors like systems of trade, deployments of colonial power, the structure of educational systems, and the development and circulation of print media. This historical and contextual specificity marks a different approach to problems of political collectivity. Anderson uses it as a basis for describing the collective imagination of nationhood. He shows that routine aspects of daily life create shared images of collective identity. The great virtue of Anderson’s work lies in creating this bridge between material practice and collective imagination. He shows quite elegantly that the action of collective identity happens in our shared imagination of ourselves as collectives. In spite of their rich insights, neither of these views captures the normative dimension of collective identity, the idea of sovereignty or collective power. Each gives us a carefully delineated description of the artificial man of collective identity, but less satisfaction regarding his artificial soul. In Laclau’s case, the problem is an instrumental conception of politics and a linguistic account of practice. Laclau’s people is not a sovereign collectivity so much as a movement that besieges sources of power and attempts to win satisfaction. It does not authorize, delegate, or create, nor is it, in any broader sense, authorized as sovereign. I have complained about the reductive, instrumental, and individualistic character of these ideas. To some extent there is another problem at work, however, which arises repeatedly in comparison with Anderson. That problem is a narrow focus on discourse that excludes other forms of practice. Laclau describes the formation of political identities as a function of language. Missing from this account is a broader, more heterogeneous understanding of practice itself. Not practice construed specifically as language, but practice simpliciter as constituting identities and political imaginaries. Anderson elegantly transposes questions of political identity to this imaginary plain. There is to some extent a disjunction between his account of the material practices that are held to construct political identities and the collective imagination, though. He does not develop an account of how these practices take root in the imaginations of the subjects who practice them. As a result, we do not have a clear idea of how communities are imagined. Ernesto Laclau provides some details of such an account, but with problems that foil a clear understanding of collective identity formation. He does us the great

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service, however, of dislodging essentialist and dogmatic perspectives on these problems, opening the door for further exploration of the topic. These symmetrical advantages and limitations point out a clear path for us to follow. We must trace an investigation of the artificial soul of sovereignty, following Anderson’s insight that political collectivities are imagined communities. Sovereignties, we might suppose, are imagined in the same way that communities are. To make good on this insight, the connections between collective identity and popular sovereignty must be traced out in much greater detail. We must make clear why peoples should have a special claim to normative rectitude in our collective imagination. This requires a grounded, contextual, and historically specific reading of the power of the people. It could draw inspiration both from Ernesto Laclau’s de-essentializing emphasis on the politics of identity formation and on Benedict Anderson’s careful materialist historiography. This would be something like a critical history of popular sovereignties, or a critical history of our sovereign imaginaries. It would aim at the sources of the “artificial soul” of sovereignty, trying to document the ineffable senses in which we hold certain truths about the power of the people to be self-evident. Writing such a hybrid history requires transposing some of the insights that we find in both of these works. It requires critical tools that can talk about something as intangible as our political imaginaries, but in concrete, material, and historical terms. Such tools must be able to give us an account of imagined sovereignties equal in abstraction, scope, and specificity to Anderson’s account of imagined communities.

3 How Do We Write a History of Normative Practices? Castoriadis, Taylor, Foucault

We have to abandon the model of Leviathan, that model of an artificial man who is at once an automaton, a fabricated man, but also a unitary man who contains all real individuals, whose body is made up of citizens but whose soul is sovereignty. – Michel Foucault1

One thing we can say with confidence is that faith in popular politics is a crucial element of the ideational space that has defined much of politics in Western modernity. It inhabits our collective imagination as a norm that orders the political in Western societies. We need a critical modality that can match the complexity of this situation. It must be one that can view such ideals simultaneously as crucial for animating the thought and action of the people around us, and as interesting artifacts of the Western cultural landscape. These ideas compel us despite their many internal tensions and precisely because they are cultural constructs. We must be careful not to erase that tension, but recognize its constitutive role in our own political culture. We need a set of interpretive tools that can embrace this complexity rather than oversimplify or blind us to it. They must be sensitive to the collective, shared, intersubjective character of these ideas – the sense in which they are simultaneously compelling and imaginary. To begin framing this project, I will draw on three thinkers who provide important insights about our political imaginaries. I will start with the originary theorist of this idea, Cornelius Castoriadis. Charles Taylor and Michel Foucault provide valuable refinements to his views but also encounter symmetrical shortcomings. To take stock of all this, I will travel a somewhat circular path, from Castoriadis to Taylor and then on to Foucault, then back to Castoriadis and Taylor in the end, highlighting valuable insights and problems along the way. My strongest allegiance lies with Foucault, but I will argue that 39

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each of these thinkers runs up against characteristic limitations. Only by sifting through and recombining their resources can we arrive at a satisfactory critical perspective on popular politics.

Imagining the Political Cornelius Castoriadis contributes an important perspective to this project. He provides novel concepts for describing ineffable phenomena of cultural politics. Castoriadis reformulates Jacques Lacan’s idea of the imaginary to describe a shared, social domain of communication and representation. He takes great pains to locate this notion in the domain of concrete institutions and practices. A social imaginary combines several of the analytically separable elements that Lacan identifies. In substance it consists primarily of the forms of ideation described by the imaginary. Castoriadis is careful to specify, though, that the imaginary must be seen as intertwined with the symbolic.2 Just as the imaginary is a nonlinguistic mode of thought, the symbolic is its linguistic counterpart. By itself, the imaginary is inarticulable and lacks an intersubjective dimension. That is provided by language. Together, the two modes constitute a shared domain of meaning – a domain combining words and images – within a given society. Castoriadis emphasizes the material character of these acts of collective imagination. They are inscribed in “the concrete materiality of acts and things,” which includes both the material objects that structure daily practice and the words that give it social meaning.3 Materiality is at once a product of shared understandings and their anchor. The meanings we attribute to the shared world of objects and practices are a product of shared imagination. Conversely, the objects and practices of this world solidify the meanings they embody, providing continuity within a society. The social imaginary is thus inherently material, and the material world is constituted by joint acts of imagination.4 Materiality and imagination come together most importantly in forming collectivities. Castoriadis describes collectivities and the values shared by their members as products of our collective imagination.5 He sees societies as an important example of this phenomenon. They have a vital role in constituting shared meaning and reality, even though their membership and boundaries cannot be precisely determined and the processes of development within them are not unified and run at many different paces.6 As Castoriadis puts it, societies do not “contain” systems of interpretation of the world. Rather, “each society is a system of interpretation of the world.”7 A society both creates its own world and is simultaneously a product of that world. In this sense, institutions are an important part of the social and material character of our collective imagination. They combine the social and material aspects of the imagination, bringing people together in symbolic networks of communication that are to some extent functional for the enterprises they

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pursue and to some extent expressions of a society’s shared imaginary. They establish networks of communication in a form that is shaped by the shared common sense – the taken-for-granted imaginary – of a given society.8 Thus, for instance, Castoriadis claims that “When we talk about the State, we are talking about an institution animated by imaginary significations.”9 Such an institution is animated by the imaginary because function alone could not determine what form it takes. To add flesh to such a creation, to bring it to life within a specific society, requires the richness of shared meanings that a given society brings to the task. Castoriadis also draws careful connections between the subjective and intersubjective dimensions of imagination. He shows how individual thought can be coordinated into shared points of belief and taken-for-grantedness. In this way, Castoriadis shows how individual ideas, both images and words, can take on the character of shared meaning. By emphasizing the way in which collective imagination constitutes collectivities, he presages Benedict Anderson’s work on the imaginary constitution of communities. The materiality that Castoriadis attributes to this process also agrees closely with Anderson’s ideas. This material dimension is valuable in a more general sense as well: it provides an important antidote to a conception that would turn the imaginary into a kind of phantasm or purely internal, psychological phenomenon. These insights shed a great deal of light on a phenomenon like the power of the people. Castoriadis provides a flexible, nondogmatic account of the bases of our collective beliefs. He is careful to draw lines of continuity between shared forms of thought, institutions, and practices, emphasizing their simultaneously pictorial, linguistic, and material character. In this sense, he does not embrace a view of thought that locates it only in words or practices. Rather, his view integrates word, image, and practice to produce a finely rendered account of thought in all its complexity. Castoriadis also draws our attention to the collective, intersubjective character of political norms and identities. From his perspective, our ideas about popular politics are elements in broader social imaginaries – ways that society imagines itself and thus constitutes itself. This is an important direction to follow in investigating the questions I have posed. Castoriadis shows that this investigation must trace both discourses and practices, tracking the two as interconnected domains in the same project. Pursing that direction, we can view shared ideas of popular politics as part of a political imaginary that is created and reproduced by practices of many kinds. The challenge is to identify these practices and discover how they contribute to our collective ideals. Although Castoriadis provides many insights for the project I have outlined, it is important to recognize the points at which his ideas require further supplementation. A  primary limitation comes from Castoriadis’s self-chosen frame of reference. He is constantly preoccupied with a principled rebellion against structuralism and Marxist determinism. He wants to show how some kind of

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epistemic-political praxis is possible within our collectively imagined world and sees these doctrines as ideologically foreclosing such a project. To provide an alternative view, he makes an important critical distinction between the imaginary that a society shares and the domains of spontaneous, radical imagination that individuals are capable of. There is, he says, a great deal of indetermination and slippage between these domains and among the institutions and practices they constitute. In short, Castoriadis’s primary energy is devoted to the thrust and parry of his attack on structuralism. As a result, he often remains absorbed within the conceptual landscape he is trying to escape, and his own positive agenda receives much less complete elaboration. While fighting his way out of narrow dichotomies of structure and agency and narrowly functionalist perspectives, his primary points of reference are often ideas of structure, agency, and function. These terms dominate his discussion, excluding other themes and sapping energy that could have gone into developing a more thoroughly rendered picture of the social imaginary and its consequences. The most important consequence of this focus is that Castoriadis’s idea of a social imaginary is not fleshed out in great detail. He carefully traces dimensions of novelty in our collective imaginaries and is careful to provide theoretical openings for free improvisation and autonomy in thinking.10 All of this remains at a very high level of abstraction, though, motivated by the broader struggle against structuralism and functionalism. This drains critical specificity from Castoriadis’s work. Because he does not theorize the imaginary in terms of specific social norms, institutions, group identities, social struggles, material practices, and received forms of thought, it is difficult to relate his work to these more concrete aspects of society. As a result, he cannot show how our attitudes about popular politics originate or why we attach such importance to them. Castoriadis is clear that he does not want the idea of a social imaginary to be taken as a single, overarching epistemic framework.11 However, he does not provide resources for thinking about multiple, differentiated epistemologies within a given society. As a result, this work does not have the ability to differentiate between various practices of popular politics or between the various traditions and histories in which they are rooted. It tends to ignore social differences with talk about “the core imaginary” or “the social imaginary” rather than contending and sometimes contradictory ones. Similarly, Castoriadis does not account for the way in which specific forms of material practice synthesize and reproduce the imaginary. He provides a general idea of how one might think about this and leaves the door open for such an account, but it is not pursued. As a result, we do not know exactly how the imaginary might relate to material practices, and the political ramifications of the imaginary remain largely unexplored. The absence of contextual detail in Castoriadis’s account leaves it with few resources to comment on the intersubjective, imaginary character of political norms and practices. This makes it hard to see how we collectively construct norms through material and

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discursive practice that come to seem obligatory and binding on our conduct. In other words, his work does not have the social, historical, and contextual differentiation needed to comment insightfully on a phenomenon like “the power of the people.”

Modernity and the Political Imagination Charles Taylor goes a considerable way toward compensating for these lapses. His book Modern Social Imaginaries is an ambitious effort of historical interpretation, outlining a broad view of the cultural and conceptual transformations leading to modernity. This work is notable both for its methodological reflections on the idea of a social imaginary and its substantive account of the cultural bases of modernity. In Modern Social Imaginaries, Taylor portrays our political practices as interconnected with broader, socially embedded ways of thinking: the social imaginary. This is “the way we collectively imagine, even pretheoretically, our social life in the contemporary Western world.”12 More expansively, he describes a social imaginary as a broad background understanding that includes “the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.”13 In the broadest sense, the social imaginary constitutes a shared matrix of understanding and meaning for those who hold it. For Taylor, the social imaginary is importantly related to various forms of material practice. It is a shared understanding of how practices are to be performed and the circumstances in which it is correct to perform them.14 In his account, this imaginary provides a context of meaning for our practices. “The social imaginary is not a set of ideas; rather, it is what enables, through making sense of, the practices of a society.”15 But the opposite is also the case. Practices help to reinforce and propagate certain outlooks, so the lines of influence between imagination and practice run both ways. As Taylor says, “Certain moral self-understandings are embedded in certain practices, which can mean both that they are promoted by the spread of these practices and that they shape the practices and help them get established.”16 Taylor claims a special place for theory in connecting the social imaginary with practices. It provides an organizing framework that adds meaning. In this way, the theory becomes part of the social imaginary. He asks: What exactly is involved when a theory penetrates and transforms the social imaginary? For the most part, people take up, improvise, or are inducted into new practices. These are made sense of by the new outlook, the one first articulated in the theory; this outlook is the context that gives sense to the practices. Hence the new understanding comes to be accessible to the participants in a way it wasn’t before. It begins to define the contours of their world and can eventually come to count as the taken-for-granted shape of things, too obvious to mention.17

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If we abstract away from the privilege that Taylor accords to theory per se, some very interesting questions emerge. He makes exciting claims about the interaction between ideas and practices. Ideas can provide a schema of interpretation that gives meaning to practices. This is an interesting way to relate theory and practice and a plausible account of how certain kinds of ideas, those articulated as “theory” in a particular sense, become incorporated into a social imaginary. To Taylor’s credit, he does not simply describe an abstract vision of the imaginary like Castoriadis did. He is serious about putting these ideas to use in an interpretive analysis of contemporary society. His interpretation of our modern moral order and its effects on the social imaginary forms the bulk of the book. Here Taylor goes far beyond Castoriadis, providing much more concrete detail about the workings of the social imaginary while also developing more particular generalizations about its sources. A prominent focus of his attention is the development of popular sovereignty. He views it as an important part of the modern social imaginary. This development is made possible by a new moral order that he sees articulated particularly in the work of Grotius and Locke. They provide the basis for a fundamental shift in the modern imaginary: a moral order based in the idea of contractual agreement and centered on individual freedom. In this view, society is a product of free, individual consent, and it exists to provide security and prosperity to the individuals forming it.18 This development paves the way for another aspect of the modern social imaginary, the idea of a sovereign people. According to Taylor, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s work is particularly decisive in this development, entering the modern social imaginary through the French Revolution. Taylor sees Rousseau’s ideas as providing a lens through which the revolutionary practices of this time could be understood. In his estimation, Rousseau provided a view of politics centered around a new notion of virtue, one emphasizing the common good in a quasi-religious way. This provided a basis for reinterpreting practices of revolutionary insurrection. As a result, Rousseau’s ideas became more widely familiar and thus embedded in the modern social imaginary. The effect is not necessarily positive, however. In Taylor’s analysis, the interplay between popular politics and Rousseau’s work produced a bias against stable institutional expressions of popular sovereignty. At the same time, it encouraged a kind of moral absolutism. The result was the perverse events of the Terror.19 As we have seen, Taylor’s interpretive approach accords particular weight to canonical works of political theory, particularly those of Locke and Rousseau. He claims that these works have had a privileged role in shaping the social imaginary. They achieve wider circulation in the imaginary because they provide a lens for understanding practices we already engage in. Whether high theories like those of Locke and Rousseau have a privileged role in shaping our shared imagination is an interesting question. It accords

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crucial importance to texts by authors working in a particular philosophical idiom. It marks a special significance for canonical texts and explicitly articulated arguments. Particular examples of this genre, Taylor argues, provided the lens through which French revolutionaries came to understand their own practices. Specifically, Rousseau provided the primary lens through which the revolutionaries were able to comprehend the acts they were engaged in. Prima facie it seems unlikely that any one thinker or genre of text could exercise such singular importance in world history. Such a claim must be borne out through careful examination of the archival record. Timothy Tackett has taken up this line of inquiry in interesting ways. He finds that the deputies of the National Assembly, some of those most intimately involved in revolutionary practice, were not reading Rousseau or the other philosophes at the time of the French Revolution.20 This includes even Maximillian Robespierre, one of the most articulate and ideologically influential of them. Tackett argues that their points of reference, to the extent that they were interested in literature at all, slanted much more toward classical writers and practical works of law, science, history, and economics.21 Of course, this study concentrates on the start of the Revolution, 1789–1790, so it is possible that intellectual habits changed with the developing revolutionary culture over the next several years. Some deputies seemed to enjoy the stimulation of Paris’s cultural and intellectual life, while others reported “endless meetings and grinding toil,” and “fatigue and lassitude, the result of continual tension.”22 This suggests that their influences were varied, and they did not rely on any one thinker to provide a lens for understanding the meaning of revolution. In Chapter 4 I will investigate these issues in more detail, situating Rousseau in a broader line of discursive practice that tells a different story about his place in the developing culture of popular sovereignty. Rousseau was well-known at this time, to be sure, but primarily for his opinions about music and his epistolary novel Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse. Meanwhile, thinkers now unfamiliar to us, like Gabriel-François Coyer and Louis de Jaucourt, were providing the lens through which the political practices of the day were understood. My primary objection to Taylor’s account is not with the to-and-fro of which intellectual figure was most important, however, but with this view’s underlying assumptions. It should be clear from my discussion of Benedict Anderson that I find this a highly problematic approach to cultural, social, and intellectual history. It is a questionable interpretive presupposition to privilege the works of any one person as decisive to the thoughts of his era. The singular privilege accorded to Rousseau ignores the rich intellectual tapestry of this era and its fraught relation to the politics and censorship of the ancien régime, not to mention the street politics, rumor, and public opinion of the day. In this sense, it is problematic to presuppose that “theory”  – a particular idiom of writing and publication – exercises such a privileged role in shaping the social imaginary. That would exclude the vast troves of “lesser” published materials of this rich intellectual culture  – pamphlets, atlases, encyclopedias, treatises,

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broadsheets, newspapers, and so on, not to mention the actual discourse of assemblies, debating societies, Masonic lodges, learned salons, and everyday street conversation. Given the vast intellectual ferment of the period, it is difficult to conclude that the published works of a single thinker could have such a decisive effect on the thoughts of his era. If we broaden the range of influences we see as shaping our social imaginaries, some interesting issues come into view. Consider Taylor’s insightful account of what would be involved in using theory as a schema to give meaning to practice: There is a general point to be made about modern revolutionary transitions carried out on the basis of novel theories. The transition can only come off, in anything like the desired sense, if the “people,” or at least important minorities of activists, understand and internalize the theory. But for political actors, understanding a theory is being able to put it into effect. These practices have to make sense to them, the kind of sense the theory prescribes. But what makes sense of our practices is our social imaginary.23

In Taylor’s view, a theory gives meaning to a set of practices by clarifying what those practices are and why they are significant. It seems to provide a unifying framework that draws together various practices under the same rubric. Specific instances of street protest, for instance, can be seen as examples of a broader phenomenon described by a thinker like Rousseau: the people asserting their legitimate authority. To make that attribution, however, we must already understand the theoretical explanation: we must already have some theoretically elaborated idea of a people having legitimate authority. In more general terms, the theory must already be known and understood to be applied to the practices in question. This is equivalent to saying that it must be part of a society’s social imaginary. Yet that would imply that a theory must be part of a society’s social imaginary in order to become part of its social imaginary. This view presupposes that theories are already part of our common intellectual currency, and so it does not provide a good account of how they might become a part of the social imaginary. At best it might explain how theories that we already hold might become more deeply naturalized. Our adherence to a particular view might increase with its ability to gather practices together in a meaningful way. Here Taylor makes an important contribution. His view shifts attention away from the abstract correctness of the theory, toward the historical circumstances of its naturalization in our system of beliefs. Following his lead, we do not ask, for instance, whether Rousseau’s account of popular sovereignty is normatively correct according to abstract philosophical standards. Rather, the question is how that account is taken up into our social imaginaries as a view about the social world. Such a way of proceeding need not be limited to “theory” as such. It could describe the naturalization of any belief that provides a unified explanation for disparate phenomena. Detaching

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this explanation from “theory” would retain its benefits while expanding its purview to other ideas and texts. In general, Taylor’s tendency to privilege theory is part of a broader bias toward unity and coherence within the idea of an “imaginary.” He traces a broadscale cultural transformation that he sees as something of a tectonic shift. He frames this narrative as a set of transformations that led to the modern social imaginary. In particular, these are centered around what he refers to as the modern moral order. The following comment is typical in that regard: “Once we are installed in the modern social imaginary, it seems the only possible one, the only one that makes sense.”24 This kind of monism seems to be the default mode of Taylor’s thinking about the social imaginary. It subsists in somewhat uneasy tension with the book’s title, which refers to imaginaries in the plural. It is also at odds with his less well developed remarks about the piecemeal, uneven character of transitions in the social imaginary, and the influence of class and power on these transitions.25 In spite of these promising hints, Taylor persists in portraying society as having one, perhaps “central,” imaginary. That idea often seems to function as an interpretive presupposition in his history of modernity. If it is in fact presupposed, however, it becomes particularly problematic. It would assume a unified modern imaginary rather than investigating the extent to which this is the case. Such an orientation would put substantial limits on our ability to investigate a phenomenon like folk foundationalism. It might be seen as symptomatic of that phenomenon rather than critical of it. Clearly, the plurality of the modern imagination is itself an important question. It is an interesting issue whether modernity has narrowed the scope of our imagination, leading to something like a single, hegemonic modern imaginary. David Scott has posed this question in a postcolonial context, asking whether modernity sets the terms in which formerly colonized peoples can think about their own emancipation and freedom.26 I will engage these issues in detail in Chapter 7. As we think about issues of political imagination, it would be useful to carry forward Taylor’s insights while developing a more diverse interpretation of them. By reducing the privilege accorded to works of theory, we could achieve a more balanced and comprehensive account of the creation of social imaginaries. Such a view would better capture the fine texture of social change and reveal the tensions and problematics at the heart of our social imaginaries. It would show the presence of disorder as well as order – lines of continuity crosscut with abrupt departures, disparate agendas, forms of creativity and innovation made possible by constitutive gaps of meaning and misunderstanding, and problematizations that proliferate and stimulate discourse. Such a focus would balance rational unity with diversity, disjunction, tension, and accident. This view would require a broader archival scope, leveling the distinction between high and low texts and examining a wider array of materials written for many different audiences and purposes.

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Heterogeneous Ensembles To develop a view of the social imaginary like the one I have just described, we must, as Dipesh Chakrabarty says, “make visible the heterogeneous practices of seeing we often bring under the jurisdiction of this one European word, ‘imagination’.”27 Of course, the great theorist of heterogeneous practices is Michel Foucault. Foucault referred to his own investigations as the analysis of a “heterogeneous ensemble” of discourses, institutions, and material habits and practices, “in short, the said as much as the unsaid.”28 Practices are an important mode in which forms of thought appear. The attraction of such an analysis, Foucault says, is to identify “precisely the nature of the connection that can exist between these heterogeneous elements.” His analysis adeptly includes a broad range of elements, including words, practices, and institutions. Thus, “a particular discourse can figure at one time as the programme of an institution, and at another it can function as a means of justifying or masking a practice which itself remains silent, or as a secondary re-interpretation of this practice, opening out for it a new field of rationality.”29 These insights are well suited to investigating popular politics. They could provide the means to trace the unintentional, not entirely rational mechanisms that also lead things to become fixed in a social imaginary. Foucault does not assume that our shared ways of thinking have a rational consistency or even particular reasons for being shared. He echoes the careful balancing of materiality and ideation that we have seen in both Castoriadis and Taylor. Yet he goes into much more concrete historical detail and reveals the heterogeneity of social imaginaries much more than either of them. Foucault typically framed his work in terms of concrete institutions and practices rather than shared ideas or political imaginaries, but on at least one occasion he talked about it in this way: While personally I was strongly drawn to concrete problems, like for instance psychiatry or the prison, I now think that it is by starting from these concrete problems that one can finally provoke something. And really, what is necessary to bring to light by starting from these concrete problems? It’s what one should call a “new political imaginary.” What interests me is to provoke this new political imagination.30

This occurs in the course of an interview in which Foucault complains about the lack of free and original political thinking in our time, and speculates that his own investigations might be able to provoke something new in this regard. The remark indicates an important nexus of shared concerns, revealing points of sympathy between Castoriadis’s theorization of a shared intersubjective domain, Taylor’s concern about the ideas that make sense of our practices, and Foucault’s discursive-material histories. This remark is relatively singular in Foucault’s oeuvre. It provides an interesting invitation, however, to expand on his insights. A  distinctive approach to the problem of popular politics emerges when we connect the dots that

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lie between Castoriadis, Taylor, and Foucault. To investigate our adherence to something like folk foundationalism, we must trace out the practices that lead us to develop such ideas as a shared imaginary. In particular, we must be aware of the way that such practices can create a kind of intersubjective consensus about matters of political value, leading us to attribute a “natural”  – which is to say, taken-for-granted – rectitude to the power of the people, with little further thought about the matter. In what follows, I  will trace out the consequences of this approach in much greater detail, combining insights about the concrete history of discourse and practice with broader generalizations about the origins of our shared, taken-for-granted ideas. Like Foucault, my goal is to provoke new political imagination by starting from concrete problems. The historical archive of popular politics provides rich resources for seeing how political imaginaries are realized in discourse and action. By tracing the deployment of these shared forms of imagination, we can see that our shared world, what Hannah Arendt called “the space of appearances,” consists of many imaginaries. They overlap and interconnect in various ways, containing points of problematization, tensions, and internal conflicts. These forms of imagination are not free-floating cultural entities, but forms of shared signification that are built into our material surroundings and practices. They are part of our lived world, not just as shared ideas but also as texts, laws, borders, forms of government, forms of practice, and so on. They are, in short, a “heterogeneous ensemble” that can be revealed through a genealogical analysis of popular politics. Even while focusing on the concrete particularity of practices, we need to keep the imaginary dimension of this project firmly in view. Here Foucault comes up somewhat short. He can at times be so materialist and particularist that the imagination is banished from the field of play, replaced by docile bodies, normalizing judgment, disciplined spaces, and practices of the self. The intersubjective dimension of norms and practices falls into the background of a landscape populated by power and individuals. Castoriadis and Taylor provide a useful corrective to this tendency. They remind us that the real action of popular politics is in our shared, collective imagination. Bringing their insights to bear in a Foucauldian frame, we would focus on practices constitutive of the imagination. They would be conceived as plural, partially decoupled, and partly overlapping, the result of a wide variety of processes of development and change. Here discourse is neither sufficient to explain these phenomena nor separable from other material practices. It is part of a continuum of practices that conspire to synthesize our shared understandings. Foucault makes a persuasive argument that we cannot capture any inherent logic in the processes through which our shared understandings are created; at best we can trace out some of their pathways and conditions of possibility.

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Cutting Off the Head of the People Although Foucault made some brief remarks about political imagination, he never focused his attention on popular politics. What is worse, he is rather dismissive of some of the key terms used to conceptualize it. Foucault attacks sovereignty as an outmoded concept whose time has passed with divine right and the European monarchies. He famously wrote that “in political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king.”31 Here Foucault dismisses a model of sovereignty that concentrates power and rule in one person’s agency. He claims that we have dethroned the king but not his conceptual legacy, not the idea of a centralized organizational power. The problem, in his view, is that a focus on sovereign power obscures new, insidious forms of power, the “polymorphous mechanics of discipline.”32 Disciplinary forms of power, Foucault says, are a more recent phenomenon. They have emerged in a broad historical transformation from a society organized around centralized, monarchical power to one subtly structured by discipline. Thinking of power in terms of sovereignty blinds us to this transformation and its pervasive effects. The seductions of sovereignty run deep, according to Foucault. We tend to invoke it as a way of opposing disciplinary power.33 Although sovereign power has largely been replaced by discipline, remnants of sovereignty persist in a democratized and collectivized form. These remnants survived, Foucault claims, because of their instrumental value in the development of disciplinary power. Democratized forms of sovereignty  – what we might call “popular sovereignty”  – were useful in battering away the remnants of a monarchy that stood in the way of a disciplinary society. They also provided ideological cover for disciplinary mechanisms by structuring a legal system that seems to guarantee individual rights. The result is a symbiotic relationship between well concealed disciplinary mechanisms and the ideological forms of popular sovereignty that help to conceal them. In this way, Foucault says, “the principle of the sovereignty of the social body” coexists with “a tight grid of disciplinary coercions that actually guarantees the cohesion of that social body.”34 Democratized sovereignty conceals and enables something more profoundly characteristic of contemporary societies, the development of disciplinary power, while disciplinary power provides the coercive apparatus needed to unify a collectivity into a sovereign unit.35 To some extent, Foucault’s rejection of sovereignty is based on his characterization of it as a unified and concentrated power. He joins thinkers like Schmitt and Derrida in this limited and ahistorical characterization.36 Foucault writes, “The theory of sovereignty is, if you like, a theory which can found absolute power on the absolute expenditure of power, but which cannot calculate power with minimum expenditure and maximum efficiency.”37 He characterizes sovereignty as constituting a unified political power out of a multiplicity of capacities and potentials. In his description, this unification in the face of multiplicity seems a central and inescapable feature of sovereignty.38

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Foucault’s dismissal of sovereignty seems primarily driven by his focus on questions of power. Since he wanted, above all, to put forward a capillary and dispersed conception of power, he is anxious to disentangle it from any ideas of centralized, state power. To do this, he describes those undesirable characteristics as definitional components of the older idea of sovereignty. Sovereignty, then, stands for all that Foucault seeks to reject. To think in terms of sovereignty is to think in ideological categories. He sees it as an anachronistic way of organizing power and is not interested in the concept’s broader history or significance. In sum, Foucault’s discussion of sovereignty is strongly shaped by his polemic agenda and is correspondingly foreshortened. Given Foucault’s treatment of sovereignty, it is not surprising that his otherwise probing analyses of government lack a serious engagement with forms of collective self-government, the ones we would call “democratic.” A genealogy of popular sovereignties is missing from his oeuvre.39 While this lapse is understandable, it is also unfortunate. When Foucault dismisses the notion of sovereignty, he blinds himself to some of the most pervasive political phenomena of the past 350 years: the transformation of ideas of royal sovereignty into widely held, binding concepts that organize contemporary politics. Sovereignty has survived the age of kings to become one of the dominant concepts through which we understand popular politics. By dismissing talk of sovereignty rather than historicizing it, Foucault fails to comment on a whole host of important contemporary phenomena connected to collective identity and popular politics. Lost from view is the way sovereignty is dismantled and repurposed at the end of the Age of Kings; the way it becomes analogized and refers to a wide variety of political practices that do not involve a centralized monopoly on power; the way it constitutes new subjectivities and new relations between subjects as it takes on new, more dispersed forms; and the way it constitutes collectivities and helps to justify and authorize their actions. This lapse is largely a product of Foucault’s narrow focus on questions of power. His interpretive approach could yield rich insights if applied in a more open-ended way to popular politics. Consider, for instance, the possibilities implicit in this statement: Our second task should be to reveal relations of domination, and to allow them to assert themselves in their multiplicity, their differences, their specificity, or their reversibility; we should not be looking for a sort of sovereignty from which powers spring, but showing how the various operators of domination support one another, relate to one another, at how they converge and reinforce one another in some cases, and negate or strive to annul one another in other cases.40

By substituting a couple of words  – say, “collective self-government” for “domination” – Foucault could easily have described a different way of thinking about sovereignty as part of our contemporary political landscape. The cluster of concepts related to popular sovereignty is one of our chief devices for organizing and understanding contemporary politics. The question that Foucault

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could have profitably posed, using the critical tools he did so much to develop, is whether these political practices carry forward residues of individual agency and centralized authority in disguised form. This would be a differentiated and historicized view, showing how sovereignty is used to conceptualize a wide array of practices, from monarchical absolutism to popular self-governance. It could illuminate the ways that different conceptual components of monarchical authority migrate, are reassembled and repurposed in quite different assemblages at different times and places. And it could bring to light the problems, internal tensions, and unsuccessful compromises struck in creating these piecemeal sovereignties, latter-day sovereignties, and non-monarchical, popular sovereignties. In short, a properly Foucauldian approach would show how sovereignty is used to articulate complex, dispersed political practices in creative and unexpected ways. This line of investigation could also help to pose important questions about the normative status of our political ideals. Foucault’s brief treatment of popular sovereignty refers to “the establishment of a public right articulated with collective sovereignty.”41 Here right is a basis for claims. It is rooted in “a certain basic legitimacy that is more basic than any law and that allows laws to function as such.”42 Foucault seems to think that these foundational notions of right and legitimacy are inherent in the concept of sovereignty. He does not ask whether this inherence is a fabrication, however, nor examine the mechanisms through which such a fabrication might occur. The processes of conceptual articulation and practice that go into creating such ideals remain outside of his analysis. Such an investigation could easily be marshaled using Foucault’s insights, however. It would show how “sovereign right” is not simply ideological, but one of the key idioms through which modern political claims are negotiated. We can ask how and why sovereignty acquires a normative status, and how it becomes connected with the idea of authorization to act or rule. Here notions of the consent of the governed, the will of the people, and the constituent power of the nation are objects of investigation in themselves. We would want to know how these notions, both ubiquitous and taken-for-granted, acquire their normative force and become part of our shared idea of politics. In short, we should not follow Foucault in bracketing all talk of sovereignty. To do so would disembed this investigation from the actual history of popular politics, obscuring a complicated relationship between the present and the conceptual residues of the past. Popular politics has been situated within a discussion of sovereignty for quite some time. The fit between them is neither a natural one nor a particularly good one, but it is a historical fact. The resulting tension, I will argue, has provoked a great deal of problematization in our thinking about popular politics, shaping our current ways of thinking about it. Much of the energy driving discourse around ideas like “the power of the people,” I will claim, comes precisely from these problems. Therefore we may indeed want to follow Foucault in cutting off the head of the king, seeing authority and power as dispersed into countless untamed spaces, heterogeneous

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ensembles, and disorganized multitudes. However, we cannot gain insight into this legacy by rejecting the concept of sovereignty. Rather, we must investigate why contemporary political life is still structured by this concept in new and non-monarchical ways. Rather than dismissing sovereignty, we need to trace its proliferation into popular movements and other sub-state or non-state actors like the ones I described at the beginning of the book. Having said this, Foucault’s methodological cautions about conceptual anachronism are well taken. We should not assume that “sovereignty” adequately describes the power attributed to the people, even in the guise of popular sovereignty. Jacques Derrida, Bonnie Honig, and James Martel have recently provided important problematizations of this idea.43 Similarly, we should not assume that related ideas like political theology – very useful for the discussion of absolute sovereignty in the work of Carl Schmitt and others – are relevant to this discussion without historical problematization. Work like Eric Santner’s shows just how many unacknowledged and problematic assumptions are packed into such an idea.44 In short, sovereignty and its allied concepts are just one way into this problem. We are really concerned with a whole host of similar notions: popular sovereignty, constituent power, and “the power of the people” as it shows up in a wide variety of contexts over the past several centuries. We need to write a history of the norms and practices that constitute popular politics. This includes a sensitivity to the changing mosaic of ideas and practices at work there. In the next chapter, I will trace a small part of the history of popular politics. Rather than probing the internal complexities of theoretical constructions, this investigation focuses on the more prosaic and everyday senses in which sovereignty has been articulated in political practice during past centuries. It is an example of what Wendy Brown has called “a specific genealogy of politicized identity.”45 It denaturalizes and contextualizes purely theoretical ideas about the power of the people. Here I will try to draw together the insights I have gathered from Castoriadis, Taylor, and Foucault in concrete form. This investigation is concretely historical; it explores the tensions and synergies between discourse and materiality; yet it focuses on the formation and renegotiation of political imaginaries. It cuts off the head of the king both figuratively and historically, showing how sovereignty was renegotiated in the late years of the French monarchy. As a result, it has much to say about the historical contingency, multiplicity, internal tensions, and implicit normativity of our political practices.

4 The Problem of the People in Enlightenment France A Short Genealogy of Political Collectivity

It is by no means merely a matter of misguided theory that the French concept of le peuple has carried, from its beginning, the connotation of a multiheaded monster, a mass that moves as one body and acts as though possessed by one will. –Hannah Arendt1

Political identities like “the people” have been linked to popular sovereignty for many centuries in the political and cultural traditions of Europe. This connection has varied considerably over time, however. The people has served to acclaim royal authority, to challenge it, to constitute an alternative basis of sovereignty, to promote political solidarities, to express distain for subordinate social groups, and to articulate notions of economic egalitarianism. It describes the principal agent of popular sovereignty and the most important expression of the normative grounds for democracy. The people is a polymorphous construction, though, that is culturally unfixed and quite variable in meaning, both over time and at any one time. Moreover, it exists in complex relation with a number of other notions of collective identity: nations, publics, crowds, mobs, and masses. In addition, it has been associated with various normative ideas in complicated ways. This multilayered, changing construction merits much closer scrutiny. Eighteenth-century France is the ideal laboratory for such an investigation. It contains a number of iconic elements that loom large in the Western political imagination: the Bourbon monarchy, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. These institutions, movements, and events form a complex confection of fact and mythology that has exercised a great influence on our own political tradition. They can be credited, as François Furet says, with having “invented a type of political discourse and practice by which we have been living ever since.”2 Because it so thoroughly combines political laboratory and fantasy theater, this time period is a fertile starting point for examining the imagination of political collectivity. 54

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0.0800% 0.0700% 0.0600% 0.0500% 0.0400% 0.0300% 0.0200%

publique peuple nation

0.0100% 0.0000% 1700

1720

1740

1760

1780

1800

1820

1840

1860

1880

1900

Figure 4.1. Trends in the published frequency of “peuple,” “nation,” and “publique” (people, nation, public) from 1700 to 1900. Reproduced by permission of Google Labs.

In the half century leading up to the Revolution, there is a massive increase in discourse about “the people,” accompanied almost exactly, though in lesser amounts, by talk of “the nation” and “the public”3 (see Figure 4.1). This trend is mirrored by a similar increase in fascination with crowds and masses.4 Political collectivity and political unity are a constant itch that the thinkers of this time try to scratch, producing a complex set of practices around the people, the nation, and the public as prime expressions of their effort. I will call this persistent issue the problematic of the people. It is a problématique in Michel Foucault’s sense: a field of discourse populated by conflicting preoccupations that reveal as much about the social and cultural circumstances of discourse – the felt need to problematize certain topics – as it does about its actual subject matter.5 The problematic of the people is an unsettled but politically vital attempt to articulate conceptions of political unity and collective agency. And it is one, I will show, that chafes at its expositors, inciting them to discuss a topic that refuses to settle into any coherent conceptual framework. In what follows, I will sample a small part of the problematic of the people, one extending over a forty-year span in late-eighteenth-century France. I will work immanently within a historical arc of shifting ideas and practices, showing how different conceptions of collectivity emerge in the politics of the time. This traces the emergence of a complex of ideas that are familiar in contemporary political thought:  people, nation, and public. I will show how the changing meanings of these terms reveal implicit normativities, instabilities, and inconsistencies in our thinking about the power of the people. Correcting Foucault’s overemphasis on discourse, however, I will also take pains to show that this is not merely a discursive concern but one that registers in many different domains of practice. Within this problematic, I will trace a gradual transition between two different ways of imagining the people. The first centers on issues of rank, hierarchy, and deprivation, which I will call the deprived-fraction imaginary. As the political

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situation changes from the 1750s to the 1780s, concerns shift and a new set of issues is thematized. A focus on poverty and social distinction gradually gives way to one centering on political unity. Out of these concerns comes the classic modern expression of sovereignty, which I call the popular-universalist imaginary. The transition from one to the other occurs slowly and in a piecemeal manner. It is not accomplished solely through rational construction, but also through complex material and symbolic practices, attempts to grapple with difficult, intractable problems, and the unintended consequences of other endeavors. Themes, conceptual elements, material practices, and symbolic practices that were employed in one imaginary are repurposed in the service of another. Overall, this transition occurs within a broader problematization of collective sovereignty – the problematic of the people – in which the meaning and significance of the people are under negotiation. Language and practice come under strain from the various, and sometimes conflicting, functions they are being asked to perform. I will argue, though, that the very difficulty, instability, and contested character of ideas like the power of the people result in a slow deposition of shared meaning. It does not resolve the conflicts or uncertainties that attend its creation so much as deal with them by paving over and diffusing their tensions. To elucidate these parts of the eighteenth-century French political imaginary, it is important to recall some of the things I said earlier in response to Charles Taylor. The canonical texts of this time tell an incomplete story. They are products of particular social circumstances: print capitalism, elite writing practices, the differential conditions under which ideas are circulated and received, and our own selective attention in producing retrospective ideas of the past in light of contemporary interests.6 To reconstruct the political imaginaries in which the power of the people is embedded, we must be aware of the ephemeral utterances and practices that have been pushed aside in the process of canonization. Among these is the rich archive of pamphlets, speeches, and political tracts that remain from this time. These texts were written to perform political functions and often have substantial theoretical importance, even though this was not their primary aim. Also quite striking are a wide variety of material and symbolic practices. Many of these are unique to their time and have a strong political and theoretical significance. All of these forms of thought and practice constitute a vital part of the emerging imaginaries of popular politics. Taken together, they provide a rich archive for understanding the political practices of this era, allowing us to reconstruct the formation of political imaginaries in eighteenth-century France.

Ambiguous Collectivities in the Ancien Régime: A Deprived and Fractional People The French monarchy of the seventeenth century was a paradigmatic example of centralized state authority. By the mid-eighteenth century, though, there were

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increasing signs of public disaffection with the institution. It was said that King Louis XV lacked the drive and charisma of his predecessor, and his numerous affairs were perceived as signs of decadence and unfitness to rule. Jansenist parlementarians consolidated this diffuse sense of disapproval into forceful political opposition.7 Their ideas were widely circulated through church sermons and the underground press. They challenged both the King himself and monarchy as an institution, putting political force behind the already existing public opinion about the King’s deficiencies.8 Monarchy had always relied on spectacle to orchestrate opinion and produce consent. In eighteenth-century France, there was the pomp associated with the entry of the King into Paris, special masses celebrated during time of royal illness, and public festivities and the firing of cannons to mark the birth of a royal infant or a royal wedding. There were processions through the streets of Paris with the reliquary of St. Geneviève, organized jointly by the state and church in times of national need. All of these served to assemble crowds organized around the sovereignty of the monarch.9 Both spectacle and public opinion had a physical, tangible, and material character. They were part of a politics of crowds, the street, and the square. One sign of disaffection with the crown was thus the decreasing enthusiasm for royal spectacles and public events. People no longer thronged to public festivities organized in support of the monarchy. Casual statements of disaffection with the King became more common and overt on the street. The royal administration tried to police this disaffection by enlisting spies to infiltrate the crowds and report on any signs of disloyalty. They also turned to censorship to control opinion in its written forms. Since the Middle Ages, censorship had focused on religious heterodoxy and had been the exclusive province of the Theology Faculty at the University of Paris. This was converted to a state function in 1740, and the number of censors more than doubled over the next fifty years. It was part of a repressive response to increasingly sharp criticisms of the monarchy, one that also increased the number of police spies circulating through society. Under state reorganization, censors now worked in defined subject areas. Notably, the staff devoted to belles-lettres and history comprised half of the entire office at any given time.10 These were the censors who worked on, among other things, political matters. The monarchy’s repressive response to public disaffection seems only to have made things worse. Paris saw a number of disturbing riots in 1750, which culminated in the lynching of several police operatives and the occupation of a number of police commissioners’ houses. At issue was the callous, indiscriminate policing of the working classes, and the rumor, to some extent true, that poor and working-class children were being rounded up and deported to the colonies.11 A variant of this rumor was the one claiming that the kidnapped children were actually being bled to death as a cure for the leprosy of some noble person, possibly the King. While commentators of the time put no faith

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in these rumors, their existence shows an increasing belief that anything was possible in a reign that seemed decadent and debauched to many.12 The tensions around the royal regime became more tangible with the assassination attempt against Louis XV in 1757. This is the famous case of Damiens, whose execution is graphically described by Michel Foucault as part of the spectacle of sovereign power.13 Viewed in the context of Louis XV’s reign in the mid-1750s, we can see that the violent execution of a man who tried to kill the king was not just a spectacle of sovereign power in a general sense. It was an increasingly desperate attempt to symbolize the power of a monarch whose legitimacy was daily becoming more precarious. The idea of the people was threaded throughout the insurgent public opinion of this time. A diffuse, unproblematic notion of the people had prevailed in early-eighteenth-century France. This idea was defined in binary terms: the people versus the grands. The grands were the ruling class in both a political and an economic sense, while the people were those who needed to be ruled. This seems to have been a common distinction, though its exact meaning was vague at the edges. Clearly, artisans and shopkeepers were “of the people,” and great lords were grands, but the place of a wealthy bourgeois, for instance, was somewhat ambiguous and subjective. In any case, it was a commonplace term with little practical consequence. As the eighteenth century continued, however, the idea of the people became more politicized and problematic. It took on a more distinctively normative tone with political connotations. Here the people functions as the normative fulcrum of a critique of monarchical sovereignty that I  will call the deprived-fraction imaginary. This view is defined largely by distinction and subtraction. It is epitomized by Camille Falconnet de la Bellonie’s 1748 characterization of the people as the “multitude of men destined to live solely from the work of their hands.”14 Eighteen years later, in 1766, Voltaire used virtually identical terms:  “I understand by people the populace who have only their arms for sustenance.”15 Here we see a conception of the people in which social distinction takes center stage. The people is a segment of the populace that is distinguished by manual labor and the narrow margins of its means of subsistence. It is the people as a potentially destitute fraction of society, differentiated by its precarity and means of subsistence. As such, it operates more as a sociological category than a political collectivity. Social distinction seems to have been a general preoccupation of the time, reflecting the importance of rank and hierarchy under the ancien régime.16 In the restless desire of various groups to distinguish themselves from those below, the people names the remainder, those who have no claim to special status. In this sense, remarks about “the people” have a relational character during this time:  they mark the distinction between the people and the grands. This set of distinctions can be inverted for normative effect, however:  expressing sympathy about the plight of the people is one way of indirectly criticizing the system of distinction itself. In a regime of political

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censorship and police spying, such an elliptical form of criticism can effectively target the monarchy. The Abbé Gabriel-François Coyer’s Dissertation sur la Nature du Peuple (1755) provides a rich illustration of these techniques, formulating a concentrated critique of social distinction while giving it a pointedly political orientation.17 Coyer was well-known in Parisian intellectual circles as an ironic and witty essayist whose work was well liked by, among others, Voltaire.18 He had a gift for combining levity with trenchant social critique, most often pillorying the bourgeoisie in favor of the poor and downtrodden. Even though Coyer took pains to give his work a social rather than political orientation, the censors concluded that his irony concealed other agendas and suppressed some of his early work.19 In the Dissertation, Coyer’s concern with the “nature” of the people takes two related paths. One focuses on the composition of the people as a group, which he takes not to be a simple matter. Coyer sees the people as a part of the nation, its most useful, respectable, and virtuous part. The lack of identity between people and nation is caused by segmentation of the people along lines of consumption and taste. Financiers and merchants willfully separate themselves from the people through forms of luxury consumption. This leaves as “the mass of the people” farmers, domestic servants, and artisans.20 This part of the investigation displays a Bourdieuian preoccupation with social distinction. Upwardly mobile middle-class groups with increasing status and wealth are eager to put themselves above the people, while those remaining in the mass of the people are debased by the occupations left to them. They work like animals to satisfy instincts narrowly related to survival, not having the means to engage in the more fulfilling and edifying activities of those better-off. The bestial character that Coyer attributes to the people provokes a second question:  whether they are rational. Given that the people are the poorer, lower-status remainder of society, “the mass” left over when other groups have distinguished themselves, Coyer asks whether they are so debased by their working and living conditions that they should be considered “beasts.” He notes that reason is generally associated with superfluity, taste, and elegance. Here he operates in a Bourdieuian mode again, this time associating distinction along lines of taste with reason itself. Since the people are not distinguished by their good taste or elegance, perhaps we should conclude that they are irrational, ruled by instinct rather than reason.21 This second part of Coyer’s investigation is clearly related to the first, but adds an implicitly political valence. Politics takes an ironic form here, for which Coyer has a Voltairean flair. His question about rationality and the bestial character of the people is obviously asked with an arched eyebrow: to associate reason with superfluity and elegance is a clear non-sequitur. Lest one should misunderstand his ironic intentions, Coyer continues in the same vein to report on the different kinds of ideas that the Dutch scientist Van Leeuwenhoek found

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when examining dissected brains. The brains of workers were full of practical matters on the seasons and harvesting of grains, Coyer says, while a “head of distinction” was clouded with visions of grandeur and dreams of love.22 While having a clear political undercurrent, the ironic tone of these observations also diffuses the seriousness of the more direct statements that follow. Coyer notes that another way to approach the question of rationality is through politics. Some societies have attributed sufficient rationality to the people to allow them to participate in politics. The Greeks and Romans, for instance, called the people to any assembly demanding reason, including the election of the highest magistrates and generals, the regulation of taxes, and decisions about war and peace.23 In China, the people are polled about the retention or punishment of imperial mandarins. Germany, England, and Sweden all have forms of popular representation. Coyer rushes to assure the reader that the question is not, of course, whether the French people should be enfranchised. The very phrase “the majesty of the French people” would make us laugh, he says. With this dissembling remark he returns to the topic of rationality, concluding abruptly by claiming that the people are rational because all individuals are equally human. In the end, the Dissertation retains a nominal focus on questions of rationality, an acceptable theme for a learned tract. Yet the political point is made without it becoming a central focus. The people are not only destitute but also rational and arbitrarily excluded from politics. Coyer’s path to political statement is a guarded and elliptical one. This line of questioning trades on (cryptonormative) ideas of universal human rationality and agency, though in a carefully euphemized manner. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a contemporary of Coyer and shares many of his preoccupations with the people. Rousseau is the thinker most closely associated with the idea of popular unity. When seen against the background of writings like Coyer’s, it is clear that his thinking on this subject is very much inscribed within broader problematics. Without systematically discussing Rousseau’s already familiar work, it is worth marking out several of the ways in which he adopts these problems as his own. First, we must recall the extent of Rousseau’s preoccupation with the people. On the Social Contract (1762) contains a remarkable series of chapters focusing on the struggle to articulate a viable conception of collective will and action. Book II, chapter 7 is called “On the Legislator” and recounts the challenges facing “he who dares to undertake the establishment of a people.”24 This is followed by a chapter called “On the People,” which is followed by another chapter called “The People (continued),” which is followed by yet another chapter called “The People (continued).” Rousseau clearly shares Coyer’s interest in the people as a form of collective identity, and also shares his judgment that it is a problematic one. Rather than seeing the people as fractured by social distinction, however, Rousseau sees the central problem as one of individualism. He characterizes it as an issue of

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self-regard and self-interest. From this perspective, the task is to achieve some sort of ethical-cognitive unity among the people, one that would endow them with a further unity of will and action. While Coyer’s concern with the people is normative in a carefully understated way, Rousseau’s is explicitly so. He outlines a conception of political legitimacy for societies in which people are “born free, yet are everywhere in chains.” This conception is based on the formation of a unified people. It rests, at bottom, on a notion of autonomous self-direction, expanded into a collective sense of mutual self-determination. It is a reflexive view of political agency that postulates a complete coincidence of will and action – what Rousseau called “obeying only oneself, and remaining as free as before.”25 This conception of popular sovereignty works on analogy to individual freedom. In their natural state, people are individually free; in civil society, this freedom is transmuted into a form of collective self-determination. Both of these notions – the individual and the collective – require a unitary agent. The people must be unitary to rule itself in the same way that individuals rule themselves, with the same coincidence of will and action. If this were not the case, the analogy with individual self-direction would not work, undercutting the claim that popular sovereignty is a form of (collective) freedom. Like Coyer, Rousseau is very much aware of the problematic character of popular unity. Whereas Coyer describes processes of distinction that fragment society, however, Rousseau realizes that leveling such differences would not resolve the problem. “All the people” taken simply as an aggregation of equals would only produce a collection of individuals. He believes that a more abstract form of unity is needed to constitute a people. The genius of Rousseau’s contribution is to transmute this problematic to an epistemic level. The desired form of unity requires a cognitive transformation, one creating an identity of interests and outlooks by causing individuals to see themselves as members of a larger whole. Rousseau’s epistemic reframing of the problematic is novel enough to cause even this brilliant prose stylist some difficulties. The strain becomes clearest when he tries to describe the way unity would result from this ethico-cognitive transformation. The result is a series of ideas put forward as a solution that mostly seem to re-pose the problem. He takes various approaches to collective unity, theorizing it as a “general” will or as a matter of common interests, and mapping this generality onto what he somewhat clumsily refers to as “all the people” [tout le peuple].26 He also resorts at points to similarly awkward constructions like the “body of the people” [le corps du peuple].27 Rousseau’s linguistic difficulties continue when he struggles to characterize the people’s politics. A kind of reflexive relation to self would be achieved when “all the people enact a statute on all the people,” which is the same as seeing “the entire object” seen from one point of view and then another, with no division between them.28 He describes the twofold character of this transformation

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in somewhat convoluted terms: “Each individual, contracting, as it were, with himself, finds himself engaged in a double relation: as a member of the sovereign towards the particular members, and as a member of the state towards the sovereign.”29 In a parallel manner, Rousseau later insists on the unity of the people’s agency. When acting as sovereign, it must maintain its generality both “in its object and in its essence” to avoid creating any fissures within the carefully assembled collective.30 Rousseau’s idea of the general will has roots in a different problematic. During the prior century, tensions between generality and particularity had been the structuring issue in an extended theological dispute on the nature of God’s will.31 The question was whether God exercised a volonté général, establishing general laws of nature that govern human life and salvation, or a volonté particulière, intervening directly in individual lives. Pascal, Arnauld, Malebranche, Bossuet, Fénelon, Leibniz, Bayle, and Montesquieu were all party to the debate, which amounted to a wide-ranging problematization of generality versus particularity. Of the disputants, Blaise Pascal took a remarkable step in integrating political questions with theological ones. Writing a century before Rousseau, he reworked the idea of the general will as a description of the collective unity of the faithful.32 Here the individual human body is an extended metaphor of the tensions between the particular will of individual people and their general will as parts of a whole. Individuals are integral parts of the body politic, just as arms and legs are parts of a physical body. They must rise above the “injustice” of self-absorption, Pascal says, to focus on willing the good of the (collective) body. Because of their inherent unity with the whole, they thereby will their own good. This is in many ways a political-theological idea of the people’s body like those described by Eric Santner.33 Pascal uses the unity and agency of an individual body to characterize that of a collectivity, drawing on the body’s organic unity to describe some notion of collective unity. Montesquieu also had a notable role in bending this theological problematic in a political direction. Writing in the 1730s and 1740s, he went further than Pascal toward secularization. He worries about the dangers of fragmentation when a single esprit général does not animate the corps politique. In such cases individuals follow their esprits particuliers, and the result is fragmentation.34 Viewing Rousseau against this background, one can see him drawing two separate problematics together in his struggle with problems of collective unity. One is the century-old problematization of generality and particularity, which had given rise to a political-theological notion of the general will. The other is the problematic of the people, already thrown into controversy by thinkers like Coyer, Voltaire, and Bellonie. Rousseau brings these two problematics together, secularizing the first in order to pose the second from a new perspective. His innovation is thus a synthetic one, developing a different idea of the problematic of the people by infusing it with a political-theological problematic of collective identity.

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Rousseau’s insight about the need for ethical and cognitive transformation in this process causes him to think carefully about the ways in which peoples can be formed. He understands the people as caught in a vicious circle. For an emerging people to be capable of appreciating the sound maxims of politics and to follow the fundamental rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause. The social spirit which ought to be the work of that institution, would have to preside over the institution itself. And men would be, prior to the advent of laws, what they ought to become by means of laws.35

Rousseau sees the people as an object of creation, specifically of the transformative effect of laws and institutions. To be democratic, however, these laws and institutions must be created by the people. The emergence of the people is paradoxical, then, because “the effect would have to become the cause”: a democratic people is required to establish the institutional conditions of its own creation. As he would put it later, “To put law over man is a problem in politics which I compare to that of squaring the circle in geometry.”36 It is, in other words, a thoroughgoing contradiction at the most basic level. A great deal of thought has been devoted to Rousseau’s paradox of the people.37 This problem appears somewhat differently when viewed against the background I  have just sketched, however. It shows Rousseau to be taking up concerns already in circulation at the time of his writing. He encounters problems because of the way he combines concerns about political unity and political theology. He shares the view with Coyer that the people is not a natural entity but something that is created. Unlike Coyer, however, he draws on political theology – specifically the idea of the general will – to set standards for this project of creation. Rather than relying on a (crypto-)normative critique of monarchy, as Coyer had, Rousseau employs a robust notion of universality that has epistemic and normative significance. Now the people must create the bases for its own construction because it is the only body with the sovereign legitimacy to do so. In these senses, Rousseau’s paradox is thoroughly embedded in the problematics of his time. It is a product of his unique fusion of two different strands of problematization. Rousseau’s attempt to resolve the paradox has an awkward relation with the normative standards he has established. To get away from the problems of reflexive self-creation, he looks beyond the people for a source of virtue. He says, I had seen that everything is rooted in politics, and that, whatever the circumstances, a people will never be other than the nature of its government makes it. In other words, that great question, as to which is the best possible form of government, seemed to me to come down in the end to this one: what is the nature of the government needed to produce the most virtuous, the most enlightened, the wisest, and in short, taking this word in its widest sense, the best people?38

To establish such a government, he invokes the help of a “legislator.” The legislator is tasked with imposing good laws and institutions on a populace

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that cannot generate them by itself. This, Rousseau says, will have the effect of changing human nature and transforming each individual into a part of a larger whole.39 The legislator’s task is a practical and detailed one that demands careful consideration of the relations between physical circumstances and moral outcomes. The size of a territory, the richness of its land, the number of its people, and so on, all of these factors should be taken into account. Rousseau refers the reader to Montesquieu on these points, saying that he “has shown with a large array of examples” how the art of the legislator functions in different physical circumstances.40 Here Rousseau echoes Montesquieu’s insight that epistemic transformation goes hand in hand with its material conditions. Given this epistemic focus, it is no surprise that Rousseau also invokes various symbolic devices to constitute and bind a people. In his Considerations on the Government of Poland, he says that ancient lawmakers knew how to do this. They “looked for bonds which attached the Citizens to the fatherland and each to each other, and they found them in distinctive practices, in religious ceremonies,” in games, exercises, and spectacles.41 He cites Moses, Lycurgus, and Numa as examples. In these ways, he says, Moses “dared to make out of [a] wandering and servile troop a body politic, a free people. . . . ”42 Practices that promote unity or convey its symbolic importance should thus be part of the legislator’s practical toolbox. While it is clear that the legislator must have great skill to constitute a people, it is less clear to what extent Rousseau sees this as a conceptually successful solution to the paradox. Introducing a legislator does not truly square the circle in a conceptual sense; it merely circumvents the problem with a practical, though illegitimate, solution. The creation, by fiat, of a virtuous people may be legitimate in a certain sense, but the process by which it is achieved would not be. Indeed, this is exactly how Rousseau would have understood the problem of squaring the circle. During his time, that geometrical puzzle was thought to be a problem of identifying a set of mathematically rigorous steps to achieve a given, very difficult result. It was well-known how to fudge the result by taking illegitimate shortcuts; the problem was how to achieve an exact result through a rigorous process. Similarly in politics, it would be comparatively easy to fudge the constitution of a people by taking illegitimate steps like appointing a nondemocratic legislator. The real challenge is to show how a self-legislating people might constitute itself. Whether Rousseau thought that the legislator constituted such a solution, rather than an illegitimate shortcut, is difficult to say. In any case, the thorny conceptual problems identified by Rousseau seemed not to exercise a large influence on his contemporaries. An interesting gauge of this thinking comes three years after On the Social Contract, in Denis Diderot’s Encyclopedia.43 Like the works of Coyer and Rousseau, the Encyclopedia caught the censors’ watchful attention from time to time for the political import of its articles.44 The article “peuple” [people] appeared in 1765 and was written by the Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt. Jaucourt was the well-educated son

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of an aristocratic Burgundian family. His family was secretly protestant, and he was sent under a pseudonym to study in Geneva, Cambridge, and Leiden – not only centers of the protestant reformation but also of democratic thought and practice. In England, Jaucourt says, he came to appreciate the way the “love of Liberty forms the distinctive character of the inhabitants.”45 Jaucourt was one of the “workhorse writers” of the Encyclopedia. He produced a quarter of this mammoth enterprise, a total of some 4,700,000 words.46 He managed this feat through extraordinary energy and by incorporating large tracts of other works into his own entries.47 The article “people” follows this technique, honoring the Abbé Coyer as the source most worthy of appropriation (and, interestingly, not Rousseau). This kind of textual borrowing, Jaucourt’s frequent technique in the Encyclopedia, constitutes an interesting form of discursive negotiation. What gets used, what gets left out, the assembly, editing, and mis-en-scène of Coyer’s original work provide a valuable index of shifting ideas and problematics.48 Most interesting is the frame that Jaucourt builds around the passages he appropriates from Coyer. Jaucourt begins the article by designating “people” as falling under the general domain of government and politics. He describes it as a “collective noun, difficult to define, because there are so many different ideas in various places, times, and according to the nature of governments.”49 This admission already says much about the problematic character of the idea in French literary and political discourse. Jaucourt’s preliminary remarks are followed by a discussion of the Greeks and Romans. He echoes Coyer’s description of the participatory character of the people who gave their voice to elections, taxation, decisions on peace or war, “and in short, on all the affairs concerning the broadest interests of the fatherland [patrie].” He takes this aspect of Coyer’s work further, however, transforming the Greek and Roman people into a kind of critical public. This same people, he says, became the audience of theatrical spectacles, entering “by thousands in the vast theaters of Rome and Athens” and applauding or booing the great dramatists of the era. The people is undifferentiated in these cases: the Greek people or the Roman people, providing a political voice and a critical audience that is implicitly unified in its multiplicity. The undifferentiated, solidaristic character of the Roman and Greek people stands in tension with that described in a subsequent article, Peuple Romain [Roman people]. There Jaucourt qualifies his seemingly undifferentiated description by saying that the Roman people, the plebs romana, designates all who are not a senator or chevalier. He is careful to stress that one must not confuse the Roman people with the populace of Rome. The latter were seditious vagabonds and rabble “without hearth or home” [sans feu ni lieu], always ready to make trouble, commit crimes, and trespass on the goods of the honest ones, who are presumably the people properly speaking.50 We see, then, a tension between Jaucourt’s treatment of the Roman people in these two articles. In the article on the people, the Romans are unified in

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their political voice and in their critical capacities as a cultural audience. In the article on the Roman people, in contrast, they are described in a more differentiated and complex manner. Here the Roman people does not include senators and chevaliers, on one hand, or the seditious rabble, on the other. It is thus limited to the “honest people” who remain. Jaucourt struggles to capture the complexity of a term that he earlier characterized as “difficult to define,” one in which he must reconcile the seeming unity of acting with one voice and as one public with the social differentiation implicit in being neither grand nor rabble. It is telling that he distributed these descriptions, one focusing on political unity, the other on social differentiation, into two different essays, lessening the dissonance that their direct juxtaposition might provoke. The social and political complexities at the beginning of Jaucourt’s article on the people provide a fitting frame for his introduction of more material from Coyer’s Dissertation. Moving from the classical world, Jaucourt repeats Coyer’s remark that in England the people elect representatives into the House of Commons, and in Sweden peasants are represented in the National Assembly. Turning to France, he states that previously the French people were considered the estates general of the nation, as contrasted with the grands and nobles. This included laborers, workers, artisans, merchants, financiers, lawyers, and people of letters. Now he makes the reference to Coyer more explicit, drawing on him as an authoritative critic of the increasingly restricted character of the people. Coyer is not cited by name, but is referred to as “a man of great spirit, who . . . published a dissertation on the nature of the people.”51 Jaucourt repeats Coyer’s observation that financiers, wholesalers, and lawyers have used their substantial means of luxury consumption to exempt themselves from the people. All that remains in “the mass of the people,” then, are workers and laborers.52 Although Jaucourt repeats many of Coyer’s remarks about the people, he frames them in a nostalgic mode that adds a different normative coloration. This nostalgia evokes a political past in which the people was more whole and had political representation. At the same time, Jaucourt’s indictment of poverty is more hard-hitting. He complains that the laborer, a “man of the people,” is up before dawn seeding our lands, cultivating our fields, watering our gardens, suffering heat, cold, the haughtiness of the elite, the insolence of the rich, the plunder of doctors, the pillage of bookkeepers, and even the ravage of wild beasts. To illustrate these hardships, Jaucourt tells a short parable of Lucas and Collette, a hardworking couple who share a tough life farming and raising children. When Lucas dies, his land is divided equally among their children. The implication is that this simply reproduces poverty in the next generation, since they will never acquire the capital that sets the rich apart. Jaucourt continues with a swipe at those “pretend politicians” who are afraid that industry and obedience will collapse if laborers are allowed to rest. If they would just travel a bit, he says, they would realize that industry reaches its highest activity and quality when the people – here referred to as the petit peuple – are at their ease.53

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Normativity is again anchored in deprivation and contrast with luxury, in the injustice of labor market discipline and the impoverishment of the people. Jaucourt is less satirical than direct, perhaps simply a reflection of the freedom to criticize afforded by his social station. Indeed, his criticisms seem to have struck home. Voltaire cites newspaper reports that this article had angered the administration, though he is very sympathetic to it and believes that the ministers should be as well.54 Perhaps in anticipation of such political consequences, Jaucourt’s normative colorations are almost obsequious in other parts of the article. He writes that the people are naturally obedient, that they see the king as their protector, and are his most faithful subjects. There is, Jaucourt says, natural respect of the little for the great, “with the particular attachment of our nation for the person of the king.”55 And in return, the king cares for his people. Thus Henry IV was right, Jaucourt says, to make sure that every worker could have a fat goose in his pot. Although Jaucourt follows Coyer’s lead in deploring the debased character of the people, his normative agenda is directed more firmly at improving this condition and emphasizing the rewards that accrue to leaders who do so. The semantic instability of the people is evidenced in other parts of the Encyclopedia as well. As a collective enterprise that took some decades to assemble, this document is an interesting compendium of conflicting opinions and conceptual problematics. Although “people” merits extended treatment, related notions of collectivity like “nation” and “public” do not. The article “nation” is short, cryptic, and unsigned.56 It describes the nation very differently from Jaucourt’s description of the people. The article is categorized as modern history, and characterizes “nation” as “a collective word used to describe a large quantity of people who live in a country [pays], enclosed in certain limits, and who obey the same government.” This description has a strongly Westphalian character, mapping population, land, defined borders, and government onto one another. From this concrete layering of Westphalian elements, the article now veers in a rather different direction. “Each nation has a particular character,” it says:  “frivolous like a Frenchman,” “jealous like an Italian,” “drunk like a German,” “lazy like an Irishman,” and so on. The concern here is with ascribed stereotypes of national characteristics. In neither case, the Westphalian nation nor the stereotypical-national character, do we have the idea of a politically significant collectivity. The article on “public” is similarly brief.57 It is classified under jurisprudence and authored by Boucher d’Argis, a frequent contributor who wrote some 4,000 articles for the Encyclopedia. We are told that “public” is an adjective, although the author contradicts this by using it three times as a noun in the article.58 It sometimes concerns “the political body that forms between the subjects of a state,” he says, sometimes only the citizens of a town. Its principal use lies in ideas like public good or public interest, two terms that the article

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distinguishes from one another with some care. In either case, the public interest can only be safeguarded by the sovereign, the article asserts. Reading this piece in historical retrospect, one notes that it carefully avoids any further specification about who the sovereign should be. That could be a function of its brevity, or a taken-for-granted assumption that the king is indicated, or an attempt to avoid biasing the piece in either a popular or royalist direction. A popular interpretation would not be excluded prima facie, given that public sometimes concerns “the political body that forms between the subjects of a state.” On the whole, this article flirts with issues of political collectivity and normativity, but only in the most elliptical of ways. A brief six paragraphs long, it says too little for us to draw any conclusions other than that public was not seen to merit very extended treatment. In this case as well as that of the nation, problems of political collectivity were chiefly cathected to the idea of the people, rather than the nation or public. In sum, we see several tendencies in the imagination of popular politics under the Bourbon monarchy. In the deprived-fraction imaginary, exemplified by Coyer and Jaucourt, the problematic focuses chiefly on the construction of the people itself. It is a subtractive conception in which the people is a remainder left over when others have exempted themselves. These exemptions occur when those with resources remove themselves from “the mass of the people” to occupy higher social statuses. Left at the bottom is a people constructed along lines of resource inequality and status dynamics. We cannot say that a normative idea of collective unity exists here in full-blown form. This idea is very much present in the background of worries about social fragmentation, however. It can also be seen in nostalgia for a time before the people was minimized in this way. The nation functions as a background ideal of political unity for Coyer at least: the people is part of the nation. Thus the people is semantically connected to the nation as part to whole, even though this connection is only lightly elaborated. It makes possible some notion of an undifferentiated, undivided society. That idea is not echoed in the Encyclopedia, however. The political agency of the people is not fully thematized by either Coyer or Jaucourt. Their concern is with the composition of the people rather than with its power. Nonetheless, these conceptions are normative. Most obviously, their normativity is lodged in an indignant reaction to exclusion. It draws on norms of deprivation, commenting on the miserable condition of the lower classes. The people in this sense is articulated across the boundary between the political and the economic: it is a political entity defined by and given normative sanctity by its socioeconomic distinction. To the extent that the people has power here, that is a form of moral rectitude. It lies chiefly in the claims that can be made by virtue of the abject and hardworking character of “the mass of the people,” coupled with Coyer’s carefully euphemized assertion that these people have the rationality to be actors in politics. This is the power of a class

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fraction defined negatively along lines of occupation, wealth, and prestige, and endowed with rational means of political action. Temporal references are another prominent normative device in Coyer’s and Jaucourt’s texts. The word “previously” [autrefois] is used frequently by both Coyer and Jaucourt to describe the people. In the classical past, they imply, the people was unified and largely coextensive with the public. This vaguely referenced idea of the past is a nostalgic image evoking a lost unity. It functions as a backward-looking projection in which a whole, unified, and normatively functioning people can be located. “Today,” in the mid-eighteenth century, the people is the impoverished remainder of a system of wealth inequality and status distinction. The historical accuracy of this projection is not the point, of course. The backward-looking image implicitly portrays the possibility of a future collective unity. That which existed in the past could be restored. Coyer and Jaucourt also use spatial distance to make normative points while simultaneously euphemizing them. There are eighteenth-century states that enfranchise their citizens, but they are elsewhere: China and Sweden, most distantly, but also closer neighbors like Germany and England. Spatiality helps to diffuse the potential controversy associated with these claims. The people are enfranchised in other places, not here. Further dissimulation is provided by the rather brief presentation of this insight, as well as its euphemization as a question about rationality rather than politics. In sum, the deprived-fraction imaginary mounts a substantial critique of monarchical rule disguised as a critique of social division. It implicitly holds the monarchy responsible for the deprived condition of the lower classes. Sovereignty remains vested in the monarch, but in a precarious and destabilized form. In retrospect, we can see this vision as assembling many of the elements for an idea of the power of the people without actually putting them together. It is a transitional imaginary, a vision that subjects monarchy to normative claims on behalf of a people. The problematic and disunified character of this people prevents it from making such claims itself. Rousseau takes up many of these themes but puts them together in a different way. He furnishes a contrast to Coyer and Jaucourt and stands as an interesting interlude between them. Rousseau focuses on political unity and the destructive consequences of self-interest rather than the political disempowerment that results from social distinction. He therefore emphasizes “moral transformation” and epistemic unity as favored solutions rather than the equalization of social status. The chief difference between him and the other two lies at the normative level, however. Rousseau specifies a conception of legitimacy that is, strictly speaking, paradoxical. It is paradoxical in a material and temporal sense: “the effect must become the cause.” Coyer and Jaucourt, in contrast, follow a less direct normative strategy, one disguised by irony and displaced to other times and spaces. They draw on normative ideals already

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circulating in their culture to endow the people with normative status, rather than attempting to develop a freestanding conception, as does Rousseau. The juxtaposition of these themes reveals an interesting shift in the idea of the people. Rousseau’s adoption of earlier forms of political theology allows him to imagine more vividly than Coyer or Jaucourt what might lie beyond a monarchical conception of sovereignty. Still living under the ancien régime, he brackets the idea of sovereignty as concentrated in the body of the king and imagines it as a characteristic of political collectivity. As Rousseau moves the politics of the people to center stage, new issues and problems emerge. The thought experiment of a people that must create itself reveals new dimensions of the problem of political unity. Thus the people is problematic for Rousseau in a different and more thoroughgoing way. Rousseau’s worries about the paradoxes of a self-creating people did not seem to attract great attention in his time – he was much better known as the author of La Nouvelle Héloïse – but in retrospect we can see its concerns as an important transmutation of the problematic of the people. It marks the early outlines of a distinctive imaginary focusing above all on the problem of popular unity. I will call this the popular-universalist imaginary. It is a vision of the people as a totality, one that has normative force because of its universal character. Perhaps it is the recognition, in hindsight, of Rousseau’s location in this transformation that leads contemporary thinkers like Charles Taylor to attach such importance to his work. The transition between these imaginaries is slow and piecemeal, marked by continuities as well as differences. The primary contrast is the transition from an imaginary that problematizes monarchical sovereignty to one seeking to replace it. However, we still see strong lines of continuity in the background of these evolving concerns. The problematic character of the people and the fragility of its normative status emerge as themes traversing different approaches to this shared problematic. Through the eyes of Coyer and Jaucourt, we also see a side of Rousseau’s work that is often ignored by those who focus too narrowly on the paradoxes of the people. Rousseau displays a sensitivity to the material bases of political unity with which Coyer and Jaucourt would be quite sympathetic. The chief difference between them is that Rousseau traces the material conditions of epistemic transformation, examining the symbolic and material practices necessary to cause individuals to imagine themselves as part of a larger collectivity. Coyer and Jaucourt, in contrast, focus on the material bases of social status: the unequal distribution of goods that allows well-endowed groups to distinguish themselves from poorer ones. Rousseau presses material practice into the service of collective agency, while Coyer and Jaucourt task it with eliminating the social differences that create political inequality. It is important to remember how these shifting imaginaries relate to the politics of their time. The circulation of print material becomes increasingly important as the monarchy grows more precarious. Thus we see a form of

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intellectual production in this period that is also a potent genre of political practice. The production of texts contributes to a powerful reimagining of collectivities and their normative significance. These writings are not merely forms of idle speculation or contributions to an abstract body of knowledge, but acts in a struggle over meaning and signification. In this sense, they form a vital counterpart to the politics of the street, the square, and the crowd: they are material acts that help to transform the collective imagination. The royal regime understood this, censoring Coyer, the Encyclopedia, and Rousseau at various times. In this sense, each is a fitting example of Wittgenstein’s observation that “words are also deeds.”59

Inciting Collectivity: Nations and Peoples in the French Revolution Rousseau’s vision of a society without a monarch eventually became reality. This was by no means a swift or predictable outcome. Rather, it was the result of a complex set of events that extended from the summer of 1789 to January 1793. The end of the Bourbon monarchy was a three-and-a-half-year process that was filled with hesitations, reversals, and divergent agendas. The events commonly referred to as “the French Revolution” comprise an extended process of working through a set of difficult problems, not the least of which is the question of how to think about sovereignty when monarchy itself is under negotiation. The problematic of the people takes on a new urgency in this environment. Concerns about collective identity and agency are now taken up as part of the question of what can replace the sovereignty of the king. Central to this issue is the question of how sovereignty and collective identity can be imagined without the identity and unitary agency of the king. Sovereignty was attributed to the king through an elaborate code of symbols and ritualized practices. As Lynn Hunt and Ronald Paulson note, the end of monarchy created a need to devise new symbols appropriate to the changing political circumstances.60 The unprecedented character of these changes left a vacuum of representation, creating a need to find new ways to represent the unprecedented.61 The people is thematized as a key means for resolving this problem, but that only problematizes it more deeply across a wide variety of discursive, symbolic, and other practices. The connections between collective identity and normativity become explicit foci during this time. The cryptonormative embrace of the people under the ancien régime is transmuted into an explicit concern with collective sovereignty. Here the idea of the people is interchanged freely with vaguely similar forms of collective identity. Nation, crowd, and public are important examples of these vague synonyms.62 The problematic of the people now enters a broad crossroads, intersecting other problematic collectivities and leading one author to note that “there are no words more abused than nation, people.”63 Meanwhile, notions of public opinion, “the public spirit,” and the general will

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are increasingly taken as normatively privileged manifestations of the power of the people, shaping that notion in new ways as well.64 At the same time, practices of political insurgency are increasingly associated with the people.65 Crowd actions are attributed to the “power of the people.” Attempts are frequently made to describe political practices with a shifting mosaic of terms that attribute various characteristics to the people. The sources of this confusion are located within political practice, or more precisely, in the attempt to act politically while employing an internally problematic political imaginary. In these practices, the people and its near-synonyms cross from terms of art for describing social stratification to ones directly deployed in politics. Political discourse becomes wrapped up in the self-referential project of clarifying the bases of its own sovereignty. In so doing, it reveals some of the confusions about political collectivity that plague the developing popular-universalist imaginary. Emmanuel Sieyès shares many of these concerns. He was a principal intellectual of the revolutionary period and one of its most potent political actors. Sieyès combined these two roles by writing highly influential and conceptually sophisticated propaganda. He was not a writer of learned treatises or literary works, but of political pamphlets, speeches, and draft legislation, writings that had a direct political force. In the winter of 1788–1789, the government of Louis XVI was in the midst of a severe fiscal crisis and decided to convoke the Estates General, a moribund representative body that had been used in previous centuries to approve royal taxation. The old structure of the Estates General was to be preserved, giving equal voice to the clergy, nobility, and commoners. This provoked outrage in intellectual circles, prompting a blizzard of essays, articles, and pamphlets. They demanded greater voice for the commons, who comprised the “Third Estate” behind the aristocratic Second and the clerical First. The most widely discussed of these publications was Sieyès’ What is the Third Estate? Published in January 1789, this pamphlet is above all an attack on aristocratic privilege. In a move of political legerdemain for which he became quite famous, Sieyès claims that the Third Estate is identical to the nation.66 He thus levels the hierarchy between the estates by equating the Third with the normatively consequential whole. Through this conceptual maneuver, the Third Estate seizes sovereignty and excludes the other two orders. By implication, if the other two wish to become part of the sovereign nation, they must give up their privileged status and join the newly universalized Third. This argument was enormously influential and established Sieyès as a leading intellectual figure of the opposition. In June 1789, the Third Estate in fact followed his suggestion, issuing a declaration drafted by Sieyès that made them the National Assembly, gave them the power to author a new constitution and make laws, and transferred sovereignty from the king to the nation.67 The fundamental juridical transformations of the Revolution were thus accomplished a month before the storming of the Bastille.

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The bold conceptual moves that Sieyès makes are underpinned by normative ideals of popular unity and collective identity. He puts forward the desirability of these ideals while also being acutely aware of the difficulty of realizing them. Sieyès sees unification as a key prerequisite for political power, in the form of a unified, collective agent. He writes, Here it can be seen that power belongs to the public. Individual wills still lie at its origin and still make up its essential underlying elements. But taken separately, their power would be null. Power resides solely in the whole. A community has to have a common will. Without this unity of will, it would not be able to make itself a willing and acting whole.68

This is a crystalline expression of the problematic of the people. It articulates a need to create a collectivity that can act as a single agent: Hobbes’s image of the artificial man once again. Interestingly, in this passage Sieyès attributes power to the public, not to the nation or to the people. The reason for this, one might hypothesize, is that “nation” has a very technical meaning for him, and after more detailed argument, it will indeed be associated with the idea of communal political power. “People” has a highly cathected meaning in French discourse at this time and one that he wishes to avoid. Therefore public is a more neutral choice until he can make the connection with the nation more explicit. The power that Sieyès refers to is what he will call constituent power. It is the power to found a political order. Unlike Rousseau, Sieyès does not believe that constituent power can be constituted. Some preexisting entity must already be endowed with the power, authority, and legitimacy to constitute other orders. This, he says, is the nation. Sieyès is well-known for the idea that the nation ultimately wields constituent power.69 His assertion of this idea is ambiguous and complex, however, mediated by the problematic of the people. For instance, he sometimes equates the people and the nation in a normative sense. He writes, “All public powers, without distinction, are an emanation of the general will; all come from the people, which is to say, from the nation. These two terms should be synonymous.”70 Similarly, Sieyès seems to use the nation as a generalized universal and a primordial source of constituent power. Yet he also seems aware that nations are not natural phenomena but products of human creation. Thus he treats the nation as a normative foundation while also theorizing means to create it as a unified political body. In this sense, declaring the Third Estate to be the nation does not resolve the problem of collective unity so much as pose it with even greater urgency. Sieyès recognizes that even if the clerical and noble orders could be convinced to join the Third Estate, a unified nation would not result. Beyond the problem of status distinction inherent in the three estates, there are troubling political differences defined by geography. Some of the provinces are wealthier and more influential than others, and these sources of provincial privilege become one of his chief targets.71 Urban versus rural differences and central versus peripheral

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ones are also significant. Many in the countryside scarcely think of themselves as French.72 A carefully unified nation, Sieyès believes, would provide the kind of universalism needed to erase these differences. He concludes that such a nation cannot be presumed, but must be built. For Sieyès the process of national unification is best accomplished through division. He describes a process of “adunation” that creates “one great people ordered by the same laws and forms of administration.”73 William Sewell tells us that this is not a neologism on Sieyès’ part. The term was a nearly forgotten one in his time, which signified “the act of uniting, of forming a whole out of unconstituted fragments.”74 While its uses were primarily religious and territorial, the etymological resonance with “nation” would not have been lost on Sieyès. He uses it to propose a set of uniform administrative districts, the present system of départements, as a way of standardizing the territory of France to eliminate the privileges, jealousies, and internal cohesion of the provinces. This is a form of territorial Haussmannization a century ahead of its time: spatial and administrative uniformity in the service of equality. A  nation is created through geographical homogenization. It is a strategy oriented at disciplining space and thereby governing the people within it, transforming them into “one great people.” Sieyès, in short, combines normative universalism and empirical constructivism. He universalizes the Third Estate as the nation, then sets about building the nation that he has valorized. The intellectual and legal movements in which Sieyès participated had a concrete counterpart in the politics of the street. Political interventions like pamphleteering and the creation of the National Assembly helped to focus diffuse public dissatisfaction into political action. Iconic events like the storming of the Bastille were the result of spontaneous actions and reactions in the streets of Paris.75 In these largely unsteered politics, there was no particular center and no particular direction. It was, in many ways, a concrete demonstration of the kind of disunity that so troubled Sieyès.

Technologies of Mass Communication, 1789: An Abstract and Dispersed People Sieyès’ interest in technical solutions to the problem of popular unity was shared by others. In the midst of the Revolution’s whirlwind of political events stands a quiet, optimistic meditation on the prospects of technology for improving political discourse. In October 1789, the Press of the Widow Hérissant published an anonymously authored pamphlet whose title, occupying a full half of the first page, can be translated as Treatise on the Means, 1st, of Communicating Directly to the People, Being Outside of the Place the Assembly is Being Held, the Deliberations that are Held There; 2nd, Of Making Oneself Understood in a Large Assembly, and Particularly the Estates-General, In Spite of the Noise of the Deliberants.76 The pamphlet was clearly intended

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as a helpful intervention in the popular politics of its time. It describes four useful inventions designed, as the title advertises, to facilitate mass communication. The purpose is to communicate public deliberations that are held within a particular space to the people outside of that space, and to facilitate clear communication within the deliberative arena itself. This treatise undertakes this task with an élan for technical innovation and creative problem-solving. It was seen as important by at least one audience: the only surviving copy bears a library stamp depicting a crown encircled by the words Bibliothèque Royale, Royal Library. Here the impossibility of collective political identity is faced with all the hallmarks of Enlightenment rationality and optimism. The author sees the problem as one of spatial dispersal. The people are distributed across space in a way that makes it difficult to address them all at once. The solution is a series of ingenious inventions designed to “communicate directly to the people.” The first invention is called the Porte-Voix du Peuple, the Megaphone of the People (Figure 4.2). It is a giant trumpet that can be mounted on a stand or window, with a sinuous, bulbous shape designed to amplify the sound of public speeches. With this invention, the author claims, one can address large assembly halls and outdoor gatherings in a natural voice, without having to speak slowly and artificially in order to be heard.77 The second invention is called the Tableau Populaire, the People’s Screen (Figure 4.3). It is the eighteenth-century equivalent of the stories-tall electronic message boards now seen in Times Square and Piccadilly Circus. The Tableau consists of a length of fabric suspended between two large spools, mounted inside a very large window. It is accompanied by a basket of cloth letters that can be pinned to the background to spell out a message. This can then be rolled out into public view by turning the spools while the next message is being prepared. Providing some sign of the author’s political sympathies, the Tableau shown in the illustration displays the message, “Wait and he will reveal to us the dark conspiracy of the aristocrats.” The advantages of this invention are several:  Magistrates would not ruin their voices trying to make themselves heard, nor would they need to throw pamphlets from windows, which tend not to be read anyway. Further, a magistrate could safeguard his public image by minimizing the number of times he need appear in public.78 The third invention is the Siège Orale Mobile, the Mobile Speaking Seat (Figure 4.4). Like the Porte-Voix, this machine amplifies an orator’s voice. It uses parabolic reflectors to do this, modeling them on the amplification produced by a church dome, the proscenium arch of ancient drama, and some of Rousseau’s observations about musical acoustics. In this way the orator can speak in a natural tone that allows him “to embellish his words with a harmonious accent” that is “almost certain to reach the soul and persuade.”79 This method of amplification also allows the speaker to show himself with his face uncovered, “to better penetrate the spirit of those who listen.”80 The

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Figure 4.2. The Porte-Voix du Peuple. Reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Figure 4.3. The Tableau Populaire. Reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

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Figure 4.4. The Siège Orale Mobile. Reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

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Porte-Voix is not well suited to this, since the speaker has to stand behind the device and speak into it. The mobile speaking seat solves this problem by providing a rolling stage on which the orator is at once visible, ambulatory, and amplified. The aim of this pamphlet is clearly technical innovation. While the machines are interesting in their own right, even more interesting is what remains silent in this discussion of the means of communication. The inventions described in the treatise are based on an important but unstated premise: they will be used to address a people that already exists. They seem to assume that the problem is to deploy speech and images in a way that could provide instruction and direction to the people, not to bring them together. These inventions are not seen as having a constitutive function, so much as creating political effectivity on a mass scale. Their true goal is to direct and manage an already existing people. It brings them together as a politically unified force, but does not  – consciously at least – alter or effect their composition. Given these goals, the brochure’s diagrams seem to have one glaring omission. They carefully portray the orator and his devices, but contain no representation of the subject actually under discussion: the people. In an era with well-developed pictorial tropes for portraying the people,81 it is striking that they are nowhere represented in these diagrams. We have ample illustrations of the orator and the technical devices being promoted, but no representation of the audience itself. It is interesting to ponder the significance of this absence. There is certainly an implicit focus on the subject position of the speaker. Consider, for instance, the treatise’s first sentence:  “Whatever harm is borne by the unfortunates whom the people sacrifice to liberty, the trouble that one expends on their account would not exist, if wise and enlightened men could make themselves heard [se faire entendre].” There is a center-periphery dynamic at work here, in which privileged subjects have insight that could save others from trouble and harm. This is reinforced by other comments in the text: for instance, the remark following the description of the Tableau Populaire that “in this manner the People could be instructed.”82 Similarly, at one point the author says that this invention could be useful not only for communicating messages quickly to the People but also for moderating their impatience.83 The people are being spoken to, rather than speaking. I believe that the absence of the people from these images is not simply a reflection of the self-regard of Enlightenment intellectuals. The people are absent precisely because that is the problem being addressed. The problematic of the people plays out here as implicit recognition of the abstracted and virtualized character of the people. In one’s daily experience they are everywhere, yet precisely nowhere. In these diagrams, the absent people are the dispersed and virtual audience of the orator’s eloquence. They are evoked as a diffuse, inchoate subject. The object of oratory is unconstituted and not fully present.

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Consider, for instance, the spatiality implied in the description of the Porte-Voix du Peuple. The author says that it can be scaled up or down to match the size of the room one wants to address, “or the space one wants to embrace if it’s a matter of speaking to the People assembled outdoors.”84 In other words, there is no people as such. Rather, it depends on the area one wants to cover, which will in turn determine the audience and thus delimit the people being addressed. The people, in this case, is constituted by addressing a particular space, and it will be differently composed depending on the space one wants to address. We see a tension playing through this document. The people is assumed as an object of address, yet it is absent, diffuse, indeterminate, and problematic. This, I believe, takes us to the heart of the people’s absence from the clearly drawn diagrams of the Treatise. There are at this time established conventions for portraying the people, but they are always individuals at toil.85 The people is typically portrayed in its deprived, fractional, and noncollective form: those “destined to live solely from the work of their hands.” There is no pictorial convention for representing a diffuse and indeterminate multitude. This, in short, is an example of the kind of crisis of representation described by Lynn Hunt or Ronald Paulson, in which the unprecedented events of the revolutionary period outstrip the symbolic conventions available for their representation. It would not work graphically, for instance, to include a (concrete, determinate) number of individuals in the picture frame when the point is the abstract, ephemeral, and disunified character of the people. The concreteness of the image would fail the essay’s theme. As a result, the people is represented by absence itself. The absent people is not an omission or a failure of the imagination, but a graphic portrayal of the problematic of the people. It is an implicit acknowledgement of the tensions and problematics that this treatise is designed to address. In short, these illustrations reveal some of the conceptual tensions created by the problematic of the people. They acknowledge its abstract and dematerialized character. Trying to work through this realization, the idea of a collectivity present to itself is giving way to a more abstract notion, in which the people is “out there” in a more vague and unspecified way. It is an audience with a need to be informed and persuaded. The diffusion and abstraction implied in this idea verge on another notion of political collectivity developing a following of its own at this time, the public.86 This pamphlet’s conception of the people is much less normative than others of its era. Sovereignty is implied rather than elaborated. The people is one that needs to be addressed by skilled orators. It is thus an audience of politics, but it is also depoliticized to some extent. There is no notion of the action of the people here, only the need to instruct, persuade, and manage it. This could, however, simply reflect an urgency of concern for the composition and agency of the people, seen here as fairly problematic. The diffuse, abstract, and

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ineffable character of the people needs orators and machines to facilitate a popular sovereignty that is otherwise put at risk.

The Constitution of Unity: An Epistemically Problematic and Disunified People While the author of On the Means of Communicating Directly to the People chose a technical approach to problems of political unity, others were pursuing creative solutions of a different kind. In the midst of chaotic revolutionary events, an elaborate politics of signification was developing that helped to consolidate political identities around a new set of symbols. For instance, liberty came to be symbolized as a woman, Marianne, during this time.87 The red “Phyrigian” cap was rebranded as the “liberty cap” and worn as a sign of revolutionary sympathies. The maypole, a traditional center of communal gathering at village festivals, was transfigured into the “liberty tree” and given a more complex set of meanings: it was now both a site of communal celebration and a more menacing platform for posting revolutionary slogans or warnings to those who might resist the Revolution.88 In this rich new world of signification, no symbol was more widely recognized than the tricolor cockade. This was the blue, white, and red rosette ribbon that became a ubiquitous symbol of the Revolution. Ferdinand Pouy describes the cockade as an “electric and magical fashion.”89 It originated as a sign by which revolutionaries could recognize one another, but went through a rapid evolution to take on much wider significance. When revolutionaries wanted to force the king to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Revolution, they made him display the cockade. Similarly, a rumor of soldiers trampling on the cockade at Versailles prompted a women’s protest march in response.90 The tricolor cockade was even held up as a litmus test of loyalty in the Constituent Assembly: it was claimed that failure to wear it would indicate lack of pride in citizenship and should result in exclusion from the Assembly.91 Devices like the cockade aimed at creating virtual unity through symbolic means, ones with a practical function on the street as forms of mutual recognition. They began as symbols of revolutionary sympathy but became means for creating political unity across many different domains of interaction. Such practices constituted new forms of collective identity, based on signifying one’s allegiance to a cause or set of ideals rather than one’s placement in a hierarchy of estates or other distinctions. There is no single people here, but there is an attempt to create unity across other forms of distinction. Almost as soon as the cockade became a sign of unity, it also became a sign of difference. In keeping with its spontaneous creation, people continued to improvise on the design and appearance of the cockade, changing its size, material, the order, color, and number of its concentric circles, and decorating it with other symbols and motifs. The centrifugal force of these improvisations was

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seen as a threat to collective identity. Thus in May and June 1790, “reforms” were put in place regulating the style and use of the cockade. They forbade deviation from the national standard. By extension, variant forms of the cockade came to be associated with deviance in general. Arrest records reporting suspicious or provocative behavior often comment on improper display of the cockade during this time, cataloging it as a sign of deviant tendencies.92 Another practice of popular unity was the festivals that sprang up around peasant uprisings in the autumn and winter of 1789–1790. Mona Ozouf recounts these unplanned events, which she characterizes as “an improvised ritual of unity.”93 Sometimes they formed out of spontaneous movements to link the inhabitants of villages together in defensive pacts against local brigands. Armed inhabitants from one village would “invade” another, gathering up its inhabitants to proceed on to a third, and so on. The result was a visible display of combined strength in action, forging a pact of mutual protection, which would then devolve into public celebration. These celebrations, Ozouf reports, often combined joy and unanimity with an element of sedition and menace. For instance, in July 1789, in Lons-le-Saunier, a group of high-spirited young people were celebrating the recent events of the Revolution by decorating themselves with the tricolor cockade. They decided to make a similar gift to the municipality and began ordering other citizens to wear it. Here celebration combined with coercion to incite a form of symbolic, collective identification.94 In general, such symbolism was a vital part of the popular festivals of the time. Symbols of aristocracy or the church  – weathercocks, coats of arms, church pews – might become objects of violence or parody. Elected officials and local aristocrats might be decorated with the cockade. In all of these ways, collective identity was simultaneously problematized and pursued. In time, the government realized that festivals could be adapted for important political purposes of its own. National festivals were created to preempt and contain the chaotic energies of spontaneous, local ones. The Festival of the Federation in 1790, for instance, was designed to coordinate the local celebrations of mutual defense pacts. Although officially commemorating the first anniversary of the Revolution, it took on a more forward-looking aspect as an attempt to orchestrate national unity. Instructions about the timing of local festivities came out from Paris, stipulating that they must be simultaneous across the entire country. Delegates would also be sent to Paris for a great festival there. In these festivals, there was a wide array of symbols representing unity: wreaths, garlands, banners, altars to the fatherland, representations of Concord and Wisdom to ornament the liberty cap, angels waving tricolor flags, and decorations of all kinds in the national colors. There were oaths and gun salutes to accompany these tangible symbols, all aimed at what Ozouf calls “the dynamic image of the gathering.” Yet the gathering remained problematic. These “official” festivals tended to belie their own symbolism of inclusion through top-down planning, an emphasis on spectacle rather than participation, and the exclusion of spontaneous celebration. Government officials

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and the National Guard were well displayed, but the broader population was invited only to watch.95 Official concerns about collective unity also registered in the legislative arena. The National Assembly was converted into a constitution-drafting body known as the Constituent Assembly on July 9, 1789. Early on, it was decided that the constitution should declare the philosophical principles on which it was based, and this statement would be included as a preamble to the main document. The Marquis de Lafayette was tasked with drafting this statement, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, and introduced it into the Assembly on July 11, 1789.96 As passed in August, its third article read: “The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body, no individual can exercise authority that does not emanate expressly from it.” [“Le principe de toute souverainété réside essentiellement dans la nation. Nul corps, nul individu ne peut exercer d’autorité qui n’en émane expressément.”]97 The idea of locating sovereignty in the nation reflects the influence of Sieyès and like-minded thinkers, theorizing a sovereign collectivity that is considered to be one cohesive body. The idea of locating sovereignty in the nation did not remain free of controversy for long, however. The 1789 constitution was redrafted in 1791. The Declaration of the Rights of Man would again serve as its preamble. The Declaration’s language about sovereignty in Article 3 was preserved without change, but additional text was added to the body of the constitution amplifying these ideas. The debates surrounding this addition reveal some of the crosscutting confusions about different ideas of political collectivity. On August 10, 1791, the following text was under discussion in the Constituent Assembly:  “Sovereignty is one, indivisible, and belongs to the nation; no section of the people can attribute its exercise to itself.” [“La souveraineté est une, indivisible, et appartient à la nation; aucune section du peuple ne peut s’en attribuer l’exercice.”]98 This proposal itself is already quite ambiguous: sovereignty resides in the nation, but worries about division and usurpation focus on the people. This raises the question of how the deputies understood  – or thought they understood  – the relation between those two terms. The most obvious interpretation would postulate a lack of distinction between them, so using nation and people interchangeably would not be controversial. Another, more literal, reading would claim that the nation is not thought of as divisible, while the people is. During the debate, Maximillian Robespierre notes the confusing character of these issues while falling headlong into their complications. He says, It’s stated in two articles of the constitution: “no section of the people can attribute to itself the exercise of sovereignty.” I can easily agree with the truth conveyed by these words, but I think that it’s necessary to clarify the equivocal ones. One can’t say in an absolute and unlimited manner that no section of the people can attribute the exercise of sovereignty to itself. It’s quite true that an order of sovereignty will be established; it’s also quite true that no section of the people can at no time pretend to exercise the

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rights of the people as a whole; but it isn’t true that in no case and for all time, no section of the people cannot exercise, in that which concerns it, an act of sovereignty. (Ironic laughter.)99

The Archives Parlementaires reports that Robespierre’s attempts at clarification were met with laughter, evidently because of their highly convoluted and qualified character. In trying to clarify the equivocal words, the most celebrated orator of the Revolution vividly demonstrates their linguistic and conceptual difficulties. Forging on, nonetheless, Robespierre asserts that the nation cannot fully delegate or alienate its sovereignty, and that it is false to say (as Sieyès had) that the nation can act only by delegating that authority. Rather, a section of the people can exercise sovereignty in selecting deputies for the entire nation. Given the contrast that Robespierre draws between “a section of the people” and “the entire nation,” it might seem that the question of people versus nation was one of divisibility versus universality. The people can be divided, while the nation cannot. Nonetheless, Robespierre wants to preserve some form of sovereignty when “a section of the people,” probably an electoral district, selects deputies, even when the legislative power of those deputies will extend over citizens not selecting them. (He is likely thinking of a situation in which deputies to parliamentary bodies like the National Assembly are elected from geographical districts but make legislation that bind all people within the national jurisdiction.) The difficulties Robespierre encounters concern universalism and sovereignty. On one hand, he seems to require a universal collective identity for the manifestation of sovereignty (the nation or “the people as a whole”), but, on the other hand, he claims that such power could at times be generated or used by a collective faction of the people that is something less than universal. The complicated and highly qualified nature of his statements is clear; what is less clear is whether the sovereignty exercised by “a section of the people” would be different in type or extent from that arising from “the rights of the people as a whole.” In this moment of constitutional debate, the loose equivalence of “the people as a whole” and the nation exists within the same tension-filled conceptual field as the idea that sovereignty requires universality, yet it can also seemingly be wielded by a fraction of the whole. In this regard, it is important to remember that some of the same tensions between part and whole characterize Sieyès’ 1789 pamphlet. Sieyès claims that constituent power comes from the whole, yet he famously identifies the nation only with the Third Estate.100 This identification had strategic significance, of course, and can be read not as a denial of universality, but as a polemic attempt to actualize it by forcing the Second and First Estates to renounce their privileged and separate status. Here the tensions between part and whole are actual and to be overcome by universalism. Since the project under discussion in the constitutional debates is more complex, it is not surprising that its problems seem to be registered at

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a more deeply conceptual level. Robespierre is not playing on actually existing tensions between part and whole polemically for political effect, but trying to arrive at a version of them that works conceptually. It is difficult to escape Sieyès’s words entirely while making this sympathetic interpretation, however. He does say that constituent power lies in the nation, which is to say the Third Estate, seemingly blurring the lines between universal and factional collectivities. In both of these moments, one in 1789, the other in 1791, it is difficult to say whether universalism is required for the exercise of sovereignty or whether we ought to think of the nation as an entirely universalistic idea. It is thus not clear what the broader stakes might be in contrasting the people with the nation. To some extent the tension between people and nation in this particular debate is sidestepped when Jérôme Pétion de Villeneuve moves that the phrase “Sovereignty is one, indivisible, and belongs to the nation” be amended to read “Sovereignty is one, indivisible, and inalienable.”101 The reference to the collective agent bearing sovereignty is thus eliminated. Even without this reference, however, Villeneuve substantiates his assertion with a reference to collective identity in classically Sieyèsian terms. He says, This idea is extremely simple. All of these articles deal with constituted powers, and over all of these constituted powers, one can speak of the sovereignty of the nation, because it is from this sovereignty that all these powers emanate. But you can’t conceal the fact that the nation can never alienate its sovereignty, in which it always maintains the right to censure constituted powers, in which it reserves constituent power, and this is the basis of national conventions.102

Jacques Thouret notes some of the conceptual problems they seem to be encountering. He says, “We’re dealing here with a subject in which it’s very important that each expression be carefully examined, carefully determined, and that we don’t let any pass through that could be abused.”103 After this caution and acknowledgement of the conceptual indeterminacy of what has come before, the discussion veers away from issues of collective identity to the question of how to describe sovereignty: inalienable, imprescriptible, and so on. François Buzot eventually insists that in any case it is important to have the word “inalienable” in the constitution. “It’s completely true that sovereignty is by its nature inalienable,” he says, “but it’s vital that the people never forget this. . . . ”104 His point is interesting from both an epistemological and political perspective. The truth of inalienability is less important, he seems to suggest, than the knowledge and action that this fact might motivate. And the collectivity that would understand the nature of its rights and act on that basis is the people. So the people returns again in the end, perhaps as a casual reference or perhaps as the ultimate epistemic referent of the discussion. There are really two crosscutting issues at work here. One is the minutely dissected character of sovereignty and the question whether it can be represented; the second is the composition of the sovereign body itself. These issues

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are very much tied together. In a series of amendments to the proposal under discussion, we are presented with the ideas (1) that sovereignty belongs to the nation; (2) that sovereignty is inalienable; and (3) that sovereignty is imprescriptible. The discussion moves back and forth relatively freely between various properties of sovereignty and various collective identities that it might be associated with. Ultimately the adopted constitution is syncretic on these points, wrapping all of the suggestions into the idea that “Sovereignty is one, indivisible, inalienable, and imprescriptible. It belongs to the nation; no section of the people nor any individual can attribute the exercise of it to itself.”105 It is important to take seriously the conceptual confusion playing through this deliberation. It records a moment in the assemblage of a set of concepts. They are brought into being as related and connected, but not in an entirely finished, complete, or coherent manner. Here the process of conceptual negotiation is our focus, because the product pales in comparison to the process bringing it about and merely records an eventual compromise that does not successfully resolve the underlying conceptual problems. In this process we see forms of political collectivity being imagined, reimagined, and refashioned. At the same time, normative powers are attributed to them in an equally hesitant and experimental fashion. This is not a two-step process, but a single, organic one. Collectivities are imagined, and they are imagined as having normative powers. In both of these cases, both in 1789 and 1791, we see an attempt to articulate elements of a popular-universalist imaginary  – though this is only visible in the hindsight of several centuries.

Policing Unity: Jacobinism and Political Fragmentation While the Constituent Assembly was drafting the Constitution of 1791, regional and global events were adding complications to the political situation. Chief among them was war against Austria and Prussia, which upset the political balance by benefitting some interests at the expense of others. At the same time, the country had entered an economic crisis. This was made worse by slave revolts in the Caribbean colony Saint-Dominque, which caused commodity prices to rise and provoked food riots. In the midst of these destabilizing events, the King was put on trial and executed.106 These events laid bare some of the problems that the new constitution had not resolved. Evidence of popular unrest made tangible the concerns about unity that the Assembly had debated, and the final removal of the King as a nexus of royal sovereignty made their resolution more urgent. Collective identity was seen as both politically necessary and even more fragile than before. As a result, discourse about it continued while new measures were devised to confront the problem. The war with Austria in the summer of 1792 exacerbated political divisions, including ones that would later become lethal among the Jacobins. There were

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fears that unrest at home would jeopardize the war. Thus, emergency wartime legislation included efforts to foster patriotism and discipline ideological conformity. The tricolor cockade was singled out for special treatment in this regard. A law was passed requiring all men to wear the cockade, and renewed efforts were made to regularize its use. Further, wearing a cockade of colors other than the national blue, white, and red was decreed a “sign of rebellion,” punishable by death. Citizens failing to report such violations would be considered accomplices.107 Similar concerns about collective identity continued to play out in the legislative arena. An interesting glimpse at these problems is provided by a speech of Robespierre during the King’s trial in December 1792.108 The question before the National Convention (a successor to the Constituent Assembly) is whether the King’s punishment should be determined by “the people” rather than the Convention. In the discussion of this proposal, it quickly becomes clear that it is ambiguous what the people means and how it can properly be consulted. In response, Robespierre draws a complex relation between the people and the nation. At one point he says, First, I don’t doubt that the people want [the death of the tyrant], if you understand by this word the majority of the nation, without excluding from it the most numerous, unfortunate, and pure part of society, that on which the crimes of egoism and tyranny weigh. This majority expressed its wish at the moment that it shook off the yoke of your former king. It started, it sustained the revolution. It has morals, this majority, it has courage, but it has neither finesse nor eloquence. It strikes down tyrants, but it is often fooled by rogues.109

Here Robespierre’s identification of the people with the nation is an ambivalent one. The people is not, or not necessarily, the same as the nation. He seems compelled to qualify that in this case we would want it to encompass at least the majority of the nation, the largest fraction. In particular, he is concerned that it include “the most numerous, unfortunate, and pure part of society,” an idea remarkably similar to the fraction that Coyer characterized as all that was left of the people back in 1755. (His phrase was “the most useful, virtuous, and respectable part.”110) It is important not to overlook the significance of Robespierre’s “if you understand by this word.” This statement is of course a rhetorical move in a public speech. However, it also indicates the plasticity of reference to the people in the discourse of the time. He implicitly notes that the audience would have understood different things by the people, and his meaning required clarification. In any case, the nation functions as an indeterminate universal here, while the people remains problematic in its composition. As a result, the people merits a much richer description than the nation. It is numerous, unfortunate, and pure, a victim of egoism and tyranny, it has morals and courage but not finesse or eloquence, it has force but is foolish. For Robespierre, the people resonates with a whole catalog of qualities that give it normative status. These

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characteristics are directly connected with its role in starting and sustaining the revolution. In contrast, the nation is a more vague and undefined whole, of which the people is a more special part. The King was executed in January 1793. Given its momentous nature, the event caused little disturbance in France, a sign that ideas about the centrality and political theology of monarchy had already changed. In the meantime, divisions began to widen between political factions, particularly the Girondins and Montagnards. Combined with peasant uprisings in the provinces and sans-culotte agitation in Paris, the political situation reached a point of eruption in June 1793 with an order for the arrest of Girondin deputies to the National Convention. This put the Montagnard faction in power, and they proceeded to draft a new constitution.111 The draft constitution of 1793 considerably expands the Declaration as its preamble. It removes the previously confusing references to nation and people and replaces them with language that refers to national and popular sovereignty in a newly confusing way. Its Article 23 echoes the language of national sovereignty found in the 1789 declaration: “The social guarantee consists in the action of all to assure to each the enjoyment and preservation of his rights; this guarantee rests on national sovereignty.” [“La garantie sociale consiste dans l’action de tous pour assurer à chacun la jouissance et la conservation de ses droits; cette garantie repose sur la souveraineté nationale.”] In contrast, Article 25 maintains the omnibus characterization of sovereignty found in the constitution of 1791, with slight changes in word order, but drops mention of the nation and brings back the people. The result is the assertion that “Sovereignty resides in the people; it is one and indivisible, imprescriptible and inalienable.” [“La souveraineté réside dans le peuple; elle est une et indivisible, imprescriptible et inaliénable.”] This allows a more consistent rendering of the relations between part and whole, which are now phrased entirely in terms of the people. Thus Article 26: “No part of the people can exercise the power of the entire people; but each assembled section of the sovereign must enjoy the right to express its will with complete liberty.” [“Aucune portion du peuple ne peut exercer la puissance du peuple entier; mais chaque section du souverain assemblée doit jouir du droit d’exprimer sa volonté avec une entière liberté.”]112 In this constitution, references to part and whole are made in terms of the people, eliminating some of the potential confusion there. However, in various other parts, sovereignty is said to lie both in the people and in the nation. Again, nation and people coexist here in unresolved relation to one another. It seems that the two are being identified with one another; but given the tangled history of their association, we cannot be sure how stable or conceptually sound this identification would be. In any case, this identification is further destabilized within the constitution itself. There we find the assertion that “The sovereign people is the universality of French citizens.” [“Le peuple souverain est l’universalité des

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citoyens français.”]113 Here the people is identified with a third term, an odd conglomeration of two rather incompatible ideas. Unlike people or nation, citizen is a legally defined category. It has explicit criteria of membership, permitting a much more concrete determination of the boundaries and content of the collectivity. The “universality” of citizens presumably means all of them without limit or qualification. To that extent, it invokes all of the special normative connotations of Enlightenment universalism. It uses this magical word in the service of a fairly prosaic legal category, however. Unlike people or nation, citizen remains an individual category of membership; there is no collective term for citizens. Adding “universality” is presumably an attempt to square the circle of individualism. It tries to create a collectivity of citizens that can be identified with the people, an idea that is inherently collective. This odd compound of universality and legal individualism is conceptually unstable. The result is a substantial confusion about which collectivity is sovereign and why. The political instability of this period seems to have registered in the revolutionary festivals as well. Festivals sprang up outside of the stiff, official efforts of national celebration. They were more improvised affairs of the “people’s clubs,” oriented toward carnivalesque forms of parody. These festivals featured costumed caricatures of judges, priests, aristocrats, or politicians with exaggerated features; effigies of Fanaticism or Monarchy; and the use of dung carts, asses’ ears, dwarves, and animals to parody clergy or nobles. All of this marked an expansion of the symbolic vocabulary of the festivals and a rearticulation of what it meant to assemble in public. These more genuinely popular festivals were not centrally planned and acted out a different iconography: not official representations of unity, but a grassroots satirization of the old and new privileged classes.114 In reaction to these popular energies, the government remained focused on the problem of collective identity. In May 1794, the Committee on Public Safety asked the artist Jacques-Louis David for proposals to curtail status distinctions through dress. Forms of dress had become a terrain of social and political conflict, as we have seen in the politics around the tricolor cockade. They were also a long-standing method of signifying class and status, such as in the well-known boundary between those who could afford silk knee breeches, culottes, and those who could not. David was not only a painter but an energetic organizer of revolutionary festivals, and he had extensive experience in staging collective unity. His idea was to replace the system of distinctions encoded in dress with a national civil costume. David’s design was characteristically neoclassical, based on a tight fitting tunic and hose and a short cloak. It reflects Renaissance and Roman influences, in keeping with the republican fascination with the classical world at this time. The Committee was sufficiently pleased to order 20,000 prints of the design to be distributed to public officials around the country, though there is no evidence that the costume was ever widely worn.115

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The project of a national costume reveals traces of a chafing problematic rather than any broader achievement of popular unity. It is also a vivid expression of two different approaches to political unity:  top-down attempts to engineer unity by legislating the use and appearance of dress, versus the spontaneous adoption of forms of signification like the red liberty cap and the tricolor cockade. It is very much the same tension seen in official versus spontaneous revolutionary festivals. An underlying problematic of unity is shared between them, but tensions are revealed in the different modes of its expression. David’s optimism about unity was met with a rather different set of political events. The spring and summer of 1794 were characterized by waves of political arrests and executions. The Terror, as it is called, culminated in the overthrow and execution of key members of the Montagnard faction, including Robespierre.116 It is not surprising that these events were met with a conceptual retreat from ideals of popular unity. The constitution of 1793 had never been put into effect, and it was now abandoned. In April 1795 a committee was convened to draft a new constitution.117 Perhaps because of the conceptual confusion in previous versions, or perhaps because the idea of the people was associated with the now discredited Montagnards, sovereignty is no longer held to reside there. The constitution of 1795 states that “Sovereignty resides essentially in the universality of the citizens.” It goes on to specify that “No individual nor partial group [réunion partielle] of citizens can attribute sovereignty to itself.”118 This constitution strips out any reference to an overarching collective like a people or nation. Instead it preserves only the language that aggregates individuals who are legally recognized as members of the polity. This signals an exhaustion or retreat from ideas of a normatively sanctified collectivity in favor of something much easier to specify and correspondingly less compelling as a normative abstraction.

Problematic Collectivities This completes a short genealogy of the people in late-eighteenth-century France. During this tumultuous era, the people is a constant ostinato, a steady, pulsating motif in the midst of otherwise revolutionary upheaval. We see a plurality of meanings for the people during this time. In mid-century, under the ancien régime, we can see the perspicacity of Giorgio Agamben’s observation that, Every interpretation of the political meaning of the term “people” must begin with the singular fact that in modern European languages, “people” also always indicates the poor, the disinherited, and the excluded. One term thus names both the constitutive political subject and the class that is, de facto if not de jure, excluded from politics.119

This doubling is already evident in the mid-eighteenth century. As early as 1755, Coyer’s Dissertation on the Nature of the People describes the people as sometimes universal and sometimes partial. As we have seen, Coyer characterizes

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the people as the whole from which privileged groups remove themselves, leaving as a remainder only its most degraded part. More importantly, this genealogy reveals an indeterminacy and problematization in the people. Already in Coyer’s work, we see considerably greater complexity than is suggested by Agamben’s brief remark. This is true of his eighteenth-century successors as well. Political collectivities like people, nation, and public have highly ambiguous and changing significations that go beyond part and whole, mirrored by subtly shifting normative colorations that also show a greater complexity than that suggested by Agamben’s binary analysis. Writings like Coyer’s also show us implicit connections between the two meanings that Agamben identifies. The seeming equivocation between the people as constitutive political subject and the people as the poor is, inter alia, a way of euphemizing politics. As we have seen, the issue is never simply impoverishment, but a more directly political agenda duplexed on top of it. Starting with Rousseau and blossoming in the era of the French Revolution, this political valence comes to the fore. It is no longer necessary to euphemize one’s interest in the people as a good-hearted gesture toward the poor and downtrodden. One can now talk openly (as Rousseau had) about the people as a competitor to royal sovereignty. We move away from the deprived-fraction imaginary as concerns about popular universalism take center stage. The emphases and normative shadings change, while the underlying problematic remains the same. This lies in discerning some notion of collective action or collective identity that might be able to bear the weight of sovereign authority. Collectivity remains a focus of intense attention, always twinned with problems of sovereignty. The French Revolution is often seen as a break with the past, one present above all in the consciousness of revolutionary actors as they overthrew the old order and initiated a new one.120 We see something rather different here, however. In at least one important sense, there is substantial continuity in the conceptual difficulties surrounding sovereignty, revolution, and collective political action. The revolutionary period marks not so much a rupture with these problems as a rearticulation of their key concerns. In terms of collective identity, this was not a new beginning but merely a change of register. The problematic of the people had been articulated primarily in acts of print publication; it now becomes a topic of constitutional debate and public deliberation. Its problematic character is most often a moment of unnoticed difficulty in the discussion of other topics. This chafing, unresolved discussion spanned some five decades. It shows that the Revolution produced an important shift in the discourse on the people, but one taking place within broader problematics that predated it and continued after it. These problematics played out in all of the texts I have examined, but the Treatise on the Means of Communicating Directly to the People is perhaps the most frankly symptomatic of them. There the people is implicitly acknowledged as problematic by its very absence. The felt need to have a people is not

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articulated as such, but it is implied by the invocation of technology to “communicate” to the people. Since the people is so difficult to reach, “communicating to it” is tantamount to constituting an audience through technology, an audience so problematic that pictorial tropes do not yet exist to represent it. The helpful inventions that permit mass communication are ultimately technologies of governmentality. They aim to create a collective subject by drawing it together through communication. Here an Enlightenment faith in ingenious machines meets the subterranean anxieties of a new age of democratic self-rule. Universalism is expressed in complicated ways during this time. It is not a clearly defined or absolute idea, but one that takes on different qualities and concentrations. This is a universalism that is not one. Instead, it is articulated in various ways according to the needs at hand, typically in a specific idea of some kind of universality that is also part of a normative conception of collectivity. Universalism is often implicit rather than clearly stated. Collectivities are simultaneously concrete and universalized in these attempts, so the particular and the universal exist in complicated tension with one another. As a result, there is nothing natural or normatively clear about universalism. Rather, it adds normative weight to broader projects, but in an unclear way. In Benedict Anderson’s terms, these attempts to describe a sovereign subject are efforts to imagine a particular kind of community. Unlike the national communities that Anderson describes, however, they are not by-products of other mundane practices. Rather, they are prospective efforts of imagination that try to replace the unified, sovereign agency of the king with a community of the same characteristics. The gap between aim and achievement is palpable here: the various attempts to fashion a political collectivity never quite work. Ideas of people, nation, public, “the universality of citizens,” and their analogues are pressed into service in not entirely satisfactory ways. Instead, we see a transition from the deprived-fraction imaginary, an intellectual weapon against monarchy, to the fitful outlines of a popular-universalist imaginary. This difficult, piecemeal emergence is marked by chafing problematics that are not satisfactorily resolved. The effort spawns a great deal of discourse and other activity, but without settling on a fixed form of collectivity or stable conceptual schema. This problematization is a broad and pervasive phenomenon that begs further attention.

5 Chimeras of Political Identity Intermediate Reflections on the Pathways of Political Imagination

La démocratie, dans un grand État, est une absurde chimère. –Jean Joseph Mounier1

My brief genealogy of the people shows notions of collective agency and collective sovereignty circulating widely in eighteenth-century France. They form a conceptual pillar of political discourse leading up to the French Revolution and provide one of the principal idioms for understanding the changes taking place. In these discussions, however, there are persistent, unresolved difficulties about the people and its powers. The deployment of collective identity in this era is troubled and unsettled all the way through. The pamphlets, treatises, speeches, and other documents of this period show a more or less frustrated obsession with developing a workable notion of the people. Political actors try to locate sovereign power in the people, with mixed results. This disturbance reveals some very important instabilities, complexities, tensions, and historically shifting meanings in eighteenth-century French political discourse. The question posed by this story is how the problematics and tensions of that era could have formed part of the history of our contemporary, relatively fixed and uncontroversial ideas about the power of the people. How can a stable, mostly taken-for-granted political imaginary form out of this field of problems? This chapter is dedicated to answering that question. It culls broader lessons about the pathways of political imagination from the genealogy that came before, trying to provide a more general picture of how sovereignty is imagined. When we examine the history of these ideas, we find an arc that extends from problematization to habituation to profound forgetting. I will trace it out in four stages. (1) I will begin by reexamining the problematics of collective sovereignty in the eighteenth century. The persistence and urgency attached to these problematics can be explained as an incitement to discourse. (2) Within 93

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this proliferation of talk, we see new visions of popular politics begin to form. I will refer to them as sovereign imaginaries. They fuse together eclectic elements, combining notions of collective identity and normative value. (3) To see how such imaginaries are formed, I will detail some of the processes by which collectivities and values are brought together. (4) Finally, I will draw out the vital role of naturalization in this process. Sovereign imaginaries can only settle into place once the controversy that created them is put to rest. This can occur only if their underlying problems are resolved or forgotten. I will argue that in the case of the power of the people, resolving such problems was not an option. As a result, the internal tensions of this project were gradually paved over, routinized, and made to recede into the background. I will examine some of the psychic dimensions of this process, showing that there were strong incentives to forget controversy and naturalize the power of the people.

Incitement to Discourse The problematic of the people is characterized by difficulty and incompleteness, yet it persists throughout the period I have surveyed. The people is continuously problematic throughout this time, as are various ideas of nation and public, yet they are never set aside in favor of other devices. Why? Why did the people become a topic of intense discussion in the later half of the eighteenth century? What explains its persistence through a half century of political speech, thought, and practice in spite of its problematic character? The easiest answer would claim that this ongoing effort is driven by difficulties in the political project of emancipation. In this view, the discourse on the people aims at collective self-liberation. The people is a naturally occurring entity, endowed with natural powers and rights to self-determination. The challenge is to liberate it in a way that restores its natural freedom. This is not what we see in the actual discussions of the time, though. The problematic of the people reveals problems above all in the object of discourse itself. A  collective identity with preexisting rights is definitely not taken for granted at this time. Rather, this idea, in an unclear and shifting form, is one among several focal points in a fraught, problematic discussion about the nature of the agent that might be able to replace the king. The central issue is the need to reimagine sovereignty and political order as monarchical regimes are dissolved. The energy of this discussion is stoked by perceptions of disunity, division, the lack of a collective subject, and the incoherence of a conception of sovereignty not based in the agency of one person. The highly charged question of this period is precisely that with which I opened Chapter 2: what is the nature of the “artificial man” who can wield sovereignty like a king, and what is the nature of the sovereignty that could function as his “artificial soul”? The power of the people provides the means to articulate the idea of a collective

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macrosubject capable of doing this, even though it does so only with problems. In this sense, the eighteenth-century French problematization of the people is motivated by a deep-seated conceptual unease. It results in a great deal of talk focusing on a chafing political problem. Michel Foucault might have characterized this phenomenon as an “incitement to discourse.” The phrase describes a set of social and institutional arrangements that promote talk about a particular topic.2 They proliferate discourse in response to some deeper need. Foucault’s focus when he coined this term was sexuality. Although we usually think of sex as a topic forbidden in the public domain, too impolite to discuss, he notes the considerable increase in discourse about it over the past three centuries. He theorizes that this is the result of institutional attempts to manage and administer sexuality, chiefly for the sake of health, safety, and productivity. Discourse on sex is incited as a by-product of these efforts of institutional management. Our need to discuss sexual practices is a form of self-construction as self-revelation. It creates human identities along the lines of administrative imperatives. Although Foucault never addressed the topic, his insights apply to the problematic of the people as well. There is, I believe, an incitement to discourse about the people during the age of democratic revolutions. It reflects a deep-seated psychic and practical need to resolve problems of collective political agency. This problematic has two aspects. On one hand, it is a problem-oriented discourse, seeking to find some workable notion of sovereignty beyond that of the king. On the other hand, it is a discourse of justification, trying to identify some “power” or other source of normative sanctity that would justify a shift in power away from the king. It brings these two aspects together in an attempt to find clarity about what should replace monarchy and how to justify this change. In retrospect, it is easy to foreshorten this period of historical transformation and see it as presenting a clear choice between the king and the people. At the time, though, the options were much less clear. Old institutions like the Estates General, with their tripartite representative structure, could be generalized or radicalized for new purposes. The king could be incorporated into a representative system with some kind of veto power. The people could be identified with the nation, or with a destitute class faction, or with a numerical majority, and so on. Openness and uncertainty were the order of the day, rather than a clear choice between a sovereign king and sovereign people. Unlike the versions of the incitement to discourse detailed by Foucault, this one is not focused on the management of populations. Foucault’s focus when he developed this concept was on governmental and administrative institutions, where he subtly details managerial practices that govern conduct and solicit behavior. When we turn to examine the politics of popular revolution, we see incitement of a more organic, decentered sort. Intellectual and political movements respond to the emerging situation in their various ways, promoting

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discourse among one another in a form of mutual and reciprocal incitement. The tensions and ambiguities of their proposals and counterproposals, and the unsatisfactory character of what is produced, have the function of feeding further interest, of goading others into discourse. This discursive situation is mediated by institutions quite different from those that Foucault observes. Rather than administrative agencies of care and correction, center stage is occupied by the collective commercial enterprise of the Encyclopedia, the small publishing houses of eighteenth-century print capitalism, the semiprivate public spheres of the political clubs and sociétés de pensée, the informal discourse of the revolutionary festivals, and the formally organized deliberative arenas of the Constituent Assembly.3 They are part of the “deluge of words” that Lynn Hunt notes in revolutionary France, including a surge in periodical publishing, political meetings, and conversation.4 As a result, this situation displays a kind of decentered incitement quite different from the one that Foucault observed, though quite consonant with his interests and sensibilities. It is mediated by insurgent social movements, political associations, and small enterprises rather than institutions of care and correction. In this sense, “incitement to discourse” does not go far enough. We might more accurately talk about an incitement to practice, where discourse is one mode of practice in the political currents of the time. Also incited are the material, visible crowds gathered in the revolutionary festivals and the streets of Paris; the signifying practices around the tricolor cockade, the liberty cap, and other forms of dress; and so on. The ferment of this period is not simply conveyed in spoken and written language, but in a whole array of discursive and material practices that blossom together. The problematic of the people also differs from Foucault’s genealogies in the object that it aims to produce. This is not the plethora of deviant identities and docile bodies that Foucault catalogs. It is identity of a different sort, one to which Foucault was disturbingly blind: collective political identities.5 Here the productive power of discourse and practice is used in an attempt to create a new political macrosubject, one with the ability to exercise sovereignty analogous to that of a king. Although the problematic of the people seeks to respond to deeply felt needs, it does not necessarily succeed in doing so. Rather, we see the opposite. The discourse on the people proliferates during this time but remains equivocal at a fundamental level. This highlights a largely ignored side of the political thought of eighteenth-century France. Rather than developing an overly abstract and universalistic conception of popular sovereignty, this period was haunted by conceptual difficulties that it could never successfully resolve. The lack of resolution, combined with the practical need to resolve such problems, incited continued efforts to find a workable notion of collective political identity. Only later were these difficulties finessed or forgotten, largely by imagining powers of the people that have never been fully coherent.

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Sovereign Imaginaries Besides providing ample insights into the construction of the people, the writings and events I  have examined also reveal much about their “power.” The problematic of the people shows, through a mosaic of shifting ideas about collective identity, that the normative powers associated with the people are constructed in the same way as the people itself. The people is imagined not only as a collectivity but also as a normative construct – as having an inherent value, natural rectitude, or obligatory force. The people are imagined as having power, and that power is seen as inherently good and correct. Just as the people are an “imagined community,” in Benedict Anderson’s wonderful phrase, so is the power of the people an imagined sovereignty. Conceptions of the people vary not only in their articulations of collective identity, but also in their different qualities and concentrations of normativity. Such normativity is historically and contextually specific to particular events and struggles. It is formed in complex processes of collective culture formation that are thoroughly political. It thus varies considerably in character, scope, and intensity. We have seen this play out, for instance, in the differing normative strategies of Coyer, Rousseau, and Jaucourt. Coyer and Jaucourt trade on notions of deprivation and status inequality to normatize the people, albeit in different ways. Yet in the end each locates a remnant of collective identity among the people and legitimizes their political voice. This is a weak form of legitimation, one in which the collective agency of the people stands alongside royal authority without challenging or displacing it. There is a kind of inchoate sovereignty here, an implied right to be represented. It is, in retrospect, a germinal form of the power of the people, though not yet in the full-blown sense of an active authorizing force, constituent power, or collective agency that other thinkers will describe. As the people is brought more directly into opposition with royal authority, conceptions of collective identity and collective agency shift along with their normative connotations. This is likely due to the increased normative weight they must bear: the people is now a more direct competitor to the sovereignty of the king. The problem, as perceived by thinkers like Rousseau, Sieyès, and Robespierre, is to account for a collective identity sufficient to sustain this normative status. They respond by devising various notions of a collective macrosubject with rights to self-determination. If we look from the right angle, it is clear that each of these collectivities is modeled on the agency that was formerly concentrated in the person of the king. Each has forms of agency and self-direction characteristic of individuals, giving each collectivity a similar ability to choose its own direction through life. This solution takes the daring step of claiming that a unitary collective agent not only acts with an individual agency similar to that of the king, but is normatively similar to him as well and should therefore have similar powers of self-determination. In this way,

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collectivity is tasked to substitute for the sovereign characteristics of the monarch. Each one chooses his own conception of collectivity with its own normative significance: Rousseau tasks an outside party, the legislator, with creating a people that can function as a single, unified sovereign will, Sieyès situates an ineffable constituent power in the nation, and Robespierre emphasizes the natural virtue and rectitude of the people. The problematic of the people is, in short, a field connecting collective identity and sovereignty. The two are intimately linked by their joint articulation in discourse and practice. The reason for this is plain:  just like the inverted reading I gave of Hobbes’s artificial man, the problem is to account for a collective subject that can act with the self-direction of an individual person. The people and its powers are problematized together: the “artificial man” needs an “artificial soul.” This is a vision of sovereignty articulated in terms of collective political identity. It is important to note that normative agendas are not added to notions of collectivity; rather, collectivities are constructed already replete with normative force. As we have seen, the collective character of these ideas is often of a piece with the normativity aimed at. Far from settling questions about the character and extent of popular sovereignty, such imagined sovereignties are very much under negotiation themselves. In the most general sense, these imaginaries create political normativity by associating sovereignty with other ideas and practices. Particular collectivities are imagined as having a special normative sanctity. Normativity is created simultaneously with collectivity, fashioning a composite that incorporates individuals into a larger whole and endows that whole with sovereign power. The image of a chimera is useful for thinking about these constructions. The chimera is a “fabulous creature” composed of parts of different animals: a lion, a she-goat, and a serpent, in the classic description.6 It is an image that was very much in vogue during the period I am examining. For reasons interesting to contemplate, there was a surge in the use of this expression immediately after the French Revolution, including in political discussion (see Figure 5.1). It was a frequent metaphor for things poorly stuck together or oddly mismatched, but also for futile illusions and misleading desires. The collective political identities of this time are chimerical in much the same way. They amalgamate diverse elements into some kind of coherently imagined whole. That whole consists of individuals aggregated into larger collectivities like peoples, nations, and publics. These constructions are also associated with normative powers, adding another diverse, and at times ill-fitting, body part to the creature being imagined. Although a chimera’s pieces may seem odd in relation to one another, the whole takes on a coherent shape. Particular peoples, nations, and publics are formed out of a recognizable combination of characteristic parts. We can call these fabulous creatures, these assemblages of unlike elements, sovereign

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0.001000% 0.000900% 0.000800% 0.000700% 0.000600% 0.000500% 0.000400%

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Figure 5.1. Trends in the published frequency of “chimère” (chimera) from 1700 to 1900. Reproduced by permission of Google Labs.

imaginaries. A sovereign imaginary is a particular vision of popular politics. It is an assemblage of diverse elements that connects collectivity and sovereignty to one another in a specific way. The problematic I examined in the last chapter is a good example of this. In one way or another, the contributors to the discourse circle around a roughly similar ideal, the notion of a self-regulating, self-identical people that collectively wields power over itself. This vision, never entirely coherent, at least has a recognizable shape. It is a particular vision of sovereignty with a long history in our political tradition. It is the one that I have called the popular-universalist imaginary. It is a vision of the people as a totality, and one that has normative force because of its universal character. To see how the popular-universalist imaginary functions as a coherent vision despite its internal tensions, consider how it operated in the last chapter. Throughout the period I  examined, basic ideas of political collectivity are very much in dispute. The people is the form of collectivity that receives the greatest attention, and it takes on an array of significations: the populace of a nation-state, a human universal, and the poorest fraction of society. Its normative significance is correspondingly complicated: the normativity of democracy is interlaced with that of collective self-determination, natural rights, and distributive justice. The unsettled character of the popular-universalist imaginary is a sign of tensions within the discourse on the people itself. It produces a complicated, back-and-forth, background-and-foreground relationship between the corresponding normativities. Just as the people can represent parts of a whole, aggregations of individuals, or universal totalities, so the implied normativity oscillates between the political self-determination of a unitary macrosubject, critiques of differentiation and division, nostalgia for lost unity, and sympathy for a particular fraction of the population. Because these ideas are very different from one another, there is much ambiguity about their normative implications as well.

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It is no wonder, then, that issues of popular universality are a frequent, problematic topic in the discursive horizon of eighteenth-century France. We see this is the constitutional debates of 1791. An important debate erupts precisely around the idea that no part of the people can claim the authority that is thought to reside naturally in the whole. Here the people is problematized precisely in an effort to iron out the details of universalism as a trait of political collectivities with normative force. In all of these cases the principal issues are not resolved, but take on a kind of tangible reality for the people discussing them. This ongoing discussion, incited by the tension between its problematic character and the political necessities surrounding it, settles on a set of ideas about the people, the nation, citizens, universality, generality, common interests, and so on, even as it fails to find a satisfying means to fit them together. These ideas become routinized even while they remain problematic. Together they form the elements of a shared conceptual landscape. It becomes part of a loosely knit imaginary that provides a shared point of reference, even though it remains conceptually problematic. This popular-universalist imaginary forms out of, and in part because of, the very fact of problematization itself.

Normatization The epistemic uncertainty created by the problematic of the people reveals something deeper about imagined sovereignties. Differing claims about the ontological, epistemic, and normative status of the people coexist in uneasy tension within the same field of practice. These ideas are often asserted at cross-purposes with one another. As such, their normativity too is partial, incomplete, an object of continual revision and controversy. This particular effort to envision popular sovereignty is plagued by tensions and instabilities, yet it also has a certain coherence and binding force for the people imagining it. In this complicated process we can see some of the characteristic ways that normativity is attached to conceptions of political identity. These can be traced out as processes of normatization. They are the various techniques used to create collective identities with normative significance. If we think in more abstract terms about the popular-universalist imaginary, for instance, normativity is posited through various forms of association and projection. This happens in at least four general ways in the material I  have surveyed:  through projection toward universality, projection in time, projection in space, and by association with other normative concepts. Projection toward universality. Universalism is not just a defining feature of the popular-universalist imaginary; it is one of its principal bases of normatization. Universalism confers a particular normative status. This is likely by virtue of its roots in humanist ideals of universal humanity, especially their expression in norms of equality and inclusion. A people that is all-inclusive and lacks

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hierarchy and privilege is, in the ideals of the time, much better than one having the opposite characteristics. Various conceptions of universalism are threaded throughout this discussion. They are frequently postulated in a differentiated way that creates tensions with the idea of universalism itself. For instance, universalist conceptions of the people are often bounded within a geographic domain: the people of France, or the people of China. Similarly, there is often some question about who should be included in “universal” notions of humanity, citizenship, or popular identity. At various times it is framed as “generality,” as in a general will, or “common” interest, or mapped onto the “entire populace.” The idea of universalism is by no means simple or absolute, but a problematic and contested feature of other ideas. It is often troubled by tensions between boundless inclusion and bounded differentiation. The people of France is a concrete collectivity, but when it is referred to without hierarchy, status, or other internal differentiation, it can be said to be “universal.” Despite these ambiguities, universalism confers a normative status on groups and norms with which it is associated. This is accomplished by connecting a specific aggregation of individuals, already difficult to identify, with the projection of a counterfactual universality. It is what Étienne Balibar has called the “synecdoche of the universal”: taking the part for the whole.7 In this way, a people can be concrete and politically immediate, with the ability to make demands and take to the streets, yet invest itself with the normative sanctity implied by an all-inclusive, potentially universal whole. This would be a people capable of exercising sovereign self-direction and control over its territory because of its concrete, limited, self-identical character, yet it would also have the normative rectitude associated with universalism. (The idea of political universalism clearly merits a genealogy of its own. Balibar has made a number of contributions to such a project.8) Because of its simultaneously concrete and abstract character, its simultaneously limited and unlimited membership, such a universalistic conception of the people is a tension-filled idea that is more projection than reality. It fuses unlike elements together in a chimerical manner. Projection in time. Conceptions of collective identity are also endowed with sovereignty by projecting them into past or future times. Coyer and Jaucourt, for instance, look to the classical past for examples of unified peoples, holding these examples up as a contrast to the social divisions of their time. Many of the French revolutionaries share this orientation. They are well known for their passionate attachments to antiquity, referring back to the political traditions of ancient times as a way of legitimizing present regimes.9 Sieyès invokes temporality in more ambiguous and subtle ways. He seems to locate the nation, his sovereign collectivity of choice, in an indefinite past. It seems always to have existed: “The nation exists prior to everything; it is the origin of everything.”10 On close inspection, however, the temporality of this statement is difficult to pin down. Sieyès clearly relishes its rhetorical force, but

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he may not intend it to be taken literally. Instead he seems to equivocate on two different notions of priority: the nation is temporally prior to any other form of politics, and/or it is normatively prior to any other form of politics. This blurring of the normative and the temporal is reinforced when he locates the nation in a roughly sketched social contract theory.11 It may be a temporal origins story or a conceptual exploration of the nation’s inherent normativity – his intentions are not clear. In any case, the invocation of temporality and sovereignty together shows how the two ideas can reinforce one another. Sieyès’s equivocation between them only heightens the effect. Rousseau’s backward-looking evocations of a free natural state provide a similar example. He refers back to an idealized and abstract past, trading on poetic assertions about it without having to make good on any concrete claims. Thus “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”12 The imagined freedom of this originary state furnishes a normative standard for present peoples, who are to live in a “form of association . . . by means of which each one, while uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before.”13 These phrases evoke a past state that has normative content. By bringing it into relation with the present, Rousseau is able to gain normative purchase on contemporary states and societies. Such forms of temporal projection are not simply devices of normatization in the French eighteenth century. They have been noted as a more general phenomenon in popular politics as well. Rogers Smith details some of the ways that narratives of the past can be used to postulate a people, shore up its collective identity, or add value to that identity. He notes, for instance, how peoples are formed around a shared ethnicity. This common ethnic background is projected into the past, drawing on glorious histories, heroic ancestors, and shared origins as a way to naturalize and valorize it. While such stories may be based in preexisting identities, they also have a constitutive function. They create something new by bringing into existence groups that may not have existed before or by sharpening the boundaries of existing groups.14 Similarly, Smith notes how collective identities can be created by centering them around a heroic tradition of great leadership. Again, the past has a narrative function, providing the basis for stories that celebrate great leaders from previous eras. He argues that political agendas are enacted by creating a dynasty that concludes in the present leadership. Such a lineage need not be literally dynastic. What is important is the naturalization of authority, making it seem necessary or inevitable. The result is a taken-for-granted conception of legitimacy that entrenches existing power structures and those who control them. Collective identity is a tool of such political control and a product of narratives about the past.15 Benedict Anderson finds similar phenomena in his analysis of colonialism. He shows how museums have been used to help constitute a collective past. They memorialize a people’s history within a particular region. Starting in the early nineteenth century, this is especially true of archaeological discoveries,

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which represent a people as connected to a territory over time. Presumably it also holds true for the representation of national or ethnic artistic traditions, which museums represent as continuities of identity. In both cases museums endow a people with duration in a particular place and help to naturalize its existence.16 Jason Frank focuses on the future rather than the past in tracing the temporality of popular politics. He notes the way conceptions of the people that are seen as incomplete and unsatisfactory can be projected forward in a counterfactual way to some future endpoint. Frank focuses on what he calls constituent moments of action that instantiate the people and change the framework within which political claims are evaluated.17 He is particularly insightful in capturing the prospective and always-incomplete character of such claims: they are made on behalf of a people that does not exist, by individuals not authorized to make such claims.18 Focusing on postrevolutionary America, he shows how these unauthorized claims are “navigated,” establishing sovereign peoples without having a proper warrant for such an act. Here Frank elucidates an essential feature of claims to popular sovereignty: their tendency to overshoot the normative and temporal limits of the situation in which they are articulated, drawing a larger legitimation through some deferred (and in principle unfulfillable) promise to completeness and full authorization. He characterizes this as “the paradoxical political reality that the people are forever a people that is not . . . yet.”19 The people draw their power, in his view, “from their own unrealized futurity.”20 Jacques Derrida also notes the way future temporalities are used in popular politics. He unpacks temporal aspects of peoplehood in a compact and brilliant way. In his short piece “Declarations of Independence,” Derrida notes that there can be, strictly speaking, no people to authorize such a declaration.21 Rather, they are called into existence by the act of declaration itself, which is signed by someone who counterfactually claims to sign on the people’s behalf. This counterfactual, illegitimate act is then legitimated in retrospect by the existence of the people that has now been summoned into existence. Derrida parses this grammatically, as well as conceptually, as the future perfect: “I will have given myself a name and an ‘ability’ or a ‘power’, understood in the sense of power- or ability-to-sign by delegation of signature.”22 The temporality that Derrida traces is employed in a kind of deferral: the party declaring independence evokes a collective identity (now) that can only exist by being named (as though present and past), hence it will exist (future) after it has been counterfactually evoked. Past, future, and present are all traded on in various way to create a people and endow it with sovereignty. Derrida takes this to be one aspect of democracy’s lack of presence. It is never fully realized and always rests on promissory notes about the future: it is always, as he says, a “democracy to come.”23 All of these insights show how time can be used to produce normativity in popular politics. In each case, tensions between collectivity and sovereignty are

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finessed by invoking a (counterfactually) unproblematic past or future. The association confers normative status on present collectivities, though this effort at norm-by-association is never clearly articulated and remains problematic. Projection in space. Normatization can also occur by projecting collective identities onto particular territories and geographies. This happens only in a weak way in the examples I have examined. For instance, Coyer and Jaucourt invoke the political customs of other peoples, defined as nation-states: the peoples of China, Sweden, and so on. Taking the same tack in a different direction, Sieyès proposes départements as a way of homogenizing the territory and rendering it free of privilege. Because this geographical innovation makes possible the creation of peoples of equal status, it functions as a condition of possibility for popular power. The spatial irreality of the Treatise on the Means of Communicating Directly with the People presents a different kind of case. The people do not appear in the illustrations of this treatise precisely because they are dispersed in space. Their sovereignty seems to be assumed, but it is also problematized by the abstract and virtualized character of the collectivity. Here we have the flip side of other invocations of space:  the normativity of the people is undermined rather than secured by their spatiality. The Treatise’s author seeks to draw them together even when they are not locatable in space. A connection between normativity and spatiality is thus affirmed, but as a negative: be careful with the spatiality of the people, lest you undercut their sovereignty as well. By far the most common way of associating space and sovereignty is to use physical boundaries to naturalize notions of collective identity and popular power. The most historically influential version of this is what I  have called Westphalianism. Here we find the layering of collective identity, territory, and popular power. The geographical boundaries of territory define a particular populace, which are thereby given a particular identity. Once the identity is stabilized in this way, it can be further endowed with some form of popular power. Westphalianism is not only a tendency in our thinking about popular politics, but a strategy of normatization as well. It works by endowing collectivities with normative status and/or naturalizing them to make their normative connotations seem natural as well. Such geographical reference implicitly operates in the background of much of the history I have surveyed. Although it is not clearly stated, the geographical boundaries of the eighteenth-century French state help to define a populace that is variously known as “the French nation” or “the French people.” This in turn becomes the basis for arguing that these collectivities have, or should have, some kind of political power. This implicit reference is vital to Sieyès’s attempts to privilege the nation. It also structures the long, complicated constitutional discussions about popular sovereignty in the 1790s. In these discussions the bounded nation-state provides an implicit reference that counteracts the conceptual difficulties and instabilities otherwise encountered. As we have seen, it is not entirely successful in stabilizing the association between collective

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identity and popular power. Without some spatial reference point to define the people or the nation, however, this discussion would not even have been possible. Association with other normative concepts. Finally, normativity can be created through association with other concepts. The ideas of deprivation and misrecognition invoked by Coyer and Jaucourt are particularly good examples of this. Notions of distributive justice, human need, and status misrecognition operate in the background of these accounts. They are invoked rhetorically rather than explicitly articulated. I  take Coyer’s ironic question about the “bestial” character of the people in this vein, as well as his remark that the people are the most useful, respectable, and virtuous part of the nation. Similarly, the implicit romanticism of Robespierre’s statements about the people resonate with other values. Thus his assertion that the people has morals and courage, but not finesse or eloquence; it has the power to strike down tyrants but is fooled by rogues. Here the people is a kind of morally steadfast simpleton giant. It has a natural innocence and rectitude but needs guidance. Robespierre’s morally charged language does much to normatize the people; much more than could be done, likely, with a more explicit argument. In all of these cases we see how collective identity is given normative value by connecting it with other things. The associations and projections that I have described are the glue that holds sovereign imaginaries together. They compound various forms of collectivity, time, space, universality, and other associations in a greater normative whole. As it is created, the larger whole takes on a coherent shape in our collective imagination. It acquires an intersubjective reality with a vividness and motivating force that is compelling for us in spite of its chimerical character. To quote Jacques Derrida out of context, “We are dealing here with schematic and imaginative and fantastic and fabulous and chimerical and synthetic figures that mediate between two orders. . . . ”24 In this case the two orders are the people and their powers. Peoples are composed of disparate and innumerable elements. Their powers are ineffable. Yet, through processes like the ones I have examined, a greater whole is formed that takes on real significance for the thoughts and practices of those imagining it.

The Psychic Economy of Popular Power A close examination of ideas like the power of the people reminds us that these constructions are odd and extravagant creatures. Understanding the processes that contribute to their formation does not relieve the unsettling effect, but only brings it to consciousness in a rather vivid way. That is not how these ideas are perceived by the vast majority of people, however. Such ideas tend to have a taken-for-granted, even foundational character in our thinking about politics. The question is how they have lost their disruptive potential and became naturalized. One would expect the problematized character of popular politics to prevent the formation of stable norms or

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practices, yet we actually observe the opposite. Sovereign imaginaries have settled into place in spite of, and perhaps because of, their problematic character. How this might have happened is an interesting question that would require further extending the genealogy I  have sketched. Where it currently ends in the late eighteenth century, we do not yet see the consolidation of the power of the people, though arguably the 1795 constitution is a step in this direction by attempting to change the terms of discourse from peoplehood to citizenship. To complete the story, we would need to extend this examination into the nineteenth century. This would be a story of de-problematization, structured forgetting, diversion, and digression. It would catalog the moments when the power of the people is used in argument without comment, when it is taken for granted as asserting a natural rectitude that seems uncontroversial. This investigation would likely discover conditions of possibility for such forgetting in the formation of institutional orders that are stable enough to be considered legitimate, even when the ideas legitimating them do not entirely make sense. We might suppose that “the power of the people” can justify such orders as long as other conditions (like material prosperity) operate in the background to serve as supplemental grounds of legitimation.25 There is undoubtedly a vivid and interesting story to tell about this process. I will not attempt it here, but I can mark out some of the terrain that would need to be traversed. By 1846, Marx and Engels were able to offer this dismissive gesture toward problems of sovereignty: Already here we see how this civil society is the true source and theatre of all history, and how absurd is the conception of history held hitherto, which neglects the real relationships and confines itself to high-sounding dramas of princes and states.26

They had decided that the real action lay in the “social problem” and the analysis of civil society that it required. Correspondingly, the older investigation of “princes and states” and its whole conceptual apparatus of sovereignty and legitimacy were no longer interesting. That is not to say that the problematic of the people had been forgotten or resolved. However, it seems at least to have permuted into something new, such that the old problematic could safely be waved aside without argument. Dismissing these ideas with a rhetorical gesture says volumes about their de-problematizated status. Whether this attitude is representative of the time is a question that awaits more detailed work. With an eye toward that future project, we can lay out some guiding ideas that one might follow. This consolidation of political imaginaries could be characterized as a matter of habituation and forgetting. Habituation, we can speculate, could be a direct product of the proliferation of discourse about the people. Clashing political demands, problematization, and discursive conflict leave lasting residues of political meaning. They render certain claims, ideas, and idioms familiar. Similarly, the association of identities and sources of normativity creates familiar associations and gives them a durable presence in thought and practice. With the passage of time, these

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repeated associations and problematized conjunctions acquire a kind of cultural durability, becoming habits of thought that translate into habits of speech and action. They consolidate into forms that begin to seem familiar. We thereby become used to the tensions and instabilities of democratic normativity. At the limit, such ideas form stable, taken-for-granted patterns of thought and belief. Like the chimera, they begin to take on a coherence of their own. Benedict Anderson has vividly illustrated similar phenomena. He shows that ritualized, repeated, mundane aspects of life add up to a collective imagination of collective identity. As I have argued, this also holds for the collective imagination of normative identity. We see similar processes at work in Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus formation, which describes how individuals acquire durable dispositions of taste, thought, and behavior.27 The phenomena I  have been discussing cannot be theorized directly in this way, but we can see them as something of an analogy to those that Bourdieu describes. They are not a matter of individual habitual behaviors being molded and coordinated, but of the formation of collective imaginaries. We need new conceptual resources to characterize such phenomena. Adapting some of Bourdieu’s language, we might think of them as durable dispositions of collective imagination and practice – tendencies reproduced through time because they have a kind of collective facticity or embodiment. Here we might not be talking primarily, or even at all, about individual bodies, but rather the material manifestations of social life in a broader sense. In this way, we could transpose Bourdieu’s ideas to theorize tendencies of thought, belief, and behavior shared by societies and groups. The simultaneously discursive and material character of our sovereign imaginaries facilitates this habituation. Imaginaries are created and reproduced in practices, speech acts, claims, and other mundane aspects of daily life. Language is part of a much broader picture that includes institutions, laws, customary practices, revolutionary action, and even the embodiment and technical mediation of discourse itself. This discursive-material doublet lends a facticity and durability to our shared imaginaries. Coyer’s Dissertation on the Nature of the People, for example, is not just words; its publication and circulation as a print document count as an important intervention in political practices of sovereignty and collectivity. Even more so, the constitutional debates of 1791 have a tangible as well as discursive character. Those discussions produce a written text and are recorded in a written record, and they articulate legal regulations that shape thought and action. These legal visions are put into place both by the concrete politics that enact them and the organizational schemas they produce. Similarly, the tricolor cockade was a thoroughly material intervention in the public spheres of the day, and it helped to propagate and normalize republican sympathies during the French Revolution. In all of these ways, the materiality of politics contributes to its routinization. It becomes an observable, tangible part of our physical environment and is thus normalized in subliminal ways.

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Such materialized interventions could only become part of our reservoir of taken-for-granted ideas if they ceased to be problematic. To make folk foundationalism psychically possible, such tensions must be effaced in some way. Problematization first sedimented into habituation; now that problematization must be forgotten. The power of the people could not be assumed as a stable basis for politics while it was problematic. One can imagine how this might happen. Issues that incited discourse became less urgent, talk about the people became routine in ways that papered over its problematic character, and ideas of popular sovereignty settled into the background as taken-for-granted descriptions of political reality. The psychic unease that originally incited people to discourse slowly dissipated and the power of the people was naturalized. The highly fraught process of its construction was forgotten and became part of our conceptual landscape as though its problems had been solved. This was undoubtedly a gradual process that was not steered by any particular intention. Rather, there are tangible advantages to such forgetting that would be undercut by conscious awareness of what was happening. It would not be possible to embrace popular politics as normatively correct while living with a full realization of its problematic character. “Forgetting” in this sense is a form of psychic accommodation that paves over tensions and renders the resulting beliefs naturalized and (relatively) unproblematic, allowing politics to go forward.28

High-Sounding Dramas of Other Sorts Problematization, habituation, and forgetting form a picture of how sovereign imaginaries might take shape. Together they draw connections between the eighteenth century and our own time, seeking to explain the transition from a proliferation of discourse to a pervasive and comfortable silence. By tracing complex efforts to assemble ideas of the people, I have tried to delineate some of the problematics that persist in our own thinking about popular politics. They reveal the implicit instability of key concepts in our political tradition while also explaining the lack of controversy surrounding them. I have pointed to the constitutive role of problematization, the way it promotes certain practices and incites discourse. This problematization results in a creative ferment, one that assembles novel forms in the political imagination. The resulting sovereign imaginaries take on real life for us. They populate our world with fabulous beasts composed of disparate parts. Among them are many of the key concepts of our contemporary political tradition. Eighteenth-century France provides an important window into this process of existential self-imagination. It is a historically significant example, since it has provided an implicit template for much of our subsequent thinking about popular sovereignty, insurgency, and political collectivity. The residues of that thinking inhabit this chapter to some extent. Although this story highlights the indeterminacy of a set of problematic events, it could still seem captive to the

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mythology of the French Revolution as a privileged moment in world history. To the extent that it accepts this originary myth at face value, the account could be charged with narrowing our thinking about the power of the people and overemphasizing idiomatically French conceptions of collective unity, universalism, and the Westphalian state. Indeed, eighteenth-century France mixes Enlightenment, statism, and revolution in very particular ways. The paradigmatic rationality of the period is combined with the paradigmatic boundedness and centralization of the French state. When these three things came together in the mid- to late-1700s, they gave rise to a political tradition that was genuinely revolutionary, but also specific to the cultural history of the Enlightenment and the unitary character of French statism. In these circumstances, it should be no surprise that the political imaginaries of the time would be highly sympathetic to unified notions of collective identity, be they formed around the people or some other unitary actor. The legacy of republicanism in French political culture only adds to this orientation. To see how this might limit our thinking, we must expand the scope of the investigation. The problematic of the people permeates not only the internal debates about the future of the French state, but much beyond. That discussion is inextricably intertwined with other issues and problematics that bear directly on the people and their power: colonialism, slavery, and anticolonial revolution. The diaspora of French revolutionary ideas ultimately led to an anticolonial revolution against the French on their own terms. This Caribbean twin of the French Revolution further problematizes the story we have already examined, showing us what happens when sovereignties are imagined in a very different context.

6 Sovereign Imaginaries of the Revolutionary Caribbean

There are different and sometimes antagonistic forms of sovereignty, and it is always in the name of one that one attacks another. –Jacques Derrida1

The French Revolution occupies a unique place in our political imagination, but it is not representative in many ways. These iconic events occurred within a developed European nation-state with established borders, well-developed ideas of citizenship, and long-standing cultural, political, and intellectual traditions. In this context, thinking about sovereignty implicitly assumes a bounded territory governed by a centralized state. To the extent that this image is taken as paradigmatic for our thinking about popular politics, it narrows our thinking in important ways. It constrains us to the frame of a national people, a national imaginary, and legally institutionalized systems of political representation that are legitimated by popular consent. To see how the power of the people has been articulated outside of this European, Enlightenment context, I will turn to the other great revolution of the eighteenth century. Here I am not referring to the American bourgeois separation from British rule, but to the anticolonial revolution in the French crown jewel colony Saint-Domingue. Conducted in terms both familiar and strange to French political thought, this revolution drew on political opportunities created by the French Revolution to produce the modern nation of Haiti. Starting immediately after the French Revolution and targeted against French colonialism, the Haitian Revolution raises striking new issues about popular politics. Here sovereignty and discourse are deployed on a transatlantic scale. Saint-Domingue was a commercial and cultural hub of the colonial Caribbean. This bustling geographic region was crisscrossed by merchant shipping traffic, black market commerce, superpower tussles over colonial possession, and one of the most dynamic economies of the eighteenth century. It was a site of great 110

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political, racial, and social complexity, not least because its economy was built on slavery. The mixture of slave populations from different regions of Africa with expatriates from many European countries produced a wild blending of cultures and languages. The revolutionary Caribbean thus provides an important counterexample to the iconic political events of eighteenth-century France, with its well-established traditions of European political and legal thought and its centralized, Westphalian nation-state. By shifting our view to the revolutionary Caribbean, we can better see the complex dynamics at work in the creation of sovereign imaginaries. They reveal important aspects of the processes through which we come to believe that collective identities possess forms of political power. When we ask why one thinks that sovereign power lies in the people, we can point to a long history of normatization to explain the origins of such a belief. Tracing the specific practices through which this occurs helps to show that sovereign imaginaries are often multiple, overlapping, and in tension with one another. In previous chapters I  have emphasized the importance of problematization in creating our shared understanding of politics. Here we will see that contestation and struggle problematize sovereignty in other ways. Popular politics is to some extent a politics of the imagination, constituting a field within which different notions of the entitlement to act and speak are fought out. Above all, we see here the complex dynamics of contending sovereign imaginaries. Something like “the power of the people” operates in several different and incompatible ways during the Haitian Revolution, revealing important struggles over the meaning of popular politics. These imaginaries function in various ways both as claims and practices. They are acts of public imagination exercised within complex networks of communication and across complicated geographies. Together they provide a rich view of the way ideas of popular power are synthesized and negotiated. To draw out these insights, I will expand on the idea of a sovereign imaginary developed in previous chapters. I  will further develop this notion by showing how ideas like “the power of the people” build their force through complex processes of normatization. The events I  will examine are chosen for what they reveal about the fine texture of this process. They show how we attribute meaning to various practices, articulating normative conceptions of politics through words, actions, associations, and projections. These processes describe the ways in which visions of popular power are created and reproduced. Here I return to themes I have developed earlier in the book: that sovereign imaginaries are not unitary, that they combine discourse and practice in complicated ways, and that they are not necessarily Westphalian. As we have seen, the particular forms of normatization associated with popular politics posit normative powers along with collective identity. “A people,” for example, is imagined as a collectivity at the same time as it is imagined as having normative

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power. The process holds not only for peoples, but nations, publics, and other collectivities as well. It can be accomplished by linking normativity to a spatial jurisdiction: the people of France. It can be created by connection to past or future time: the ancient rights of Englishmen, or the promise of democracy to come. It can also be connected to a wide variety of normative ideals – notions of rights, justice, or equality – creating normativity by association. In this chapter I will highlight a further dimension of normatization. We will see that it occurs through many kinds of discursive and material practice, and particularly practices that share both of these characteristics. That will include not only materialized forms of publicity, print capitalism, and symbolic display, but also practices with significant performative dimensions. Normatization, I  will argue, intimately combines publicity and performativity. This reminds us that imagining sovereignty is not a purely mental act, but one structured into the material milieu of politics and the practices that constitute it. Just as politics is a simultaneously discursive and material practice, so are processes of normatization.

Complex Caribbean The material and ideological roots of the Haitian Revolution lie in a dense tangle of Euro-Caribbean conflicts at the end of the eighteenth century. The anticolonial revolution in Saint-Domingue was complexly interrelated with the metropolitan one in France. Saint-Domingue was, by the end of the eighteenth century, the most prosperous colonial possession in the Caribbean. Its wealth helped give the French bourgeoisie the confidence and means to challenge royal authority.2 Symmetrically, the ideological underpinnings of the French Revolution provided intellectual points of navigation for Haitian revolutionaries. Three separate revolutionary struggles were intertwined in colonial Saint-Domingue during this period. First to blossom was a movement among white plantation owners to separate from the colonial metropole. Second, and developing along with the white move for independence, was a movement among free, mixed-race Afro-European gens de couleur (people of color) to fight for political equality. Third was the slave revolt that eclipsed these other struggles and eventually resulted in the creation of Haiti.3 Many familiar issues arise in this context: struggles over political and personal autonomy, collective agency, the constitution of a new political order, and the specification of a form of sovereignty appropriate to this context. Like the problematics of eighteenth-century France examined in Chapter  4, this set of intersecting political struggles reveals an open field of problematization that pushes issues of sovereignty and political normativity to the forefront of political discourse. As these three divergent revolutionary movements struggle for normative status, they frame different visions of legitimate politics. In this conflict, the dynamics forming constituent power, popular sovereignty, and the power of the people are exposed to view.

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These events are not simply a story of a colonial island separating from metropolitan France. They occur within the highly fraught imperial politics of France, England, and Spain. There was a great deal of competition, occasional privateering, and armed conflict between the powers. Each maintained policies designed to monopolize trade with their own colonies. Such legally enforced relations of commerce between colony and metropole helped to preserve national identification over long distances. As a result, each colony maintained particular cultural ties with its metropolitan master. Metropolitan efforts to monopolize colonial trade in the Caribbean became increasingly futile as the eighteenth century wore on, however. They were undermined by the unique characteristics of the region: a large constellation of islands with many busy ports, teaming with small ship traffic. Because of the easy travel between islands, it was often much more efficient to satisfy needs locally than transatlantically. Black marketeering and smuggling were common. Slaves were (often illegally) traded among colonies of different nations as well, bringing their cultures and practices along with them. Starting in 1724 a trade liberalization movement began spreading across the area, opening ports to further mixing of cultures and peoples. Sailors, merchants, free blacks and gens de couleur, and escaped slaves could move increasingly freely between colonies as well as to North and South American ports. As a result, news and ideas circulated more readily as well. French colonies like Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe, and Martinique came to have as much in common with British Jamaica, Spanish Cuba, or American Charleston as they did with France. Through these associations, expatriate European cultures, creole identities, and the African cultures of forcibly imported slaves were in constant contact with one another.4 As we have seen in Chapter 4, French thinkers turned to notions of collective identity to resolve problems of sovereignty. They could finesse an appeal to “the people” in a near-universal sense by obscuring or ignoring the many problems with the idea. This appeal never really worked, but it had rhetorical force and provided a conceptual template for what a successful solution would look like. The situation in Saint-Domingue was profoundly different. Complex geopolitics and social relations produced a bewildering array of social distinctions that foiled easy universalism. Unlike the French case, there could be no appeal to notions of the people or the nation to settle issues of sovereignty. There was no universal collectivity in the colony nor any hope of rhetorically invoking one. In Saint-Domingue, social inequality and geographic complexity made even a rhetorical reference to “the people” impossible. To say that the island’s population was fractured along intersecting lines of race and class significantly understates the problem. The economy and culture of slavery, undergirded by racial legislation of the French state, generated a highly differentiated notion of racial identity. This included not only black and white but also various qualities of “mixed blood,” classified as mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons, and so on. The people to whom the latter terms were

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ascribed tended to prefer the label gens de couleur (people of color), though this term itself sometimes had ambiguous and changing reference, usually referring to people of mixed European and African descent, but sometimes including anyone with African ancestors.5 Lines of property and wealth intersected these distinctions in complicated ways. Plantation owners were wealthy and often aristocratic, and had a substantially different class identity compared to the white working- and trades classes (so-called petits blancs). Ownership of the means of production thus constituted a further form of differentiation, but in an extra-complicated way. The class distinction was not simply between those who owned productive capital and those who did not, with a middling layer of craft and tradespeople who worked independently and hired a few helpers. More importantly, it included those who were owned as productive capital, the slaves. The economic bases of class thus determined freedom in particularly acute ways. Not all blacks and gens de couleur were slaves, however. The appellation “free gens de couleur” included the non-slave portions of the various nonwhite identity groups, both blacks and mixed-blood. Similarly, not all members of the planter class were white. Some gens de couleur and free blacks also owned plantations and slaves. Class and race were highly complex phenomena here, even more so because of their intertwinement with one another. A final, intersecting line of complexity came from birth identity. Some residents of colonial Saint-Domingue were born in Africa (from a wide spectrum of ethnicities and geographic regions), some were born in France, and some were creole, born in the colonies. Even these forms of identification were further complicated by movement between islands. For instance Boukman, the putative leader of the 1791 slave rebellion that set Saint-Domingue on a path to independence, was an escaped slave from Jamaica. Migrants like him were often multilingual, speaking various mixtures of French, English, Spanish, and African languages. As a result of these crosscutting lines of distinction, allegiances and identifications in colonial Saint-Domingue were extremely complicated. There were planters of various races, petits blancs, free gens de couleur, and slaves. Duplexed on top of these identities were distinctions of class and ownership (wealthy free gens de couleur owning their own slaves; tensions between poor and affluent whites). Lines of status and affinity determined by birthplace and ethnicity created a further level of complication:  creole slaves, for instance, finding their African counterparts quite foreign in many ways. The revolution in Saint-Domingue thus acquired a considerably different complexion from the French Revolution, even though the two shared much in culture, ideology, and causal connection. It is not surprising that the revolutionary movements framed very different visions of political normativity and popular agency. Each asserted its own vision of self-organization and independence. Each imagined political order with both collective and sovereign dimensions. That is to say,

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each developed some notion of political collectivity that was also posited as having a privileged normative status. The differences between colonial Saint-Domingue and metropolitan France are telling. Because the complexity of the situation in Saint-Domingue foils any straightforward appeal to “the people,” notions of collectivity follow other channels, both narrower and broader. Race incites people to discourse in this context. New sovereign imaginaries emerge from the psychic and political complexities of racial hierarchy. This problematic follows lines of publicity across national boundaries, racial lines, and between metropole and colony. It results in visions of sovereignty that have a very different temporality and spatiality. They provide additional and contrasting insights about normatization and the imaginaries that result from it. In what follows, I will describe three sovereign imaginaries that can be seen in colonial Saint-Domingue around the start of the revolution, roughly the late 1780s and early 1790s. They are three normative visions of popular politics. Each follows a different strategy for constructing political collectivity and endowing it with sovereign force. Together they reveal some of the mechanisms for forming normative bases of popular politics, while showing us a great deal about how sovereignty might look when “the people” is not available as a stabilizing concept and the notion of a Westphalian territory is up for grabs.

The Planter-Separatist Imaginary One prominent sovereign imaginary arises out of a colonial separatist movement in the late 1780s. This movement began as a struggle to have (white, propertied) colonial interests better represented in the French Estates General, and subsequently in the National Assembly. It was a move, in other words, for colonial Saint-Domingue to become more fully assimilated within the legislative apparatus of the French state.6 Because these calls for representation were typically driven by complaints of “ministerial despotism,” they were associated with proposals for better administration of the colonies.7 This movement was supported by approximately one-third of the white population of Saint-Domingue, chiefly the colony’s most powerful planters.8 It is what Carolyn Fick has called the “revolts of the propertied classes.”9 As the movement for colonial representation pressed forward, it quickly became clear that assimilation into the French representative system would come at a price. Movements for abolition and racial equality were gaining favor in Paris. Thus fear of “social reform,” of laws that would undermine slavery and social hierarchy, ultimately turned wealthy planters away from representation as a strategy for safeguarding their interests.10 The question of how many representatives the colonies should have in the National Assembly, for instance, raised awkward questions about the universality of the franchise. Colonists had proposed counting slaves and free blacks and gens de couleur

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for purposes of determining the number of representatives, but excluded them from the assemblies electing those representatives. Excluding people from the franchise flew in the face of republican ideals, however, and drew sharp invective from some deputies in the National Assembly.11 As a result, an autonomous slave state ruled by white planters came to seem an appealing alternative. A  number of colonists from Saint-Domingue had participated in French battalions during the American revolutionary war, and the model of American independence seemed to apply to their own situation in appealing ways.12 Threats of secession thus became a key tool to force concessions from the National Assembly.13 These threats leveraged a reform movement oriented toward greater autonomy for a Saint-Domingue led by white planters. It was oriented toward increasing colonial autonomy, preserving slavery, maintaining the social privileges of the planter class, and eliminating metropolitan governance and restrictions on trade.14 This conception can appropriately be called the planter-separatist imaginary. The planter-separatist imaginary reached its fullest expression in a brief independence movement in the spring and summer of 1790. During a moment of creole rebellion, one of the island’s local assemblies declared itself the General Assembly of Saint-Domingue.15 In so doing, it authorized itself as the sole legislative and judicial authority of the French part of the island. This assertion of authority came with all of the discursive ferment and inward-looking deliberation we are used to from the American and French Revolutions: talk about the nature of the authority they were granting themselves, the obligations and rights they might have vis-à-vis France, and so on. The move was first approved by the royal governor of Saint-Domingue, but the Assembly was ultimately disbanded and its members sent into exile under orders from the metropole. Normativity was added to the planter-separatist imaginary in a number of ways. In a carefully worded decree of May 1790, the General Assembly uses the idea of an “interior regime” to rethink Saint-Domingue’s relationship with the French metropole.16 In their usage, an interior regime is a domain of local autonomy insulated from outside control. Such a regime gives the General Assembly sole legislative authority over Saint-Domingue, subject to royal approval but not participation by the French National Assembly. It also puts commercial relations with France on a different footing. Instead of the paternalistic and exploitative monopoly on colonial trade previously enjoyed by the French state, trade will now take the form of a contract between equals. The planter-separatist imaginary uses projections of both space and time to create a normative basis for itself. Consider, for instance, the somewhat hyperbolic opening statements of two planter petitions to the French Estates General: “Saint-Domingue, never conquered, never acquired, formerly independent, and voluntarily French”; “Saint-Domingue, sovereign, has freely sworn itself to the treaties and decrees of a great king; this precious isle, which has always improperly been called a colony when it is actually a second kingdom.”17 Here we see the idea of a free Saint-Domingue extended indefinitely in time

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and having no record of acquisition that would confer rights of rule on anyone else. Saint-Domingue is French only by free, autonomous contract:  as a form of agreement among equals. As a “second kingdom,” it can place itself under the rule of the great king by will, but presumably withdraw itself by the same means. As a “precious isle” it forms a geographically separate entity, a form of Westphalianism, further naturalizing the claim to being an independent kingdom. The Westphalianism of the planter-separatist imaginary is an odd, partial one. In its pure form, the Westphalian model maps bounded population, territory, sovereign control, and legal jurisdiction onto one another. Demarcated borders separate inner territory from the international state of nature outside; legal jurisdiction is mapped onto this territory; and population is contained within it. The population can thereby be “mapped onto itself” as a freely self-regulating people. Subjects of the law also become its authors. The planter-separatist imaginary moves only ambiguously in this direction. On one hand, the imaginary seems to rely on ideas of self-determination like those attributed to sovereign nation-states. It is oriented toward throwing off “ministerial despotism” and adopting forms of internal sovereignty. The idea of an “interior regime” flirts with something like a Westphalian ideal of legislative jurisdiction over a bounded territory. Similarly, the claim of the colonists that Saint-Domingue is not a colony but a “second kingdom” heads in that direction. On the other hand, a full push for national independence was not publically raised, the island was to remain part of the French imperial system, and the king was to retain the right of veto over colonial legislation. Normatization is also attempted through association with other ideals. The rights of man are used in this sense to justify colonial autonomy. The decree of May 1790 asserts that “the [French] National Assembly cannot make laws concerning the interior regime of Saint-Domingue without reversing the principles that it consecrated in its first decrees, especially that of its declaration of the rights of man.”18 This appeal does not specify exactly what parts or principles of the declaration would support colonial autonomy. Presumably the reference is to basic notions of freedom and self-determination, but we do not have enough information beyond that to understand what connection is being envisioned. In any case, this appeal to the rights of man is not without problems. That principle was also being put forward by gens de couleur and blacks to further their own causes. To preempt this move, Antoine Barnave, a Parisian ally of the colonial elites, advocated exempting Saint-Domingue from the Declaration of the Rights of Man. He cited the “false extension that has been given” to some of its principles.19 The planters’ attempt to invoke this principle while limiting its application across lines of race was a difficult balancing act. Their imaginary draws simultaneously on populist ideals and forms of exclusion from them. It walks a careful line through racial and class politics by making unstable conceptual compromises.

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The sanctity of the interior regime is partly justified on Montesquieuian grounds: laws should be appropriate to a territory’s unique climate, population, manners, and habits. Slavery, alleged to be necessary for tropical plantation farming, should be seen as a locally appropriate custom that is respected by local laws. Given its dedication to white privilege, the planter-separatist imaginary seems to have little association with popular power. Wealthy plutocrats would not have considered themselves members of the people. Yet they relied on elements of popular thought in justifying their insurgency against the French state. This strategy of justification uses ideas of political collectivity in unusual ways. It is a national imaginary to the extent that it rests on claims about the special character of the island and the unique culture of its people. This “people” is one that has unique local customs – specifically slavery. It is a rather paradoxical conception: all of the people seem to participate in the unique local culture with its colorful institutions, but only some of them would be fully enfranchised citizens of the new political order. Popular culture has a much broader extension than popular sovereignty in this vision. This is no surprise, given the tensions that result when ideals of autonomy are used to justify a stratified, exclusionist, slave-owning creole society. The role of political action in the planter-separatist imaginary should not be ignored. This was an integral part of arguing for its normative rectitude. This imaginary postulated increasing autonomy for the colony, and at one point performatively enacted it by declaring the legislative sovereignty of the General Assembly. This act of self-articulation, which flew in the face of metropolitan sovereignty, put the General Assembly of Saint-Domingue squarely on the path that Jason Frank refers to as navigating dilemmas of self-authorization.20 The Assembly’s preliminary, unauthorized declaration of its own legislative sovereignty created a legitimation deficit that could only be navigated with difficulty. It tackled this problem on several fronts at the same time: by performatively enacting its own authority through a busy burst of legislation, and by generating the kinds of normative justification I have just examined. As such, the forms of normatization engaged in here were also forms of articulation. That is, the effort to justify this political vision was undertaken politically. The planter-separatist imaginary played on (and constituted) lines of publicity between colony and metropole. These included restricted domains of publicity like its political arm in France, the Club Massiac. It also included officially sanctioned domains of publicity like the French National Assembly and the Saint-Domingue General Assembly. These were domains in which the ability to speak is restricted and regulated, but whose discussion is fully publicized and open. The colonial press on Saint-Domingue was another venue of publicity. It ran the gamut from cautious commentary on events to outright advocacy of independence.21 There was an easy and thorough interpenetration of many of these spheres. The Club Massiac wielded power in the French National Assembly by virtue of the members shared by both groups.

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The colonial General Assembly printed broadsheets to publicize its opinions and had loyal representatives in the local press. Thus the planters articulated a kind of political power through publicity, and it was often aimed at generating deeper normative justifications for their cause.

The Egalitarian-Inclusive Imaginary The white planter independence movement created its own backlash. It was clear that colonial autonomy would give white planters even greater abilities to enforce the inequalities that made possible their economic privilege and social status. This was a particular concern for long-established creole de couleur families. Some of them owned land and slaves that put them on an economic par with white planters. In spite of their wealth, however, racism was always a problem. It became even more of a problem as the planter-separatist movement intensified: new laws were passed restricting the status and privileges of free gens de couleur. They were more explicitly classified by race and were more frequently required to carry documents certifying their free status. By 1782, it became illegal for gens de couleur to use respectable titles like “Sieur.”22 They became subject to sumptuary laws, were forbidden to ride in carriages, and were required to serve in the military and the local paramilitary maréchausée.23 In 1789 a man of color named Lacombe was executed for submitting a petition to the Provincial Assembly of the North for political rights of free gens de couleur.24 The result was the development of a vision contrary to that of the planters, an egalitarian-inclusive imaginary. The most prominent and thoughtful exponent of this position was Julien Raimond. Raimond was one of the most affluent of the gens de couleur in Saint-Domingue. His wealth exceeded that of many whites on the island, and he owned some 100 slaves.25 At least two of his siblings were educated in France, and he spent an extensive period there lobbying for the equality of free gens de couleur.26 Raimond was an exceptional individual by any standard, though one whose life story was typical in certain ways of a class of creole colored planters who were affluent, educated, and well connected to French metropolitan society. Partly through Raimond’s efforts, the gens de couleur of Saint-Domingue had important allies in France. The issue of abolition had a history of several decades at this point. Beginning in the late 1780s, however, the metropolitan abolitionist community shifted its focus increasingly toward the status of free gens de couleur, rather than the abolition of slavery. This cause became the primary concern of the most prominent French abolition group, the Société des Amis des Noirs (Society of the Friends of Blacks). The Société was founded in 1788 by Jacques-Pierre Brissot, a Girondin leader in the Legislative Assembly. It turned the cause of abolition in a decisively political direction, linking it with concerns about national unity, the integrity of the nation, general rather than particular interests, and the divisive consequences of privilege in all of its

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forms.27 Before the Amis des Noirs came on the scene, abolition “appeared to be one of the many harmless philanthropic fashions of the late Enlightenment.”28 Because many members of the Amis des Noirs were also members of the French National Assembly, they brought concrete legislative force to the otherwise abstract character of the abolitionist cause. The egalitarian-inclusive imaginary relied heavily on association with other ideas as a strategy of normatization. Although many inequities were inflicted on gens de couleur, they framed their central concern as a matter of “political status.” This meant enfranchisement, or as one petition put it, having the ability to consent to laws that they participated in forming.29 Other documents also characterized this issue as a matter of political rights, of which they blamed white colonists for depriving them.30 Political status had a broader meaning within this imaginary, however, and it functioned as a rubric for normatizing politics by other means. Gens de couleur frequently anchored their claims to equality in prior legal measures. The guarantees provided by the Code Noir, the law governing slavery from the reign of Louis XIV, were a frequent point of reference. The code is referred to constantly in their petitions and addresses, though never by its common name. Instead it always appears in the deracialized euphemism of “the law of 1685.”31 Though designed to regulate slavery, the Code Noir provided blacks and gens de couleur with certain rights that were rarely enforced. Thus, a group of gens de couleur complained to the French National Assembly that they had a much greater claim of being harassed by “ministerial despotism” than the white planters, because the despotism of the local white elite government had been stripping them of the rights guaranteed by the law of 1685.32 This claim to better (if not equal) treatment is normatizing in several ways. It locates the source of that normativity in a legal claim and places it firmly in the past through the euphemism of “the law of 1685.” For good measure, it also co-opts the key normative claim of the planter-separatist imaginary by showing that “ministerial despotism” was the same, if not worse, for gens de couleur, the only difference being that the despots were colonial white planters instead of remote French bureaucrats. As a normative strategy, “the law of 1685” thus has a triple reference point: in a distant past, as a legal guarantee, and through association with another widely held genre of normative claim. Like its planter-separatist counterpart, the egalitarian-inclusive imaginary also relies heavily on association with “the rights of man” for normatization. This idea is a constant touchstone in the petitions of gens de couleur to the French National Assembly.33 It provides a conceptual anchor point for imagining a universal extension of political membership. The formal document, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, is never named in these references. Instead, the rights of man are invoked as an abstract idea, “les droits de l’homme,” and are neither enumerated nor discussed in any further detail. Thus, they function primarily in an auratic and imaginary sense rather

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than a philosophical one. These references evoke the cultural authority and aura of meanings associated with the rights of man as much as its actual principles. If one doubts this substitution of cultural aura for philosophical principle, it is only necessary to observe the deep tensions within these invocations of “the rights of man.” The gens de couleur intend their references as ones that would justify equality across racial lines. At the same time, they are not arguing against slavery. Indeed, many of the most prominent spokesmen for this position are slave owners and take great trouble to distinguish their cause – which we might call the equality of all property owners – from the separate issue of whether slavery should exist. They see the rights of man as supporting their claims to equality as plantation owners, but not claims to abolition. Julien Raimond, for instance, defines the cause of the gens de couleur by marking a strong separation with the cause of slave emancipation. He says it is important not to confuse the two. Free gens de couleur are free by virtue of birth or manumission, not based on any claims of racial equality.34 The egalitarian-inclusive imaginary thus has a difficult relationship with the rights of man. It invokes this idea for its normative aura but cannot fully accept the universality of equality, at least not to the extent that some of its prime exponents are arguing for the equality of free gens de couleur as slave owners. The egalitarian-inclusive imaginary also has an important performative dimension. Several colored activists spent considerable time in Europe, interacting with French and English abolition groups, working to shape legislation in the National Assembly, and publishing pamphlets explaining their cause. Through these channels, they enacted a kind of political equality in metropolitan France by making use of the public and private channels available to them, giving the lie to their political exclusion in the colony. As such, they were enacting a form of political equality that was new in the metropole and prohibited at home. In many ways the position of the gens de couleur is a trilemma of class, status, and politics like that described by Nancy Fraser.35 In its classic form, this trilemma is a vicious circle of low status, low political agency, and few economic resources. The three attributes reinforce one another, reproducing a dynamic of stigmatization, disempowerment, and poverty. The situation is a bit different for the gens de couleur of Saint-Domingue, however. Those who raise the issue of equality are affluent property holders, yet they are members of a stigmatized race. They want to maintain class distinctions – the ones that provide their wealth – while dissolving racial stigma. In particular, they seek to maintain slavery while fighting for racial equality. Thus Julien Raimond tries to dissociate slavery from race, claiming that it is an economic and legal relation rather than a racial one.36 It is justified by differences in class, making race irrelevant. On the other hand, Raimond holds it wrong to discriminate based on race. Thus the racial stigma attached to rich gens de couleur is unjust.

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The political dimension becomes the key domain in which this argument is made, and Raimond’s wealth gives him access to this domain in which he can act as a political equal.37 Thus the trilemma of class, status, and politics functions differently in this case. It is not a vicious circle, but a set of interlocking relations that can be played on to create political agency and fight against racial stigma. Large amounts of economic capital are converted into political capital, which makes possible a revaluation of the stigma attached to race.38 In this way, gens de couleur are able to revalue their social status directly through economic and political means, as bourgeois and citoyens, rather than risk arousing sympathy for slaves by focusing too heavily on race. It is important to emphasize the extent to which the ability of gens de couleur to convert economic capital into political capital depended upon access to metropolitan France. The metropole offered a set of values, laws, public spheres, and legal domains that did not formally exclude gens de couleur. Many young, affluent, and free colored planters had relatives, land, and investments in France. Some also received French education, and others traveled to the metropole at some point. The result was familiarity with metropolitan culture, ease in speaking its idioms and making connections, and thus access to its political opportunities. This suggests striking parallels with Benedict Anderson’s account of nationalism. Anderson describes the circuits of travel experienced by bright young creole men in a variety of colonial systems, first being sent to the metropole for education, later returning to serve as metropolitan bureaucrats in the colonial administration. For Anderson, the back-and-forth movement between colony and metropole creates a distinctive creole identity that forms the germ of a nationalist consciousness among a generation of future leaders.39 We see something analogous in colonial Saint-Domingue. In this case, however, the result seems not to be national sentiment, but closer identification with France. The young, cosmopolitan gens de couleur identify more strongly with French culture, particularly with republican political doctrines and revolutionary notions of equality, as a result of their circuits of travel. The difference from Anderson’s examples is not surprising. Racism within Saint-Domingue effectively prevents gens de couleur from being part of local administrative or intellectual elites. Affiliation with the metropole, in contrast, serves as a school of equality and a guarantor of rights that would be lost were the colony to gain its independence. The egalitarian-inclusive imaginary found its largest articulation in the intercontinental, multilingual public spheres connecting the Caribbean with Europe and the Americas. Gens de couleur formed connections with metropolitan abolition movements in both France and England. The Société des Amis des Noirs was a société de pensée in the classic tradition of the time: a debating society that constituted a semipermeable public sphere, limited in membership and participation but promoting public dialogue on issues of contemporary concern.40 It was linked via membership to the National Assembly, where

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members made many speeches on issues of abolition and the “political status” of the gens de couleur. The political modalities of this action are quite significant. The extensive petitioning engaged in by gens de couleur is a performative form of political power. Formal mechanisms exclude them from the official representative system, but not from the vigorous informal publicity developed since the revolution. Raimond fights for official-political inclusion by acting within an unregulated political modality. He uses connections with the Amis des Noirs, whose members are some of the most prominent participants in the French public spheres. (Brissot, for instance, has his own newspaper, Le Patriote Français.) By tapping into these networks of publicity, Raimond uses the material means of the public sphere, combined with economic capital, to renegotiate the boundaries of official politics. He is, in this sense, performatively enacting the egalitarian-inclusive imaginary as a form of popular politics. He uses performative means to make political claims for formal inclusion based on claims of morality and justice. There is, then, a kind of performative meta-politics, a politics about politics, in Raimond’s combination of performance and imagination. This is in many ways the kind of self-authorization that Jason Frank describes.41 It goes beyond that, however, because this is not merely a political act of self-authorization, but one that helps to instantiate a new political imaginary. Modalities of publicity and the mobilization of resources are used to create, perform, and materialize new conceptions of popular power. This not only provides a retroactive ground for Raimond’s own actions but also, more broadly, creates a collectively imaginary basis for understanding that action as normal and authorized. Raimond did not fully succeed in this task – the egalitarian-inclusive imaginary remained controversial in France and Saint-Domingue – but we can see his practice as aiming at such a form of normatization. In sum, the egalitarian-inclusive imaginary is crisscrossed by a number of tensions. Politically it remains within the bounds of the French colonial system. The metropole is a distant guarantor of rights and equality based on property ownership. It provides the means to fight localized racism that stigmatizes free colored planters. This is hardly an egalitarian or inclusive imaginary in the broad, universalistic sense that one might expect from the Age of Enlightenment. The equality and inclusion of gens de couleur is supported by a sharp distinction between free colored planters and slaves. Race is not important to a person’s status, only property. As property owners, free colored planters are by right free and equal. As property, slaves are by right owned. Race is bracketed as a basis for status distinction – not, as one might expect, to render it irrelevant in the face of more basic criteria of universal humanity, but irrelevant as a basis of equal treatment so that property ownership can serve as the decisive form of differentiation. Yet there is also an undeniable strand of cosmopolitanism in this imaginary. It is not a Kantian moral universalism, but a more colloquial fusion of creole

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and metropolitan ideas in a discursive network extending from Saint-Domingue to both France and England. The actual politics of the gens de couleur, especially Julien Raimond, is very much involved in the exchange of ideas of its day. In this sense, it is culturally and linguistically open and dialogical. In sum, the egalitarian-inclusive imaginary is an interesting stew of contradictions. It puts forward a political imaginary centered on inclusion, equality, and an end to racism, yet it argues strongly for a continuation of slavery as a pure property relation. It embraces colonialism and imperialism and condemns local control. It participates in the open flow of ideas and celebrates the rights of man, yet favors social hierarchy and economic oppression.

The Agrarian-Antislavery Imaginary The Haitian Revolution began in a widespread, well-organized slave revolt in 1791. This so-called Boukman rebellion was a politically complex undertaking, likely organized by a core of creole slaves, many of whom had positions of responsibility and relative privilege on their home plantations. The military savoir-faire of the campaign probably came from newly arrived African slaves, experienced in warfare from the Congolese civil war.42 Under pressure of this campaign, and by virtue of the Jacobin government’s progressive attitudes, slavery was abolished in Saint-Domingue in 1793 and in all French colonies in 1794. Political instability continued after emancipation, however, marked by war with Britain, then civil war between free blacks and gens de couleur, and then a war of conquest over the Spanish side of the island. After a brief period of calm, Napoleon sent a large military force to reconquer the island in 1802. Rumors about his intentions to reinstitute slavery seem to have been important in provoking a new round of conflict.43 The recently freed slaves were anxious to seize the upper hand before new laws could be used against them. Fighting continued until 1804, when the Republic of Haiti was formed. A multiplicity of movements, leaders, and ideals led to the formation of this state, and alliances among black, de couleur, and white groups, and with England and Spain, were forged and dissolved. The thinking of revolutionary leaders seems to have evolved a good deal in response to these dynamics as well. The treachery and brutality of the French military late in the war seems to have had a particular impact, convincing revolutionaries that separation from the metropole was the only viable option. As a result of this complexity, it is impossible to characterize the normative commitments of the Haitian revolutionaries in any simple way. The archives present an additional problem. Unlike white and colored plantation owners, the political imagination of revolutionary slaves is poorly documented. These most world-historic of actors left few written records; indeed, most were prevented from becoming literate. They wrote no learned treatises and did not – with rare exceptions like Toussaint Louverture – document their

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complaints to the legislative bodies of the era. As a result, accessing their thinking is an epistemic and interpretive puzzle. It is largely a matter of conceptual archeology: excavating the silences left in the archival record and piecing together a picture of their beliefs from material artifacts, elite documents, secondhand accounts, and other records. Surprisingly, this thinking did not center on abolition or decolonization for a long time. In the early 1790s the slave revolt erupted with considerable and murderous force. Slaves did not seem focused on seizing political control of the colony, however, nor on demanding inclusion into the privileges of white society, nor stabilizing a future sovereign state. Even the most celebrated of Saint-Domingan revolutionary leaders, Toussaint Louverture, remained cautious in his thinking. Louverture eventually did adopt the abolition of slavery as his goal. Even then, he remained firmly committed to French colonialism, continuing to think of Saint-Domingue as a French colony and its inhabitants as French citizens.44 This has led David Scott insightfully to characterize Louverture’s thinking as “conscripted by modernity.”45 Louverture thought of himself as a civilized person and thought of France as a source of civilization. Breaking with that tradition was not part of his consciousness. With an eye toward such incongruities, Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues that the eventual result of the slave insurrections was literally unthinkable.46 The idea of a slave revolt successfully throwing off the French empire and forming a black majority state was something, Trouillot claims, for which concepts did not exist. The normative basis of postrevolutionary Haitian sovereignty was, he argues, unimaginable at the time. This epistemic subtlety is a valuable insight. Yet, I think there is more here than meets the eye. The archives of this time contain some tantalizing traces of political thinking that we can assemble into a rough and interesting picture: not about national sovereignty, but oriented toward independence, nonetheless. We might characterize the gradual development of this thought and action as a set of culturally and contextually specific notions of self-sufficiency and independence:  an agrarian-antislavery imaginary. Revolutionary slaves did not imagine their project along the lines of a Westphalian nation-state until the early 1800s, but there is evidence that they had clear ideas of collective self-determination on a smaller scale. These were forms of self-organization intertwined with and in reaction to the plantation system. The most frequently voiced demands of revolutionary slaves, repeated emphatically when they had a good bargaining position, aimed at renegotiating the organization of work under slavery rather than ending it. They consistently set their sights on negotiating three free days per week to use for their own ends, often for tending their own gardens.47 These demands have often been interpreted as a lack of revolutionary imagination. In this sense, they would be evidence of a broader “conscription” of Haitian revolutionary thinking by the very system of forced labor that slaves were rebelling against, along the lines that David Scott describes for Louverture.

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However, I  tend toward another way of reading the revolutionaries’ demands. It represents a different way of thinking about political order. The slaves’ demands for “three free days” amounted to an expansion of small-scale, secondary agricultural practices already under way in the plantations. Slaves were often allowed to cultivate their own food on nearby waste lands and were encouraged to do so as a way of relieving owners of the expense.48 They were also frequently allowed to sell surplus produce in local markets; and for some this became a source of cash income that could be used to buy their own freedom. From this perspective, small-scale, self-directed agriculture served as a source of material wealth, independence, and self-sufficiency. It represents the opposite of the nonwaged, “alienated,” forced labor that defined the Saint-Domingan social and economic order. In this sense, it can be seen as the basis of a conception of freedom, an ideal that combines agrarian subsistence and market independence.49 In the view of Sidney Mintz, this conception of freedom is an adaptation to the profoundly capitalist world of the plantation colony. It is simultaneously a form of resistance to being property and a form of conscription into capitalist modernity.50 It provides some measure of human dignity, but one defined by the dominant European culture. Mintz’s insight about the double, ambivalent character of this ideal is a valuable one, and I will pursue the question of the ambivalence of Haitian political thinking in the face of European modernity more generally in the next chapter. The ambivalence of demands for “three free days” contrasts with other reactions to slavery. Marronage, escape from slavery, was a more complete negation of the tyranny of the plantation.51 Temporary or “petit” marronage was a regular occurrence in which slaves would disappear from their plantations, often to visit friends or family members on other plantations, before returning. This illicit travel created networks of communication among slaves across the colony. “Grand” marronage was a more permanent escape that allowed slaves to form self-organized communities in the inaccessible hinterlands of the colony. Such communities predated the plantation system on Saint-Domingue, originating with slavery itself in the beginning of the sixteenth century.52 Some of them seem to have been relatively isolated enclaves oriented at creating independent communities.53 Others, however, seemed organized as bases for resistance movements built around non-European ideas and practices, including African animist religion and herbal medicine.54 These communities were sources of alternative belief and action as well as refuges from the horrors of slavery. Maroon communities were in fact treated as independent nations in Jamaica and Surinam, where the colonial administration negotiated treaties with them, though the colonists on Saint-Domingue chose persecution rather than cohabitation.55 Both maroon and captive slaves developed complex forms of collective identity that functioned as alternatives to the plantation system. Slaves who were born in Africa, which included the majority of those in Saint-Domingue, formed

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“nations” of a more virtual, despatialized sort, based on similar geographic or ethnolinguistic origins.56 They are known to have elected kings and queens and accorded them great respect.57 The slave insurgency that touched off the revolution, the Boukman rebellion, was probably organized partly through these networks. It was a well planned and executed operation, likely mapped out over an extended series of clandestine meetings by people who had formed alternative networks and collectivities by enacting their own forms of freedom.58 While marronage seems a much more complete rejection of slavery than the agrarian ideal of “three free days,” the two had common elements that coalesced into one vision after the revolution. This was an agrarian village society that Jean Casimir calls the counter-plantation.59 He characterizes it as a unique creole-slave culture that fused fragments of various African cultures with the material, social, and economic realities of the Saint-Domingan plantation system. Oriented first and foremost at rejecting plantation slavery, the counter-plantation incorporates elements of both the independent self-organization of maroon villages and the agrarian self-reliance of “three free days.” In this sense, both marronage and the agrarian subsistence ideal can be seen as expressions of the counter-plantation.60 Both are unique, local adaptations to slavery that ultimately flowed into the same path. For my purposes it is important to emphasize the unique features of the agrarian-antislavery imaginary. It was not first and foremost a Westphalian ideal, in the sense that nationhood was not a central part of this vision. This imaginary formed a localized vision of independent self-reliance, responding directly to the plantation system rather than the more abstract and intangible domination of France as an imperial power. The idea of a Haitian nation-state was only adopted later. Casimir does a careful job of emphasizing the unique cultural fusion represented by this view: not “Africa” transplanted to the New World, but a combination of African and creole cultural fragments adapting to a horrifying situation. In addition to these insights, we should also pose the question of the French influence on this outlook. There is evidence of some consciousness of republican ideals as news of the French Revolution arrived in the colony. Consider, for instance, an anecdote about a maroon slave who was captured and executed. Found in one of his pockets, the report says, were French pamphlets detailing the Rights of Man. We found in one of his pockets pamphlets printed in France, filled with commonplaces about the Rights of Man and the Sacred Revolution; in his vest was a large packet of tinder and phosphate of lime. On his chest he had a little sack full of hair, herbs, bits of bone, which they call a fetish; with this, they expect to be sheltered from all danger; and it was, no doubt, because of this amulet, that our man had the intrepidity which the philosophers call Stoicism.61

This anecdote is both provocative and enigmatic. It comes from the memoir of a white creole fleeing to the United States during the revolution. The

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three groups of objects discovered in the pockets of the revolutionary slave have symbolic importance worthy of a biblical parable. The slave is found with French Revolutionary propaganda, fire-starting materials, and an African religious amulet protecting him from danger. Fire was the chief weapon of the slave revolts, and one that struck terror in the hearts of white colonists. The sky was reported to be black with the smoke of burning plantations during outbreaks of unrest, and “incendie” is one of the most frequently used words in white colonists’ accounts of the time. The other two objects, from France and Africa, exemplify the two great ideological threats faced by the white planters: French revolutionary doctrines of liberty, equality, and fraternity; and African religious rituals that seemed at once barbaric and powerful. Let us consider what this account might say about republican values among the maroon slaves of Saint-Domingue. As an interpretive principle, we should not presume the story’s accuracy. Its symbology is uncannily convenient as a piece of antirepublican propaganda, given the juxtaposition of “incendiary” revolutionary pamphlets with materials that are literally incendiary, and accompanied by mysterious African religious objects. Here the spread of republican ideals is both explosive and bizarrely foreign. There is also an element of paranoid rumor in this story. There were many reports from white colonists of the eerie calm of revolutionary slaves in the face of death. In this story, that calm seems fortified by the twin doctrines of republicanism (“the Sacred Revolution”) and African religion. The story conveys an undercurrent of fear at the potential damage these ideals could cause if they became widely adopted by the slaves. In sum, it is difficult to know what to make of this story. Regardless of symbolism and other agendas, it could in fact be an accurate report of a revolutionary slave’s possessions at the time of his execution. It could show slaves attaching significance to the doctrines of that other revolution in combination with African religious beliefs. The anecdote suggests many potentially interesting things about the reception of French revolutionary doctrines in Saint-Domingue, though exactly what those are remains somewhat undecided.62 If the agrarian-antislavery imaginary requires an archeology of silences, then another rich vein of insights lies in the case of the tricolor cockade. As we have already seen, the cockade was the blue, white, and red rosette ribbon that was widely worn during the French Revolution. In France it was a powerful symbol of revolutionary and republican values. It also had a powerful impact in revolutionary Saint-Domingue. What the cockade “meant,” though, is at once a political, cultural, and epistemic question. French natives would have understood its meaning as an element of the revolutionary events in their homeland, though even there, there was disagreement about the cockade’s significance.63 Caribbean slaves and free blacks observed the symbol being worn by French sailors and soldiers and began to imitate its use.64 They had no direct experience of the events and public culture of that revolution, however. They must

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have attached meaning to the cockade based on their own understandings of the symbol’s significance, but we have little evidence of what that was. We do know something of the tricolor cockade’s meaning in Saint-Domingue, by virtue of the reactions to it. François Raimond, an homme de couleur and brother of Julien Raimond, had a negative assessment that reflected his aversion to the slave revolts. He believed that blacks understand the cockade as a symbol of equality and liberty and saw it as inspiration for revolt.65 Similarly, the cockade is mentioned briefly in two letters by the colonial administrators the Comte de Peynier and the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois to the French government during the fall of 1789. On September 27 they report some awareness of the French Revolution among Saint-Domingan slaves:  “Up there [in northern Saint-Domingue?] the negroes all agree on an idea that struck them as though spontaneously, that the white slaves killed their masters and, now free, govern themselves and regain possession of the goods of the earth.” Two weeks later, their reports connect these ideas with the tricolor cockade, writing that “the blacks called this cockade the sign of the liberation of whites.”66 For these white and colored elites, the cockade symbolizes some awareness of revolutionary ideas among the slaves, though it is unclear what that awareness might entail. In any case, the meanings cathected to this object were strong enough to create controversy beyond the assessments of Raimond, Peynier, and Barbé-Marbois. Local laws were passed in Saint-Domingue banning the cockade for gens de couleur and blacks.67 The fears expressed in this legislation speak eloquently about its perceived importance, though we cannot say exactly what that meaning was. It is important to recognize that much of the cockade’s ability to create meaning was generated from political action itself. Judging from the reactions to it, we can say that wearing the cockade did something in the public sphere. Consider, for instance, the performative import of a black wearing the tricolor cockade. Such an act could have strong affective connotations. It could imply “we are with those people,” the republican French sailors, “we are like them,” “we subscribe to their principles and emulate their example,” even if it is not clear what the exact meaning or content of that orientation is. Here slaves and free blacks would be assimilating themselves to French republicans by adopting their symbols. They would borrow normative principles by association without making clear, or clearly understanding, exactly what those principles are. In all of these ways, the tricolor cockade poses as many questions as it answers. It suggests an awareness of the symbols of French republicanism, but does not tell us whether revolutionary slaves adopted the ideals of the French Revolution, and if so, how they might have understood those ideals. The question of republican elements in the agrarian-antislavery imaginary remains a tantalizing and open question, and one about which there is much more to say.68 All of this illustrates the difficulties of accounting for the agrarian-antislavery imaginary. It presents a set of archival puzzles that require interpretive

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ingenuity. It is, in many ways, a history of things rather than a history of texts, necessitated by the lack of written records of this most important of political visions. Here we try to trace a set of material practices that add up to a way of imagining popular politics. We can see how normatization takes material and symbolic forms, how French republican ideals may have been refigured in unexpected ways, and how novel political modalities can be used creatively by those otherwise excluded from politics. The materiality of this history could simply be an artifact of what is available in this particular archive. Or it could be an accurate representation of a sovereign imaginary that is at once performative, indeterminate, and underspecified. It may be the case that the Saint-Domingan revolutionaries did not have a carefully worked out, propositionally articulated set of political principles. We can try to discern their ideas in retrospect and from a distance, but we must be careful not to give those ideas more coherence than they actually had. This is an important caution. It suggests that a sovereign imaginary could be poorly elaborated, indeterminate, and partially inconsistent, yet have binding force and real-world importance. In any case, talk of republican elements in the agrarian-antislavery imaginary may be a red herring. Its core seems to have been a determined negation of the social and economic structures of plantation slavery, combined with a vision of independence that rearticulates concrete elements of colonial society and economy. The monocultural, cash crop farming of sugarcane is supplanted by a diversified subsistence agriculture. The hierarchical and violent structure of plantation society is replaced by free, independent, and communal village life. This is a localized vision of what independence would look like if the plantation system were dissolved in favor of a more diverse, free, and independent form of agrarian life. It directly reimagines and negates the plantation, producing a distinctive political vision by reworking elements already found in the violent capitalist modernity of the slave colony. Perhaps because, as Trouillot notes, the idea of a black-majority sovereign state may have been unthinkable until the early 1800s, we can see strong traces of a different and original vision of popular politics among the revolutionary slaves of Saint-Domingue. One of the most striking things is the way this imaginary abstains from characteristic features of other sovereign imaginaries. Unlike the others we have examined, it does not show clear signs of spatial or temporal projection. It does not develop a conception of normativity based on control over a bounded spatial domain. There is no Westphalian vision here, no mapping of sovereignty onto a discrete political jurisdiction or boundary. This view does not rely on temporal projections to postulate a heroic past like those detailed by Rogers Smith, or on what Linda Zerilli has called a “fantasy about the wholeness of political origins,” or on projections of a future people that, as Jason Frank says, “is not . . . yet.”69 Instead, the agrarian-antislavery imaginary takes the form of a material politics with a unique set of commitments. It focuses on collective independence

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in free communities, combined with an agrarian conception of self-sufficiency made possible by cultivating small plots of land. There is a notion of spatiality in this vision, to be sure, but it is posited as a communal alternative to the plantation system rather than a source of normativity. Normativity is not derived from the idea of community, but serves as its basis. It seems to come from a vision of freedom itself that is woven into these more specific ideational substance of the imaginary. Those are practices of marronage, separatism, and rebellion that have clear political content. In sum, this is an autochthonous, Afro-Caribbean political imaginary that frames new notions of collective politics while creatively appropriating, repurposing, and/or negating elements of the French colonial past.

Creating Normativity Each of the three sovereign imaginaries that I have outlined illustrates some of the different ways that normativity is negotiated in popular politics. That occurs through practices that I have called forms of normatization. They show how the basic norms and ideals underlying our political system are assembled through relatively prosaic cultural and material processes. These sovereign imaginaries are characterized by strongly differing spatialities. The planter-separatist imaginary moves toward a Westphalian conception of an autonomous nation-state. The egalitarian-inclusive imaginary, in contrast, follows a colony-empire model extended across two continents. Finally, the agrarian-antislavery imaginary is intensely local. It is articulated on a small, immediate scale and is not otherwise concerned with the spatial arrangement of freedom. The particular socioeconomic structure it embraces, the agrarian village, is first and foremost a spatialized expression of freedom itself. In the first two imaginaries, space is not simply an organizational matrix but a conceptual device for postulating normative force. The third imaginary, in contrast, uses space as a means for materializing its normative ideals. Time is another device of normatization. It is used as a projection in the planter-separatist imaginary. White planters project the origins of their autonomous state back into a free and independent past:  “Saint-Domingue, never conquered, never acquired.” Blacks and gens de couleur, in contrast, seem to understand the dangers of romanticizing the past all too well. They make no such appeals, but either avoid temporality altogether or, in the case of the gens de couleur, aim at a future in which rights granted in the past will be realized. Visions of popular politics can also be associated with other normative concepts to create normativity. “The rights of man” serves as a flexible and polymorphous source of normative value in that sense. It is drawn on in a multitude of ways in colonial Saint-Domingue. The planter-separatist imaginary makes a rather duplicitous appeal to it. Planters invoke the rights of man in support of their declaration of internal colonial autonomy, but deny its application to blacks and gens de couleur within the colony. Gens de couleur make

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a similarly ambivalent appeal, referencing “the rights of man” constantly as a basis for their own political equality while denying its application to slaves. These references seem designed to tap the auratic power of the rights of man more than to endorse the full extent of its principles. The agrarian-antislavery imaginary takes this to a further level of abstraction, symbolizing some kind of attachment to French republican values through the tricolor cockade, but in a very unspecific sense that could be evoking something like the rights of man, or could be drawing on the imagery of the French Revolution in a more general way. Race is both a constant preoccupation of these imaginaries and a source of normativity. The planter-separatist imaginary bases its claims to autonomy on Montesquieuian ideas of the unique characteristics of Saint-Dominque, which includes its culture and economy of slavery. Oddly, the history of (past) racial discrimination is used to justify (future) colonial autonomy. The egalitarian-inclusive imaginary demands equality among property owners regardless of race, limiting its claims to those who own property and attempting to end racial discrimination without ending slavery. Property would be substituted for race as a basis of discrimination. In this sense, property also substitutes for race as a source of normativity. In the agrarian-antislavery imaginary, race is both everywhere and not mentioned. In its more inchoate pursuit of freedom from the oppressive structures of the plantation, this imaginary is heavily racialized, but it does not use race as a source of normativity. Rather, there is a purer idea of freedom at work there, not clearly specified but threaded throughout the movement to destroy the plantation system. In this sense, the agrarian-antislavery imaginary is the most universalistic of the three, employing its commitments in a fairly undifferentiated sense. The same may hold for its adoption of French republican values, if in fact this is the case. The symbolism of blacks wearing the tricolor cockade can be said to call out the implicit silence of French revolutionary values on race. Where a partial, whites-only universalism had reigned before, black slaves may have been aiming at a full, race-blind, universal application of republican values. This is purely speculative, of course, since we do not know to what extent they understood the French revolutionary legacy or attempted to add its normative weight to their cause.

Public Spheres of the Revolutionary Caribbean The conflicting visions I have described are engaged in struggles over political meaning, and indeed, over the meaning of politics itself. There are at least three competing visions of the political here, at least three competing systems of valuation for politics and political identity. There is no single vision of the people or their power, but conflict about the forms of identity appropriate to politics and the significance that one would attribute to various identities, ideas, and practices.

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For my purposes it is not important to show how any one vision won out in the end and became the hegemonic political vision of the new republic. Such a story would be much too simplistic for the actual events, and in any case, we will consider the course of those events in more detail in Chapter 7. What is important is what happens along the way to Haitian independence: how ideas are deployed and normatized, how they gain wider circulation, and how they become powerful ways of organizing collectivity, politics, and the imagination. This unsettled moment in Haitian history allows us to see things normally obscured in popular politics. The sovereign imaginaries I have described are very much ideas in formation that have not yet become part of a taken-for-granted cultural background. Their dialogue with one another shows us a great deal about the pathways of the collective imagination. As we have seen, notions of popular power were the subject of considerable interest in the revolutionary Caribbean. The social, political, and demographic complexities of the situation prevent the easy adoption of any simple notion, however. As a result, processes of conceptual negotiation and cultural change take center stage, inviting us to reflect more deeply on the constitution of popular power and sovereignty. The sovereign imaginaries I have detailed were part of much broader discussions of revolution, popular politics, equal rights, decolonization, and slavery. They were deployed in a multilingual, multilocal set of public spheres crossing the English Channel, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Caribbean. As such, these imaginaries participate in complex processes that intersect and overlap at times, compete at others, and sometimes travel quite separate paths. The lines of talk between the Caribbean colonies and the French metropole were quite robust. There was a great deal of transatlantic travel to and from the colony, and some planters were absentee landlords who lived in France. The landholders in Saint-Dominque were clearly aware of the news from Europe, including the workings of European abolitionist movements. Moreau de Saint-Méry recalls the arrival in Saint-Domingue of newspaper reports about the abolition debates in the English Parliament. He writes, “I remember perfectly that editions of Mercure, arriving in Cap Français in the months of April and May 1788, with details and reflections on this matter, produced a great sensation there.”70 Reciprocally, the press in Europe and the United States reported on slave revolts in Saint-Domingue. Susan Buck-Morss, for instance, notes the widely reprinted coverage of the Haitian Revolution in the German political journal Minerva.71 Coverage in North America was also extensive, particularly as Saint-Domingan refugees started to arrive in American cities.72 The abolition movement sustained its own networks of communication, stretching from France and England to the Caribbean. The Société des Amis des Noirs maintained extensive communication with English and American abolition groups and with Caribbean gens de couleur like Vincent Ogé and Julien Raimond.73 This elaborate network of private talk provided the intellectual and social basis for public speeches, petitions, and declarations by its

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members. Because of their overlapping membership, the meetings of the Amis regularly set an agenda for public debate in the National Assembly as well.74 Saint-Domingue also had a flourishing press in the years leading up to the revolution. Composed primarily of (white) expatriate French publishers, it represented a wide spectrum of opinion. The press tended to favor the planter-separatist cause, but included at least one radically egalitarian paper with Jacobin leanings, L’Ami de l’Égalité (The Friend of Equality).75 The colonial press displayed a keen awareness of events and ideas of revolutionary France. The Moniteur Général, which was something of a mouthpiece for the planter-separatist imaginary, advertised its task as reporting on the most interesting discourse, motions, debates, and decrees of the General Assembly, news from France and foreign countries, discoveries of all kinds, acts of valor of our patriotic troops . . . pieces of poetry and literature . . . the price of merchandise from Europe and colonial goods in the two hemispheres, negroes in jail, stray animals, the arrival and departure of ships and people, deaths; ultimately, all that could interest the colony.76

Although this self-description seems somewhat chaotic and chatty, the underlying intent is not without principle: Freedom of the press is for a regenerated people the most effective safeguard of the rights they have reconquered, the privileges they must defend . . . . The colony, that superb part of the empire . . . must also participate in this very favorable means of propagating and communicating the enlightenment in which a new people [un peuple nouveau] has so constant a need of being enveloped.77

Here the public sphere itself is the topic of valorization, and it is tied directly to the imagination of sovereignty. A free press is held to be vital for the regeneration of a people. This idea of regeneration is a favored metaphor of the French Revolution.78 Here it seems to carry much the same meaning of creating the unity and public virtue that could make a people capable of wielding sovereignty. The fact that a free press, a key element of the public sphere, is thought necessary to this task illustrates my point perfectly. Publicity is one of the principal pathways for creating sovereign imaginaries – in this case, a shared vision of a “regenerated people.” The unique geography and demographics of the Caribbean gave it other outlets for publicity besides the free press. Travel across the Atlantic and around the Caribbean was, of necessity, by ship. On a mountainous island like Saint-Domingue, ship was also the easiest way to travel between coastal cities. Caribbean port cities were thus busy sites of interaction. They functioned as mixing places for sailors of many nationalities and the slave dockworkers who loaded and unloaded cargo. These cities also served as a fertile medium for many “masterless men,” including mariners, castaways, black marketeers, and maroon slaves.79 Because of the diversity and chaos of these areas, it was easy to live anonymously without having one’s papers checked or activities scrutinized. It was thus possible for maroon slaves to pass themselves as free blacks

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or free gens de couleur in the port cities, or to ship out as sailors, or migrate to other colonies. This was the path of three of the most famous revolutionary leaders of Saint-Domingue. Makandal and Boukman arrived on the island as slaves escaped from Jamaica, and Henri Christophe, future emperor of Haiti, from St. Kitts.80 Perhaps most emblematic of this polyglot web of communication is the story of the escaped slave Jean-Louis, who lived free somewhere in the vicinity of Cap Français and was reputed to speak French, Spanish, Dutch, English, and “le jargon créole.”81 In addition to the ephemeral channels of publicity around port cities, there were public domains to which whites had little or no access and of which there is scant documentary evidence. As I mentioned above, marronage provided slaves with mobility between plantations and among independent communities established in the mountain areas. This permitted informal networks of communication across the island that otherwise would not have existed. Spiritual-religious ceremonies operated in a similar way, held largely in secret and sometimes requiring unexcused absence from the plantation. These collective events were sources of solidarity and communication both within and between various plantations.82 In sum, the links of publicity that crisscrossed Saint-Domingue and connected it with the rest of the Caribbean, Europe, and the Americas were not limited to the free press and official venues of public speech. They included a number of public spheres in different languages, spanning several continents, with widely different media of communication and radically different participants. Some of these spheres connected in surprising ways across large spatial and cultural distances, while others were decoupled from one another even though sharing the same space. The result of this complex publicity was the free movement of news, rumor, and ideas. This was true about a wide range of topics including abolition and freedom. Sailors, traveling back and forth between Europe and the Caribbean, functioned as conduits of news about revolutionary events and served as “vectors of revolution.”83 News of abolition and revolution seemed to travel quickly, in any case.84 Documents of the time note how Jamaican slaves followed abolition debates in London.85 Similarly, when the Spanish crown issued a law making significant reforms to the practice of slavery in 1789, word of it was suppressed by anxious governors of the Spanish colonies. The 200 printed copies of the royal proclamation shipped to the colonies were treated as heavily guarded secrets. Nonetheless, slaves had detailed information about the provisions of the new law within days of its arrival, sometimes in advance of their owners.86 Rumors of emancipation were common among slaves across the French Caribbean and caused a great deal of unrest.87 Félix Carteau, a refugee fleeing the revolution, blamed the Amis des Noirs for stirring up revolutionary feeling among the slaves by distributing abolitionist texts. He says that few slaves know how to read, but it only takes one who can read to spread these

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ideas to the others. He goes on to say that most mulattoes and free blacks have learned to read, so there are likely people present who can do so. Even worse, some of the circulated materials are engravings, so “it is necessary only to open one’s eyes to understand the interpretation of the subject,” which can then be repeated from mouth to mouth. Carteau impugns sailors for selling and distributing this kind of material, saying they are nothing but the agents of the abolitionists. By spreading the doctrines of the French political clubs, they foment a “boiling school of insurrection.”88 Even a step beyond rumor at this time is the role of what we could call the phantasmatic public sphere. This is the unsettling, imagined public sphere that politicians, planters, and other prominent whites project on restless blacks and gens de couleur. It goes beyond mere rumor to full-blown, paranoid projection of a public domain that does not necessarily exist. For instance, the French newspaper Le Patriote Français reported a revolt of some 10,000 slaves in December 1789, blamed at least indirectly on the Amis des Noirs. The editor, Brissot (also founder of the Société des Amis des Noirs), says he cannot confirm the report, and in any case the Amis are only arguing for legislation, not inciting insurrection.89 Other reports of slave revolts in Martinique and Saint-Domingue around the same time were supposedly caused by news from France about the Amis des Noirs as well.90 A week later, Brissot reprints a letter from Port-au-Prince reporting that the authorities in the north were everywhere taking precautions against the emissaries of the sect of philanthropes, that are rumored to be arriving from your capital [Paris]; one thereby prepares for them a reception appropriate to the pretend good that they come to do . . . . God grant that they don’t insinuate rumors among the blacks!91

In a brief response to this letter, Brissot reassures his readers in Saint-Domingue that the Amis have no such designs. The supposed missionaries sent to preach revolution to the slaves “do not exist and never existed except in the fearful and passionate imaginations” of those who want to libel the Amis. The hard-print, very real public sphere that exists between Brissot and his white colonial readers is marshaled to dispel the ghosts of a publicity that exists only in the fearful imagination. Here we have what could only be described as a phantasm of publicity. Fearful whites imagine a domain of discourse between abolitionists and slaves. This would be a kind of hidden publicity, not articulated in fully public, fully accessible media but whispered from French abolitionists to colonial slaves. The fear, of course, is that this communication would give rise to revolutionary communities and solidarities. Such a public sphere would be hidden to some and open to others, segregating discourse along revolutionary identity categories (colonial administrators, planters, slaves, “abolitionist missionaries,” and so on). There was no evidence of this communication, only fear and imaginary projections that it might exist. Thus we are not dealing with a subaltern or insurgent public

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sphere, but rather the paranoid projection of one. It is a phantasm of publicity rather than any real, collective, counter-hegemonic mobilization.

Normatization as a Process: Publicity and Performativity We can now draw the threads of this argument together to further develop the view of normatization that I outlined in Chapter 5. The array of positions I have surveyed and the tensions between them highlight some of the important features of normatization as a process. In particular, we see two overlapping, intertwined features at work in the politics preceding the Haitian Revolution: publicity and performativity. Both of them have normatizing effects. They articulate new forms of popular politics and give it normative value. As we have seen, publicity takes a wide variety of forms in the revolutionary Caribbean. It goes far beyond the classic formal arenas of discussion that we have come to expect of Enlightenment publicity: newspapers, salons, learned academies, and literary societies.92 In Saint-Domingue there are, to be sure, the rudiments of a (mostly) free press, and a widely diverse one at that. Members of the press are sometimes subject to harassment and censorship, particularly for abolitionist or republican views, but nonetheless continue their project of free opinion. More striking, though, are the diffuse processes of communication that operate at nodal points of material exchange. The ports of the Caribbean form nexes not only of trade but news as well; shipping is a medium of communication embodied in the form of sailors and dock workers. Combined with the communicative networks of maroon slaves, abolitionists, and expatriates writing home, there is a wide variety of communicative forms spanning the colony, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic, organized in complicated ways. These are partly interlocking and partly decoupled public spheres. Not everyone is included in every form of communication, and sometimes communicative arenas are limited to the members of a particular group. In this way, communicative spheres are sometimes socially differentiated, so that members of some groups are left out of touch with what is being said by members of another group. Thus, publicity occasionally takes on a phantasmatic character, a projection made from fear that other people are talking about something important and one is excluded from their sphere of discourse. Although such publicity arises from social differentiation at a local level, it can be widely dispersed in other ways. Abolitionists were thought to operate secretly in the colonies, yet they had widely extended communicative networks that went beyond the bounds of nation-states and traveled around the Caribbean basin and across the Atlantic. The possibility that this might include talk with slaves incited a great deal of fear among white planters. All of these developments belie the idea that a transnational public sphere is a uniquely contemporary invention. Globalization was well under way before capitalism entered its late industrial stages, and global communication was in

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full swing well before the Internet. Here we see a transnational public sphere that contests injustices of early capitalism and its unholy alliance with the European colonial state.93 We must be careful, of course, about the label “transnational” when talking about colonial Saint-Domingue, since the existence and form of political sovereignty was itself a crucial issue. Whether between nations or peoples, or between metropole and colony, the most important fact is that discourse extended across continents and through many different media. In describing these public spheres, I  have been careful to emphasize their material character. Communication is of a very concrete sort here, located at specific sites and mediated by particular material practices. It includes lines of shipping, dockyards that serve as nodal points for cargo and communication, the travel pathways of maroon slaves engaged in petit marronage, the alternate communities of grand marronage, the transatlantic travel of free gens de couleur lobbying for their rights in the French National Assembly, and the print journalism of the colonial press. Most material of all is the cryptic case of the tricolor cockade. As a symbol of revolutionary values, it most fully marries publicity and materiality, communicating some kind of republican sympathies without actually saying anything in particular. This complex understanding of publicity serves us well when we examine the content under discussion. Here we see different symbolic framings of sovereignty competing in public discourse. Among white colonists, the primary issue is how to constitute and justify some form of postcolonial sovereignty. This question was widely debated in the colonial press, where the issue of secession from France received a thorough treatment. It was largely a matter of discursive claims made about France’s treatment of the colonies, including the fear that it may abolish slavery. The same topics of discussion arose in local assemblies like the Assembly of St. Marc, which imagined itself as the constituent nucleus of an independent Saint-Domingue. Discourse in this assembly focused largely on constitutional essentials for a newly independent entity: if not a fully freestanding state, then at least a colony with significant powers of self-direction. In short, the planter-separatist imaginary was a product of publicity in the classic Enlightenment sense: a free press combined with popularly constituted, procedurally regulated forums of discussion and deliberation. Something similar can be said of the egalitarian-inclusive imaginary. Elite gens de couleur like Julien Raimond acted within the public spheres of republican France. They publicized the plight of gens de couleur in the colonies, using the equal rights and inclusion accorded them in France to argue for it at home. Again, this is publicity in the most classic sense:  reasoned, carefully articulated arguments made in the French press and National Assembly. Gens de couleur like Raimond gradually won French abolitionists over to their cause, bringing with them the powerful machinery of the abolitionist public sphere. Intimately connected with this was the presence of many key abolitionists in the National Assembly. The cause of de couleur equality was thus articulated in the Assembly’s official, procedurally regulated, law-producing public sphere.

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The egalitarian-inclusive imaginary takes shape in these classic Enlightenment forums of publicity, being cemented into the public consciousness through its discursive articulation. One would miss a crucial dimension of de couleur publicity if one focused only on the words said and the arguments made, however. People like Raimond performatively enact the equality they seek by engaging in the public sphere. Raimond constitutes a form of subjectivity for himself through action: he is at once a man of mixed race, born in the colonies, and wealthy, educated, intelligent, and in these senses fully on par with his elite French interlocutors. He visibly embodies an equal status by acting as an equal. The egalitarian-inclusive imaginary is formed not only through trading reasons and speech acts, then, but also through the performative enactment of the very claims being made. In retrospect, we can see that the planter-separatist imaginary also has an important performative dimension. Sovereignty is articulated through the action of separatist white planters, who not only assert ideas of autonomy and independence in the public sphere but also performatively enact some version of them by constituting popular assemblies and drafting founding documents. Here talk about the primal independence of the “interior regime” of Saint-Domingue is complemented by the assertion of a kind of local collective sovereignty. The point is not that the white elites founded a nation or a state – they did not. Rather, they founded a particular political imaginary by performatively attempting (and failing) to found a state. These insights about performativity become all the more crucial when we turn to the agrarian-antislavery imaginary. We cannot understand it solely on the basis of public arguments. It is not articulated in speech in the same way as the other two. Rather, it takes form in nondiscursive practice: marronage, the formation of alternative communities, and the consistent preference for agrarian self-sufficiency. To be sure, there are discursive elements in this imaginary. The demand for “three free days,” for instance, was put forth in language. It was not, however, an element of publicity in the classic sense that we have been discussing: a carefully articulated argument about the need for autonomous, self-directed activity that should be carved out of the plantation workweek. It was instead an aspect of the performative assertion of these ideas, an instrumental demand made whenever the revolutionary activity of former slaves provided them with the power to make such demands. This performative dimension is, nonetheless, public. It is a public bearer of meaning, contributing to a dialogue about self-direction, sovereignty, autonomy, and popular politics across the social fractures of Saint-Domingan society. This is not dumb materiality, a mere facticity of events. Rather, principled commitments operate within these actions. We must interpret such commitments from their visible manifestations, but they are, nonetheless, available for interpretation.94 The sometimes prosaic, unremarkable, patchwork character of such articulations adds up to a slow accumulation of meaning about politics. It becomes

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our common sense, capable of guiding thought and action in unthematized ways. Political ideals are often put forward in speech and thereby put into circulation. Equally, though, conceptions of politics can be performatively enacted. Both forms of practice shape our political imaginaries. In sum, the process of creating political imaginaries, of normative sanctification that renders things natural and taken-for-granted, is a practico-discursive process with inescapably material dimensions. It is not just about talking, but about a complex of discursive practice and practice in a broader sense. The two travel together. Publicity has a performative dimension. The public spheres I  have described are simultaneously dispersed media of discursive negotiation and abstracted yet concrete forms of association, ways of being together, new forms of life that are common, shared, and political. They are media for the synthesis of opinions, values, beliefs, and forms of collective identity and community. Symmetrically, performance  – forms of collective practice with political intent  – means nothing in itself. It does not become “sovereignty” without an underlying rationale to back it up, make sense of it, add meaning. It needs a normative dimension that cannot be gained from the mere positive fact of bodies moving in space. This requires publicity. Publicity creates the shared, imaginary element that is vital to our understanding of political normativity, and by extension, popular politics. All of this comes together when we examine the creation of meaning in politics. This process, which I  have been calling normatization, is threaded through with elements of publicity and performativity. They are intertwined aspects of the same process. Our political imaginaries are shaped by things that are said and things that are done, and especially the conjunction of the two. The process has both discursive and material dimensions. In revolutionary Saint-Domingue, we see contending groups with contending claims, all invoking the language of popular politics in particular ways. There are contending claims of popularity and sovereignty, and those claims are publicly articulated and enacted. These sovereign imaginaries show us how publicity and performativity work together to shape the meaning we attribute to politics.

Imagined Communities in the Revolutionary Caribbean The complex forms of practice that we see in colonial Saint-Domingue raise some broader issues about the formation of political imaginaries. These lines of discussion, publication, association, and travel are similar to the ones that Benedict Anderson describes in Southeast Asia: the development of a colonial press, communicative networks that constitute a wide variety of public spheres, and circuits of travel back and forth from colony to metropole. For Anderson, such material practices lead to the formation of shared identities, specifically, shared national identities. What we see in Saint-Domingue is rather different. Instead of imagining social unity, Saint-Domingan public spheres seem to

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promote a variety of differentiated collective identities. We see transnational identities spanning the Caribbean and Europe, and subnational ones that are intensely local and opposed to others within the colony. It is interesting to consider how material bases similar to the ones that Anderson describes could result in such different identity formations. As we have seen, Saint-Domingan public spheres consisted of interconnected, capillary, and overlapping channels of communication. In these domains, ephemeral forms of publicity functioned alongside and in ways similar to newspapers and other print media. Despite these similarities, their effect does not seem to be that of creating the political unity that Anderson finds in other colonies. He notes the sense in which widely circulated newspapers promoted a sense of commonality and simultaneity. They had the effect of unifying their audience by causing them to participate simultaneously in the same ritual of reading and news consumption. In addition, the newspaper itself was a powerful representation of simultaneity, since it provides an account of all the important events that happened on a particular day.95 The situation in Saint-Domingue was quite different. Saint-Domingan public spheres seem to have been interconnected in complex ways, but they were importantly decoupled in others. The local press was partitioned along political lines, ranging from royalist to separatist to Jacobin. Gens de couleur had their own social networks and connections with outside abolition groups, and slaves had widespread networks of communication that were deliberately concealed from elite eyes. There was no unified audience, no collective experience of a common ritual of news consumption practiced simultaneously. Further, the decoupling of Saint-Domingue’s public spheres may well have undermined any idea that one was getting a full picture of “all the events that happened on this day.” Instead, this publicity seems frequently to have given people the idea that they were missing out on something – important issues were being discussed in someone else’s public sphere and happening without their knowledge. The public spheres of this time were rife with rumor and supposition, often of a quite paranoid sort. They represented the idea that events were happening now that one did not know about, and this could be a serious problem when they turned out to be deleterious or dangerous. Given the lack of a unified audience and lack of a unified set of events happening now, it is no surprise that the public spheres of Saint-Domingue did not produce the kind of collective identity formation that Anderson describes. What we see instead are multiple networks of crisscrossing, overlapping, partially connected and partially decoupled public spheres. Rather than forging unified conceptions of collective identity that might become the beginnings of sovereign peoples, these forms of publicity follow a very different direction, illustrating the complex processes through which multiple sovereign imaginaries develop in conflict with one another. These deviations from Anderson’s work only illustrate the broader acuity of his insights. They reveal material mechanisms similar in character to

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Anderson’s, but stretched across the social fissures of a slave colony in a complex maritime economy. In this environment, publicity is not a solvent of difference and a catalyst of unity. Instead, it reinforces already-existing differences and fosters competing imagined communities. Rather than promoting overall unity, these practices are vectors of division in colonial Saint-Domingue.

Problematic Peoples and Contested Sovereignties This investigation of the cultural and political dynamics surrounding the Haitian revolution sheds new light on the normative bases of popular politics. The story I have told in this chapter is not one of heroes on the barricades. Rather, it focuses on informal networks of daily discourse, transoceanic press circulation, phantasmatic public spheres, mute symbols, and principles that are invoked for their auratic power as much as their substance. Imagining sovereignty was a gradual process that was duplexed onto many other goals and practices, including the pursuit of colonial freedom, equality among affluent people of difference races, and freedom from slavery. It is a story of quotidian events with cultural and communicative significance. This is also partly a story of how people have marshaled resources of meaning to overcome blocked, deprived, or inadequate agency. It is a story, in other words, of the complex origins of popular power. The program of devising a unified power of the people that so troubled the French Revolution was evidently impossible to pursue in the fractured, multiracial world of the revolutionary Caribbean. Popular identifications were fragile and impermanent there. Instead, the most striking feature of this world is the multiplicity of ways that material practices, both discursive and other, contribute to the formation of sovereign imaginaries. It was a multifocal region connected by polyglot relations of commerce, politics, and opinion. Here we see the formation of other kinds of collectivities and solidarities than “the people.” These are more open-ended and changing communicative solidarities like the relations between white French sailors and black slave dockhands. In turn, such networks of communication produce forms of imagination shared by some and not by others: conflicting imaginaries drawn along complicated lines of group identity. I have focused on these forms of publicity and practice to emphasize the rich diversity of means through which sovereign imaginaries are created. They form multiple, complex publics of different characters, membership, media, and modalities. In them we see partly decoupled public spheres, the silent but communicative character of the tricolor cockade, phantasmatic public spheres in which fear of publicity becomes a form of publicity, and the material force of performativity in forming sovereign imaginaries. Here we have a complicated blend of political modalities. Even the ones that seem most paradigmatically linguistic and rational – claims about the rights of man or

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the sovereignty of an “internal regime” – are shot through with conceptual tensions and inconsistent claims. These practices open up new forms of political space that do not place slaves, free blacks, and free gens de couleur at an automatic disadvantage. They are performative strategies for enacting new forms of politics. They are, in many ways, struggles over the meaning of these political modalities and the actors within them. They form new sovereignties piecemeal, through the gradual accumulation of meaning and by endowing new political modalities and collectivities with normative significance. Beneath the apparent dissimilarities between colonial Saint-Domingue and Enlightenment France, problematization continues to play a large role in the creation of shared meaning. That is even more marked in the Haitian context because of the great cleavages across Haitian society. Collective identity is problematic just as it was in France, but it cannot focus on any concrete, universal-aspiring idea like “the people.” Here the problematic of the people is articulated across lines of race, class, and nativity. The question of colonialism becomes a question of sovereignty, and that question is played out as a problematization of social identity across several different axes. The processes of normatization that I have identified in this chapter bridge the gap between discourse and material practice. They highlight the variety of ways in which political normativity can be created, emphasizing its construction through a wide array of practices. This analysis undermines the idea that collectivities like “the people” have a natural, inherent power, showing instead that popular power has been one of the primary objects of political contest. Ideas of popular power – like those that we often take as foundational to our own political system – emerge from diffuse processes of publicity and performativity. These processes redefine the parameters of the political domain and the collective agency of those acting within it. In the ensemble, they tell us much about the role of cultural politics in grassroots insurgencies and social change. Popular power is not a pre-given characteristic of a freestanding, self-determining sovereignty. Rather, it is generated out of processes of collective imagination like those that we see in the revolutionary Caribbean.

7 Conscripted by Modernity? Imagining Sovereignty in the Wake of Colonialism

If I was wrong in forming the constitution, it was through my great desire to do good. –Toussaint Louverture1

When we ask how sovereignties are imagined, a host of questions arise about how, why, and under what conditions such imagining can take place. In particular, this raises issues of originality, continuity, and epistemic freedom in the development of political ideals. It questions the extent to which autonomy and emancipation are figured within the collective political imaginary and what such ideals might mean in this context. It asks whether political independence is possible apart from epistemic independence, or conversely, whether emancipation is compromised if it is achieved within the institutional and conceptual terms set by broader currents of thought. Ultimately, this investigation allows us to approach the question of whether it is really possible to make a “new beginning,” to start fresh and found a new political tradition, in the way that our revolutionary ideology has claimed. My attempt to problematize our shared processes of collective imagination could give one the impression that they form great, glacial paradigms that set the terms of our political interaction. Such a fear animates every page of Castoriadis’s The Imaginary Institution of Society.2 Arguing against his structuralist contemporaries, Castoriadis doggedly attacks the static tendencies of what he calls inherited thought in favor of the novelty expressed by the radical imagination. We are not captive to deep, structural paradigms of thought, he claims, but are always reframing and reconceptualizing social life. My agreement with him should be clear from everything that has come so far. Indeed, the historical record I have examined amply reveals the intricate dynamics of problematization and conceptual innovation. This archive goes well beyond what Castoriadis describes, confirming 144

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his arguments in the process. We see lines of conceptual continuity, common themes, and shared problems reworked in unexpected ways – a scene of conceptual change and collective imagination that defies easy description, much less rigid conformity or determination. I would like to develop this line of inquiry further. It often seems that our political imagination has been captured by a particular set of Euro-American examples. The revolutionary traditions of France and the United States loom large in our thinking about popular politics.3 These two eighteenth-century revolutions have set the conceptual stage for most of what has come after them, framing our own thought about what has happened and what is possible. Their particular conceptions of popular sovereignty, the sanctity of grassroots mobilization, the legitimacy of a constitutional system with representative elements, and so on – all of this has become so much the language of popular politics that it often seems we can scarcely think otherwise. I will pursue this line of thought in the context of broader questions about the ways popular politics are imagined. These are not Castoriadis’s worries about structure and agency, but a far more subtle set of questions about the tensions between tradition and indetermination, conceptual reproduction and problematization. They are questions about how sovereign imaginaries are assembled; about the conceptual and historical resources we draw on to make assertions of sovereignty; and about the resonances and persuasive tropes we use to create normativity. Most broadly, they ask to what extent our imagination is captive to a set of dominant concepts about sovereignty, collectivity, normativity, revolution, the political, membership, and other ideas that are contextually specific to a particular time and place. To what extent, specifically, is our thinking about these topics conditioned by particular constitutional and revolutionary traditions. These are questions about freedom and conceptual innovation against the background of political culture and the broader historical currents within which we think and act. To approach these questions I will plumb the rich web of relations between the Haitian and French Revolutions. As we have seen, these two world-historic events were intertwined in many ways, each constituting conditions of possibility for the other. This gives us a space to assess the lines of conceptual influence and innovation connecting the two. Here I will continue to trace the ways problematization proliferates meanings and spurs our collective imagination. I will argue that there are constitutive gaps of understanding between the Haitian constitutional project and its French counterpart, gaps that provide space for productive reimaginings of the French legacy. Problematization leads to permutation and creative adaptation in ways that suggest both continuity and innovation without drawing a hard edge between them. This is not about the adoption or rejection of Old World ideas in the New World, but about the lines of conceptual cross-hybridization that provide something of a starting point for New World revolutionaries while making that starting point very much their own.

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David Scott provides a productive entry point for this investigation. He makes an insightful argument about the relations between France and Haiti during the revolution against French colonialism. Scott focuses on the Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture to characterize what he refers to as the tragedy of colonial enlightenment. He argues that Louverture’s situation within a Franco-Caribbean culture, where civilization was defined in European terms, caused him to see Haitian politics through a modern European lens. Louverture’s thought and action were thus “conscripted by modernity”: his world-historic response to European colonialism was carried out within the framework of European political concepts and French identity. For Scott, this is an irony of history. Louverture’s history-making movement of liberation against European slavery was foiled in tragic ways by his adherence to European culture and values. Louverture’s story is one of epistemic captivity, then – of his inability to get fully outside of the master’s forms of thought and practice. By relating this story of captivity, Scott exposes some of the ironies of Haitian liberation, and more generally, of rebellions against Western colonialism that are carried out within the conceptual horizon of the dominant political and legal tradition. This rich investigation opens up broader questions about the imagination of freedom and emancipation. It prompts us to ask how European modernity plays out within this rebellion against European modernity:  how European concepts of sovereignty, equality, agency, liberty, citizenship, and rights shaped a highly significant set of global political events. It poses the question of whether European modernity provided the intellectual basis for the end of colonialism and the foundation of the newly created republic, and if so, whether it thereby co-opted the revolution in Saint-Domingue, attenuating its results by narrowing the political imagination of the actors involved. To answer these questions, we must investigate the extent to which the sovereign imaginaries of the Haitian revolution are unique and the extent to which they follow already-written scripts. This involves tracing the ways that European political concepts shaped the struggle against colonialism and the subsequent establishment of new states, and conversely, the ways that improvisation, conceptual slippage, and the permutation of old ideas into novel forms resulted in something genuinely new.

Revolutionary Acts, Conscripted Thought? David Scott’s Conscripts of Modernity is a subtle meditation on C. L. R. James’s classic biography of Toussaint Louverture, The Black Jacobins.4 Scott uses this work to identify some of the complexity and ambivalence of anticolonial struggles. He sees The Black Jacobins – and more precisely, its first, 1938 edition – as structured around implicit assumptions that he finds limiting and outdated. These are assumptions about subaltern agency, resistance, and self-emancipation. They are orchestrated into a story of struggles against

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colonialism as a dialectic between two preexisting, already constituted forces. Such a narrative trades on an implicit romanticism of struggle between oppressive force and subaltern resistance. Scott insightfully finds such a view too simplistic, too rooted in notions of an innate agency that overcomes challenges to achieve a state of self-emancipation and freedom. He objects to linear narratives of progress in these views, which frame suffering as the price to be paid for the inevitable reward of a hard-won fight. We might characterize the view that Scott criticizes as “the power of the (downtrodden) people.” It is a particular narrative genre centered on grassroots power, the rectitude of rebellion, and the natural agency of people who rise up against oppression. In short, it is a variant of what I have called folk foundationalism, a view of pre-given, naturally normative agency. Scott provides us with new tools to understand folk foundationalisms of this kind. He shows that they use narrative techniques that draw on implicit and somewhat predictable assumptions. They are, in this sense, techniques of normatization. They postulate a romanticized view of the agency of the oppressed, framing it in strongly positive terms. This solves by fiat the conceptual problems of popular power that I have identified. It produces a narrative in which the oppressed are a (downtrodden) collectivity with natural, pre-given agency that is inherently good. Scott sees this romantic view as deeply embedded in a certain historical project. Books like The Black Jacobins had a political goal that was situated in a particular historical context. They were aimed at affirming the agency of those struggling against colonialism. This moment has largely passed, exposing these works as somewhat one-sided in their embrace of anticolonial agency and heroic struggle against oppression. They had a clear role in their historical moment, but that moment has given way to different concerns. What we need now, Scott argues, is a critical view that can expose the ambivalences and points of impasse in contemporary postcolonialism. To provide an alternative to romantic narratives of self-emancipation, Scott tries to capture some of the dilemmatic character of anticolonial struggles. For him, these struggles are very much shaped by their time and circumstances. They are thoroughly intertwined with the colonial legacy, which is to say, the legacy of capitalist modernization. Scott characterizes that modernity as an ensemble of “technologies, conceptual languages, and institutional formations.”5 For him, modernity constitutes the cognitive and institutional frame within which people are constrained to act. It is not simply a set of economic relations, but the entire cultural complex that came with them. Institutions, laws, practices, and ideas are all part of this complex. As a result, Scott’s critique is very much a story about the relations between cultural development, political change, and modernity. Seen from this perspective, slavery is an inherently modern institution. It incorporated people into the capitalist mode of production, making them human tools in a profit-oriented system of commodity production and international

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trade. Slaves were thus “conscripts of modernity” in a very literal sense. They were unwilling participants in the dynamic, modern, colonial economy. Scott critically engages the idea of “multiple” or “alternative modernities.”6 He embraces the notion that there are many ways of being modern, of responding to the challenges of modernization. However, he objects to the romantic undercurrent that frequently operates in such talk. Alternative modernities are often seen as expressions of the agency of those struggling against an oppressive modernity. He cites Charles Taylor’s work in this vein among others.7 Scott sees these views as falling back on an uncritical romanticism, one that fails to identify the critical stakes in contemporary forms of postcolonialism. He wants to detach the idea of alternative modernities from these romantic associations in order to assess their character and consequences in more subtle detail. When Scott criticizes the idea of a pre-given agency that emancipates itself through anticolonial struggle, his intuitions are deeply Foucauldian in the very best sense. He emphasizes the constitutive, productive effect of slavery on those incorporated into it. It fabricated subjectivities and set conditions of possibility for action. These Foucauldian insights add real bite to the charge that slaves were conscripted by modernity. They imply that slavery was more than a system of labor extraction and oppression:  it fabricated subjects of particular kinds. Slaves were not simply oppressed people hoping to become free. Their forms of thought and action, their habits, and their outlook were products of particular kinds of subjectivity that were forced upon them. These were inherently modern forms of subjectivity because slavery itself was a modern institution. This argument about productive power shifts attention away from the binary pairing of oppression and emancipation. These concepts might still be useful in understanding Haitian events, but they cannot be seen as pure and opposing tendencies. “Emancipation,” Scott notes, cannot simply consist in freeing an already-constituted subjectivity; rather, it reconstitutes subjectivities within the spectrum of possibilities permitted by colonial modernity. Scott does not say so, but the converse would also be true: “oppression” would be similarly dependent on an inherently related set of subjectivities, concepts, and institutions.8 Oppression and emancipation are thus artifacts of deeper processes: the productive power of modernity on both slave and master, deployed in the practices that tie them together. These insights are all operating in the background as Scott enters into dialogue with C. L. R. James about the exemplary figure of Toussaint Louverture. He argues that Louverture is not only conscripted by modernity but also that this was a tragic condition. Even though Louverture is the very model of a firm, resolute, charismatic revolutionary leader, Scott argues that he was hemmed in by modernity itself. Rather than being presented with an open palette of possibilities for creative action, Louverture faces a situation in which there are no good alternatives. Scott frames Louverture’s predicament as what he calls the tragedy of colonial enlightenment. The Enlightenment is full of “constitutive ambiguities,” as

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Scott sees it, particularly when it tries to provide a basis for revolutionary selfemancipation. In Louverture’s case, these ambiguities are located in his character itself. His personality, extensively praised by James in The Black Jacobins, is also seen by James as a source of tragic complications. Louverture, he says, was an enlightened leader. He was an intellectual who was reflectively selfconscious, self-sufficient, and self-controlled.9 These characteristic marks of the Enlightenment are the result of Louverture’s own self-cultivation, particularly his love of reading and French culture. They give him diplomatic subtlety, a stern incorruptibility, and a strategic farsightedness, which are great assets as the leader of the revolution. On the other hand, these traits also incline Louverture toward strictness, moral rigidity, and inflexibility. They are all signs, Scott says, of an Enlightenment subject-formation. It is in this fundamental and most deeply constituted way that Louverture is conscripted. Unstated in the background are Foucauldian ideas about the ways modernity conscripted Louverture. It held for him the promise of elevation, culture, and civilization, all values that he esteemed most highly. To achieve these values, Louverture made himself an active subject of cultivation; he created himself as a civilized, enlightened person. In other words, modernity constituted a regime of subjectification for Louverture. The tragedy from Scott’s point of view is that Louverture’s enlightenment ultimately betrayed him. It created a kind of francophilia, an expectation of enlightened treatment from the French, a love of order and hatred of chaos, all of which caused Louverture to impede the revolution rather than driving it forward. Louverture’s downfall, then, is the result of his own project of self-cultivation as an enlightened person. The ultimate tragedy is that modernity created the conditions in which Louverture voluntarily took on enlightenment as a personal project. In a very real sense, modernity placed the option in front of him and he conscripted himself. Scott’s assessment of the tragedy of colonial enlightenment focuses on the character of one man, albeit an exemplary one. I would like to use these insights for more general purposes: thinking about the imagination of popular sovereignty after colonialism. To do this, I will turn away from the questions of subject-formation that occupy the conversation between Scott and C. L. R. James. Instead, I will follow the broader line that Scott lays out, asking about the tragic effects of enlightenment in postcolonial conditions. He provides us with a perfect invitation to pose more trenchantly political questions about the ways emancipation and sovereignty are imagined. Talal Asad’s insights about conscription provide a useful pivot point to pose these questions. Describing colonialism, he writes, “A new world has been forcibly created as a consequence of the West’s imperial adventure, and . . . the categories (political, economic, cultural) in terms of which that world has increasingly come to live have been put in place by characteristic modalities of modern power.”10 The postcolonial world, of which Haiti is a notable part, is a creation of modernity, and in Asad’s estimation this prominently includes the political, economic, and cultural categories that structure that world.

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Asad’s indictment of modernity is made on sociopolitical grounds, and thus provokes broader questions about the French legacy in Haitian politics: whether the powerful ideological influence of the French Revolution conditioned Caribbean revolutionary movements in simultaneously positive and negative ways. It reveals the tensions created when Haitian freedom is achieved in conceptual, legal, and institutional terms adopted from the colonizer. To come to grips with these tensions, we must trace the ideological and practical connections between the two struggles, discerning the ways the French Revolution exerted a positive influence on anticolonial insurgencies and the ways it simultaneously posed tragic consequences for colonial revolutionaries conscripted into its ways of thinking. We must find critical means to distinguish between a tragedy of conscription, in which anticolonial revolutionaries are led astray by conceptualizing their project with European cultural constructs, and an autonomous project of self-liberation in which the Enlightenment concepts and practices provide a basis for creative improvisation. At the same time, it is important not to become captive ourselves to the idea of “conscription.” It may be that Toussaint Louverture was conscripted by modernity, but the same paradigm may not adequately describe the broader relations between Haitian and French revolutionary cultures. As we have seen in the influence that Haitian gens de couleur brought to bear on French abolitionist thought, for instance, the lines of influence between these sets of events ran in both directions. We risk overstating the case for French cultural imperialism if “conscription” is our guiding concept. It may be better to speak of mutual influence or bidirectional conditioning. Having said that, it is also important not to fall into the sort of romanticism that David Scott criticizes, providing a simplistic picture of colonial agency in the face of metropolitan power. We should be sensitive to these power dynamics and aware of the asymmetries between colony and metropole. We need to ask subtle questions about sovereign imaginaries rather than predetermining the results through our choice of a conceptual schema. These insights provide an important critical path for my argument about the power of the people. Popular sovereignty is the chief modality through which we think about the normative aspects of contemporary politics. Scott and Asad give us a lens to see how this idea is built around romantic assumptions about self-liberation, self-determination, pre-given agency, revolution, new beginnings, rupture, and oppression. It is premised on the idea of overcoming obstacles to obtain some great, deserved reward. By unmasking these assumptions and providing an alternative critical perspective, Scott and Asad give us means to think critically about agency and struggle in postcolonial conditions. They provide a very different view of efforts to create revolutionary agency and endow it with meaning, when those efforts occur in the terms and conditions established by modernity itself. This perspective throws a different light on the ways that sovereignty is imagined. It provides an additional line of problematization, asking whether

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political independence is possible simply as a material, positive determination, or whether the conceptual, legal, and institutional bases of that independence may also be acts of free self-expression. It asks, in other words, whether freedom does not have epistemic and cultural preconditions: the ability to conceptualize one’s collective sovereignty. This would be something like the ability of insurgent movements to constitute themselves and enact change through a politics of the imaginary. That is the question to which I will now turn.

The Ambiguities of a Half-Island Empire Scott’s argument about Haitian modernity focuses on the revolutionary period, the era of Toussaint Louverture. By 1804 the battle had been won and Haiti was struggling to found a postcolonial society. The Revolution was receding into memory and questions about popular sovereignty and popular power were posed in more direct and urgent ways. Here Scott’s questions about conscription by modernity become even more pertinent. The difficult task of establishing a political and legal order falls even more heavily under the sway of modernity than the struggle for independence preceding it. This era, seen through Scott’s lens, provides us with useful ways of thinking about the imagination of popular powers under modern conditions and in the shadow of colonialism. Conscription by modernity can be seen from the start of Haitian independence. The revolutionary leaders show the need to provide a normative basis for an independence that has already been accomplished through military means. To do this, they draw on devices already familiar from the French Revolution. They seek to constitute a collective identity that would be endowed with sovereignty: some “people” that would have a natural right and ability to rule itself. As we saw in the French case, this is a difficult project that produces unstable results, and the same is true of the Haitian attempts. Here the problems of accounting for collective identity and collective unity are even further exacerbated by the racial, ethnic, and class divisions plaguing Haitian society. After a prolonged and brutal war, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, General in Chief of the revolutionary army, declared Haiti independent on January  1, 1804. Dessalines’s proclamation of independence was written by Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre, a fourth-generation creole homme de couleur who had spent a decade in France.11 Dessalines commissioned Boisrond-Tonnerre to write this proclamation after rejecting a draft by a different author, one based on the American Declaration. The earlier draft was apparently too dry and philosophical. Dessalines enthusiastically embraced Boisrond-Tonnerre’s proposal that the proclamation should be written in passionate and explicitly racial terms, with “the skin of a white man for parchment, his skull for a writing desk, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen.”12 The resulting document can thus be seen as something of a collaboration between a revolutionary leader with definite opinions about its content and a skilled writer tasked with fleshing them out.

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The Proclamation shows a particular preoccupation with collective identity. Dessalines is conscious of this in addressing the newly created citizens of Haiti, What people fought for us? What people wanted to gather the fruits of our labor? And what dishonorable absurdity, to win in order to be slaves. Slaves! Leave that epithet to the French. They have won in order to cease being free. Let us walk a different path, imitating those peoples who, sustaining their solicitude into the future and fearing to leave to posterity an example of cowardice, preferred to be exterminated rather than be struck from the list of free peoples.13

Dessalines uses the familiar French idiom of “the people” in this proclamation. Unlike most French republicans, however, he uses the idea in the plural, and uses it polemically. Dessalines conjures three specific peoples: the Haitian, the French, and “those who preferred to be exterminated.” The latter group are likely the Taíno natives who lived on the island before European conquest, and who were indeed exterminated by European colonists.14 Most interestingly, the reference to the Taíno characterizes them as peoples in the plural. They are a group of peoples: a collectivity of collectivities. This is true of the group to which they belong as well: “the list of free peoples” is a similarly compound collectivity. Here a Haitian common identity is asserted in opposition to the French. The polemic contrast between the French and Haitian peoples posits the very object that does not yet exist:  a Haitian people. Haitians are encouraged to think of their freedom as having the form of a collectivity:  “free peoples.” Thus Dessalines connects naturalized, nationalist notions of collective identity (peoples) with sovereignty (free peoples). Being a people makes one self-determining, so collective identity of this type carries an implicit normative status. Elsewhere in this address, specific peoples are given further normative colorations. The French are referred to as “this barbarian people.” Haitians are addressed as “you too-long unfortunate people.” The invocation of dishonor and tones of approbation and exhortation are all used for rhetorical and normative effect. In so doing, peoples are nationalized, essentialized, and normed in various ways. In a rather intuitive manner, this proclamation articulates a proto-nationalist conception of collective identity. Dessalines rhetorically imagines a Haitian people where only French colonial subjects had existed before. Hypostatized notions of identity and agency take the form of French and Haitian “peoples,” postulating a Haitian collective identity and implicitly setting it on a par with the French. This distinction is a highly counterfactual one, because it is not at all clear who the Haitian people could be, given the multiple racial, class, ethnic, native, and geographical distinctions dividing them. “Haitian people” is an almost purely normative idea because its empirical referent is so vague. It is a highly moralized concept of collectivity, aimed at endowing that collectivity with a particular kind of normative force in spite of its counterfactual character.

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Clearly the populace of Haiti was not the only intended audience of this Proclamation, however. Copies were sent to newspapers in the United States.15 Haitian revolutionaries show a desire to justify their actions, to engage in a kind of transatlantic public discourse about the reasons for revolution. Obviously this discursive commitment to an international public sphere was smart geopolitics, an attempt to curry favor with Americans amid ongoing tensions with the French. More broadly, though, the modalities of this engagement are quite characteristic of the European Enlightenment. In the words of the US Declaration of Independence, they seem to acknowledge that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” By following this Enlightenment model of international publicity in the service of discursive justification, the new Haitian state shows itself to be conscripted into European modernity. The same problematics of collective identity and sovereignty are carried forward into the Haitian Imperial Constitution in 1805. That document is by tradition also attributed to Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre.16 The first article begins by declaring: The people living on the island formerly known as Saint Domingue here agree to form themselves [se former] into a state free, sovereign, and independent of all other power in the universe, under the name Empire of Haiti.17

Similarly, the constitution concludes as follows: We commend [the constitution] to our descendents, and with it pay homage to the friends of liberty, the philanthropists of all countries, as a sign of divine bounty, which, through these immortal decrees, has given us the opportunity to break our chains and constitute ourselves [nous constituer] as a free, civilized, and independent people.18

This document begins and ends with the idea of the people. In both cases, it acknowledges the need for self-constitution. The people first referred to in Article 1 are loosely defined: they are delimited by geographical location. They agree to “form themselves into a state.” Similarly, the closing paragraph frames the problem in the same way, ending the constitution with a vivid juxtaposition of liberation and self-constitution: breaking our chains and constituting ourselves as a people. It is worth remarking the extent to which the notion of a people operating here is a characteristically French one. If its conceptual overtones were in any doubt, the preamble to the constitution is quite clear. Evoking the authority of the people of Haiti, the signatories “declare that the content of the present Constitution is the free, spontaneous, and invariable expression of our hearts and of the general will [la volonté générale] of our fellow citizens.” This is a fairly direct paraphrase of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, Article 6, “The law is the expression of the general will.” As we have seen in Chapter 6, “the rights of man” were a frequent touchstone for Haitian revolutionaries, particularly for gens de couleur. The Rousseauian character of

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this language would also have been apparent to some of the drafters. Given the acknowledged problems with the unity of a Haitian people in this document, however, such an attempt at legitimation rings somewhat hollow. On the other hand, it would be a familiar rhetorical move, following American and French precedents in a way that would naturalize and obscure the underlying problems. It is also worth noting how the passage quoted above displays some of the novel temporality of the French Revolution. “Break our chains and constitute ourselves” is not only a commentary on servitude but also a metaphor of temporal rupture between the old and new orders. As such, it adopts one of the signature features of French revolutionary rhetoric: the very notion of a new order founded through rupture from the old.19 In this constitution the free, civilized, and independent people functions to legitimate an empire. Obviously the idea of empire itself seems somewhat at odds with popular politics. It is, in some way, put forth as a kind of popular empire – an empire based on the free consent of the people. The idea of empire has been seen by many commentators as an absurd act of self-aggrandizement by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who proclaimed himself Emperor Jacques I. After all, Haiti’s imperial possessions were limited to a handful of offshore islands.20 It is important to remember, though, that his most important political and military opponent was Napoleon, Emperor of the French. Always aware of France, employing a French model of sovereignty, and cognizant of the need to defend Haiti against French incursion, it is in many ways not surprising that Dessalines constituted the new nation as an empire. Although Haiti’s empire was quite small, we could view this simply as an act of self-assertion, an attempt to adopt the conventions of a larger competitor and foe. In this sense, it would be a response to political modernity that shows evidence of conscription precisely by imitating its legal and institutional forms. Another acknowledgement of the problem of collective identity occurs in the final article of the constitution. It contains only the following poetic assertion: “At the first shot of the alarm cannon, the towns disappear and the nation rises up.”21 This is, to say the least, a somewhat unusual measure to write into a constitution. The seemingly self-confident phrase does not successfully conceal the worry motivating it. It voices an almost Rousseauian hope for the sublation of particular interests in favor of a broader solidarity, backgrounded by a fear of what could happen if division is the response to the alarm cannon. Interestingly, the collectivity of choice in this case is not the people but the nation. It is not clear why this other form of collectivity is chosen. It will be followed immediately by the phrase quoted above about constituting ourselves as a free, civilized, and independent people. One might speculate that a tendency is operating here similar to the one I traced in revolutionary France: conceptual instability in the distinction between people and nation. Regardless of the collectivity in question, the problematic character of such fabrications is clear in both cases.

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This constitution contains some other oddities as well. The sole stipulation of Article 9, for instance, is to say that “No one deserves to be Haitian if he is not a good father, good son, good husband, and above all, good soldier.” Article 11 requires each citizen to possess a mechanical art. Most interesting, though, is the attempt in Article 14 to wrestle with the problem of collective identity. French thinkers, as I showed in Chapter 4, tried to resolve problems of collective identity by positing a universal human subject of French citizenship. This was a polemic attempt to deal with the complex system of aristocratic privilege that had come before. Such universalism was unstable and problematic in the French context. It sat in even greater tension to the complexities of Haitian society, which was crisscrossed by myriad racial classifications and subject to ongoing conflict between people of all types. In an attempt to square this circle and end racial conflict, the constitution of 1805 takes a bold and creative step: Article 14. It being necessary to end all distinctions of color among children of one and the same family, of which the head of state is the father, Haitians will henceforth be known under the generic denomination of black.22

Here European political ideals are translated into Haitian terms, upending the system of European racial distinctions. In its attempt to resolve problems of unity, equality, and collective identity, the Enlightenment settled on treating all individuals as abstractly human. In conceptual terms this is a difficult feat, because no person fits that description. The solution, never made explicit but everywhere adopted, was to conceptualize the universal citizen of the Enlightenment as a white male.23 In this sense, the universality of the “rights of man” was postulated by subordinating, in an unstated way, those who did not fit the stereotyped image of the universal human. This became the basis of what I have called the popular-universalist imaginary, the predominant political ideal of late eighteenth-century France. As we saw there, this solution was an unstable one. People who did not fit the standard concept of a universal human were marginalized and devalued; and equality and collective identity remained products of artifice built on cultural violence. These facts were not lost on universalism’s victims. The resulting political tensions destabilized the “universal” order and the unity it was meant to promote. The new Haitian republic faced similar problems of equality and collective identity. In a brilliant inversion of the Enlightenment ideal, however, the constitution of 1805 declares the default citizen black. Rather than a popular universalism in which unity and agency will come from universal participation in a white male ideal, we now have a symmetrical and inverted universalism. If unity is possible when all adhere to an implicitly white identity, then it is surely possible when all adhere to an explicitly black one. This ideal is bluntly stated in a way that exposes the subterfuge of its predecessor. It calls the bluff of Enlightenment universalism by boldly reversing that which was thought not to need explanation. After this constitution, it is no longer possible to assume

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white universality without comment. We can call this the black-universalist imaginary, for the way it radically rethinks universalist notions of membership and political identity. In this sense, Article 14 is a bold and interesting countermove to the European legacy. In sum, there are signs of both conscription and freedom in these texts of 1804–1805. The new Haitian republic adopts many legal-political conventions from its colonial forebear. The idea of drafting a proclamation of independence and a constitution follows French and American precedents, and both of these legal genres are signature features of legal and political modernity. The Haitian Proclamation of Independence closely follows the style and form of the American Declaration, which displays a characteristically modern preoccupation with justifying one’s political acts. This kind of public justification was also a preoccupation of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution.24 The idea of a written constitution was also a hallmark of modernity in this time, an example set by the American and French Constitutions before it. This practice of using a legal document to specify fundamental forms of political sociation is already a sign of conscription into a modern institutional order. The Haitians are conscripted into modernity by their circumstances. To constitute their freedom they must adopt legal forms that have been established by the international system of nation-states. This is a nonnegotiable feature of European modernity because independence would be recognized by the wider world only if articulated in particular institutional forms. The use of French phrases and concepts only carries this borrowing a step further. An equally striking manifestation of modernity is the Haitian preoccupation with collective identity. Haitians, like the French before them, see it as a necessary legitimation for political rule. The association of the two ideas is a uniquely modern one and a particular preoccupation of French modernity. Further, the conceptual device of “the people,” which is wildly counterfactual within the context of Haitian social fragmentation, is an attempt to achieve this. Another is the idea of universalism, which seeks to minimize the differences among people as a way of promoting equality and collective identity. Further attempts at a modern approach to collective identity lie in the nationalist imaginary of Dessalines’s rhetoric and the imperial one implied in the creation of the new empire. By adopting these devices, Haitians fall within the ideological ambit of European modernity. All of this extends the lines of David Scott’s thesis about conscription. It goes beyond Toussaint Louverture to show how the founding of the new Haitian republic was also conscripted into modern forms of thought, law, and institution. Haitian sovereignty and independence are conceptualized in terms of broadly modern European imaginaries. In this light, it is worth reconsidering Scott’s claim that Jean-Jacques Dessalines was not a conscript of modernity.25 Scott contrasts the character of Dessalines and Louverture to make this assessment:  Dessalines is a man of action rather than quiet reflection, and is thus not characteristic of

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the Enlightenment. I  see the situation rather differently. Viewed against the background of Haiti’s legal, political, and cultural milieu, Dessalines is very much conscripted by modernity. His is not the conscription of a stereotyped Enlightenment intellectual who reacts with emotionless rigidity to chaotic circumstances. Rather, it is that faced by any actor who must undertake postcolonial political and legal projects out of the ruins of a former colony and within the cultural horizon of the French revolutionary tradition. This difference of opinion between Scott and me says much. By shifting the focus from subject formation to legal form and its conceptual background, we get a very different understanding of conscription. In this sense, it is important to note the ways that the new Haitian Republic avoids or subverts conscription. The idea of universalism is a subject of wonderful improvisation here. Not only is the implicitly white universalist norm set aside in favor of a black one, but the jarring cognitive dissonance created by this assertion is a profound act of cultural politics. It calls attention to the unmarked, taken-for-granted racism of French universalism by inverting that racial order. This act is very much inscribed within the racial order created by European colonization, and in this sense, it is thoroughly conscripted by European modernity. Yet it creates a counter-racial imaginary that subverts the modern paradigm of race from within. It undermines conscription in certain ways even while it is a product of modernity.

Territory, Sovereignty, and the Spatial Imaginary: The Haitian Constitution of 1843 To gain an index of changing ideas and problematics, let us move several decades into Haiti’s future. The constitution was redrafted in 1806, 1807, 1811, and again in 1816. One notable addition, added in 1806 and repeated almost verbatim in 1816, provides a definition of sovereignty that was lacking before: Article 16. Sovereignty resides essentially in the universality of citizens: no individual nor partial group may attribute it to itself.26

This is a classic piece of French universalism: it quotes the French Constitution of 1795 almost verbatim (Article 17: “Sovereignty resides essentially in the universality of the citizens.” Article 18: “No individual nor partial group [réunion partielle] of citizens can attribute sovereignty to itself.”).27 It is an essentially modern expression of sovereignty, one that shows strong signs of the French influence. At the same time, race continued to be an issue throughout this period. In this vein, the constitution of 1816 establishes a conception of citizenship along racial lines: Article 39. The following are recognized as Haitian: whites who participate in the army, those who exercise civil functions, and those who were admitted to the Republic at the

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publication of the Constitution of 27 December 1806; no others in the future, after the publication of the present revision, can pretend to the same right, not to be employed, nor to enjoy the rights of citizens, nor to acquire property in the Republic.28

Article 39 takes some ideas that had existed in the constitution of 1806 and radicalizes them considerably, placing strong limits on the number and kinds of white citizens. Regarding other racial groups, however, the constitution follows a rather different direction: Article 44. All Africans, Indians, and those issued from their blood, born in the colonies or in foreign countries, who come to reside in the Republic will be recognized as Haitian, but will not enjoy the rights of citizenship until after a year of residency.29

Taken together, these two articles generate a fairly crisp racial distinction. Whites, Africans, and Caribbean Indians, so-called Caribes or Taínos, are singled out as racial categories. Gens de couleur, the preferred term for those of mixed race, are not explicitly mentioned, but they presumably fall under the category of “those issued from [Africans’ and Indians’] blood.” The overall effect is a sharp racial distinction between those qualified for citizenship and those not. Only three categories of “deserving” whites can be admitted to citizenship, while any African or Indian is prequalified. These measures show a preoccupation with problems of race similar to that of the constitution of 1805. Instead of following its racial universalist strategy, however, this constitution executes an abrupt turn in a different direction. The unity of the people will now be pursued through racial exclusion rather than racial universalism. It is worth noting the way in which citizenship is articulated in Article 44. Ordinarily one would assume that “being recognized as Haitian” would imply “enjoying rights of citizenship.” It is somewhat striking, then, that in this context they are distinguished from one another. African and Indian immigrants are recognized as members in some abstract way a year before the benefits of membership accrue to them. In this case, citizenship has a double meaning: on one hand, as a pure form of recognition with no legally actionable content, and on the other, as a status carrying specific legal benefits. Contemporary citizenship policies implicitly carry this double meaning, but it would not occur to us to separate them, nor is the meaning of the former clear from a modern perspective. This is either an innovative reconsideration of citizenship that decomposes it into functional parts, or an incoherence on the part of the drafters. After the revision of 1816, the Haitian Constitution fell into a relatively long period of stability. Maintained by the autocratic presidency of Jean-Pierre Boyer, it would not be revised until a successful rebellion removed him from office in 1843.30 The resulting constitution, ratified the same year, took a markedly different tack. It struck down the constitution of 1816, which was seen as complicit in the problems of the Boyer presidency. The new constitution was extensively debated and ratified by a constituent assembly but never really put

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into practice. It thus remains a snapshot of a certain way of thinking rather than a document with binding legal consequences. Thomas Madiou, the eminent nineteenth-century Haitian historian, details some of the complex deliberations surrounding this constitutional reform. Writing shortly after the events, he summarizes a proposal introduced into the Constituent Assembly on Nov 21, 1843: 1. Civil and political rights would be extended to whites who took part in the revolution of 1843; 2. Artisans or artists who reside for five years and teach their craft to five young Haitians would be naturalized; 3. Political rights are accorded to Africans, Indians, and those issued from their blood immediately upon their arrival; 4. All who have been heretofore recognized as Haitians.31 The proposal is, to say the least, somewhat disjointed and unsystematic. It clearly draws together elements of earlier constitutions to assemble them in a new form. It adds a new category of “deserving” whites and recognizes another “deserving” group by their useful economic function. It gives political rights to Africans and Indians immediately upon their arrival. Presumably the yearlong waiting period would still be in effect for full citizenship, however. Some participants in this debate show clear signs of conscription by European modernity. Parts of the political rhetoric surrounding this upheaval, for instance, seem completely saturated with the rhetoric of the French Revolution. General Hérard, the leader of the revolution against Boyer, expresses his opinions in a letter to the Constituent Assembly that is drafting the new constitution. “The provisional government convoked the people to form the new social contract that must unify all parts of the political body, and to lay the bases of national prosperity.”32 Here the language of contractarian political theory meets the problematic of the people in a classically European way. This text could have been taken from any number of French documents of the era. In spite of such conventional, conscripted thinking, the final draft of the Haitian Constitution of 1843 makes some surprising modifications to the earlier version. Various aspects of citizenship, treated separately in the 1816 constitution, are consolidated into a section called “Of Haitians and their Rights” and moved to the front of the new constitution. There we find familiar words with striking new connotations: Article 6.  All individuals born in Haiti or descended from Africans or Indians, and all those born in foreign countries of a Haitian man or woman, are Haitian. Equally Haitian are those who have been previously recognized as such. Article 7. All Africans or Indians and their descendents are qualified to become Haitian. The law regulates the formalities of naturalization.33

This section is easily recognizable as a descendent of Article 44 of the constitution of 1816. It subtly amends the earlier language about citizenship, however,

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and thereby changes its meaning in dramatic ways. Africans and Indians were previously recognized as having the potential for citizenship within a system of racial distinction. They were specified as a contrast group to excluded groups of whites. Those distinctions are still maintained here – new categories of whites are still prohibited from citizenship by Article 8.  However, what stands out is the twice-repeated assertion that all Africans and Indians are Haitian. Whereas the previous constitution had merely singled them out as racial categories, the 1843 version effectively grants them citizenship prior to arrival. So striking is this assertion that it is repeated in the concluding phrase, albeit in a more qualified manner: all Africans or Indians are qualified to become Haitian. This is a new and conceptually radical form of citizenship. It articulates a kind of pan-African and pan-Caribbean identity. This conception still localizes citizenship within the nation-state, and in this sense it is conscripted by the modern, Westphalian state system. Yet it also challenges that system by extending the criteria of membership well outside the bounds of any nation-state. By opening membership on both a regional and continental scale, it effectively despatializes citizenship. In its openness, its radical inclusiveness, its post-Westphalian character, its complex spatiality, and its language of membership and collective identity, this conception is quite distant from any conscripted notion that would be familiar to the European enlightenment. When taken as a whole, this constitution displays the problematic of the people in striking new ways. It combines a conventionally European idea of the powers of the people – one amply supporting Scott’s thesis about modernity – with a broadly expansive definition of the people that goes far beyond any European ideal. It is a wide-ranging conception of citizenship that would incorporate any other citizen of Africa or the West Indies. This is neither a nationalist idea of the people nor a universalist or cosmopolitan one, but one articulated along uniquely postcolonial lines. It shows that the conscription of modernity was only partial and piecemeal, and the power of the people takes interesting and unique forms in the Haitian context. The constitution of 1843 is not entirely free of European convention, however. Tensions between French universalism and Haitian racial complexity continue to produce interesting variations of the problematic of the people. The constitution includes a shortened, streamlined version of the definition of sovereignty asserted by its predecessors. It states that “National sovereignty resides in the universality of citizens.”34 The word “national” is an interesting addition. It adds distinct boundaries to the idea of sovereignty, paralleling many nationalist movements across the globe in the mid-nineteenth century, but does so in the service of “the universality of citizens.” Given the radical, pan-African, pan-Caribbean conception of universalism that precedes it, one is not quite sure how to interpret this. It is national and Westphalian, on one hand, and radically despatialized, on the other. Sovereignty lies in the nation but is universally extended across Africa and the Caribbean. Even more confusing, this

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nationalist/post-Westphalian conception of sovereignty proceeds from a people (Art. 51) and is thought of in terms of powers that are delegated by the people to elected representatives (Arts. 43–48, 50). In short, this constitution combines some wildly dissimilar elements in relatively novel ways. The resulting tensions between those elements produce a document that shows strong French influences, yet it can be hardly said to be conscripted by modernity. It is, rather, an indigestible mouthful for modernity, something that would be both strangely familiar and almost completely illegible to the nineteenth-century European legal and political order.

Improvising Modernity I have highlighted some of the conflicted, changing dynamics of Haitian legal history after the revolution. They provide us with ample grounds to think about the extent to which Haitians were conscripted by modernity in their efforts to create political stability and found a new republic. Most notably, we see problems of modernity playing out in dramatic ways. Problems of collective unity and identity play a large role in the Haitian politics of this time. Familiar European devices are used to deal with these problems. Those include ideas of the people, the nation, universality, and the rights of man; and legal conventions like a declaration of independence, constitution, and empire. These show signs of modernity in certain ways while simultaneously chafing against its limits. Much more complex and problematic, however, is the range of ways in which “the people” is constructed after Haitian independence. During this period the idea of the people acquires a strongly normative character. It is polemically deployed as a conception of a Haitian people, one that shades this collectivity with various moral colorations. This collective-normative compound is employed as leverage against French hegemony, creating the idea of a Haitian people that has broken its chains and earned its freedom. It is the kind of performative normativity that we are used to from declarations of independence.35 As such, it remains well within the bounds of European convention. While the imprint of modernity is quite evident during this period of Haitian history, it proves a difficult fit in many cases. French universalism never worked very well at home and it becomes almost ridiculous when applied in a Haitian context. The multitude of racial and economic distinctions fragmenting the Haitian populace make it impossible to create a unified people by postulating undifferentiated forms of humanity. As a result, Haitian political culture is pulled in three different directions by tensions between a nationalist notion of the people, a strikingly new pan-African, pan-Caribbean universalism, and a multiplicity of racial and economic distinctions fragmenting the Haitian populace. Many new problems surface here: worries about the ill-defined and constantly changing character of citizenship, the racial character of citizenship, the suitability of the populace to bear sovereign powers, uncertain sovereignties,

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tensions between universalism and differentiation, difficulties of combining post-Westphalian and nationalist conceptions of membership within the legal boundaries of a Haitian state, and the challenges of developing a postcolonial political culture capable of guiding institutional and legal change. Consider, for instance, the politics of citizenship. In The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, Robin Blackburn comments that Haiti was the first state in the New World to guarantee citizenship to all of its residents.36 Blackburn does not elaborate further on this remark, so it stands as an interesting enigma. Haitian constitutionalism in the first half of the nineteenth century seems to contradict his claim in many ways. As we have seen, Haitian citizenship is an ambiguous and contested concept during this time. One could easily assert that Haiti was the first state in the New World to guarantee citizenship to all of Africa and the Caribbean. However, Haitian citizenship was never fully inclusive at home. What’s worse, its meaning and extent are often unclear in Haiti’s various constitutions. Blackburn’s statement forces us to acknowledge how difficult it is to say anything clear about citizenship during this period. It illustrates the problematic ways in which this most modern of European legal categories functions in the postcolonial Haitian context. Viewed through this lens, we recognize that Haiti had a rather awkward relation to the Enlightenment. The complexities of the situation, Haiti’s distance from metropolitan France, and the presence of other influences make the conscription of Haitian revolutionary thought partial, piecemeal, and of varying degree. The Haitian revolutionaries threw off colonizing powers and tried to institute a new order under conditions they did not choose. The complexities of this experience urge caution regarding some of the standard platitudes about “revolution,” “emancipation,” and “new beginnings.” The Haitians were not exactly heroic Black Jacobins enacting an enlightenment legacy; neither were they conscripted in a tragedy of colonial enlightenment. Rather, the legacy of the Enlightenment is an ambiguous one here. It undeniably shaped the new Haitian republic, but in unpredictable and often unrecognizable ways. Modernity provides a continual source of both vexation and innovation for Haitian revolutionaries, resulting in a partial, awkward conscription. Like the French, the Haitians are troubled by problematics of collective unity and identity. Their attempt to employ French political and legal devices is problem-ridden as a result, all the more so because of the social and racial complexity of Haitian modernity. These conditions force improvisation, so the results are not written straight from a French script. Rather, they form an “improvised modernity” of complex physiognomy. The complexity of Caribbean social and geopolitical circumstances foils an easy adoption of European precedents. The discourse on sovereignty is a crucial cornerstone of political modernity, and it furnishes a good example of the ways Haitian political actors responded to modernity. Their attempts to wrestle with problems of collective identity resulted in novel ideas that were nowhere on the European conceptual horizon. Unexpected combinations arose from these struggles: black universalism,

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post-Westphalian citizenship, and a proliferation of unforeseen identities, ideas, and sovereign imaginaries. Haitians were forced by circumstance to adapt French revolutionary ideologies to their own context. This amounted, we might say, to a kind of creative revisioning under duress. While the Haitians were certainly conscripted by modernity, they also became participants in modernity. They redefined modernity in certain ways through their thought and actions, rearticulating the balance of power in the Caribbean, developing novel reconfigurations of European ideas, institutions, and legal devices, and changing the financial base of the European state-capitalist apparatus. Their action does not show a simple conscription, then, but simultaneous conscription by and rearticulation of modernity. Finally, we can now return to David Scott’s thesis. The question he poses is specifically about tragedy. He invites us to ask whether the conscription of Haitians in colonial modernity posed tragic dilemmas that foreclosed possibilities of action and forced them into untenable positions. The modernity in question is most centrally the Enlightenment itself. Scott’s meditation on Toussaint Louverture and C. L. R. James is a profound one, but I see three problems with generalizing these insights to the broader topic of the Haitian political imaginary. It may be quite misleading to see Haitian constitutional history only as, or primarily as, a tragedy of colonial enlightenment. First, I believe that Scott’s key normative concept of tragedy has an awkward relation to the broader canvas of Haitian politics. Scott’s concern is with the way C. L. R. James narrates the predicament of Toussaint Louverture. It is about “emplotment,” narrative technique, the way James tells a story. Scott argues that reframing this Haitian revolutionary story as tragedy rather than romance provides us with a more incisive set of critical tools for evaluating the postcolonial predicament. In general terms I  agree with him. However, I believe that we must acknowledge the ways in which tragedy tells only part of the story. If we think carefully about the kinds of examples Scott and C. L. R. James consider  – Oedipus at Colonus, Moby-Dick  – we are quickly reminded that tragedy is a product of writerly artifice. It is a genre of emplotment, as Scott says, a particular way to construct a narrative arc. Tragedy is a genre in which all paths lead to bad results. Its emotional punch lies in the painful irony that there are no good alternatives. This, of course, is a carefully constructed situation, a product of the writer’s ingenuity, a sort of trap laid for the characters in the story. While such a construction produces a powerful emotional response, it accomplishes this only through a high degree of stylization. Precisely because tragedy is a plot genre, it must flatten the details of a story to fit its particular conventions. Any such genre sacrifices a certain amount of complexity for the sake of style. This would certainly be true if we were to characterize a half-century of Haitian constitutionalism as tragedy. The great diversity of political and legal acts during this period defy the confines of any particular

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narrative genre. The value we might attach to them is ambiguous. In this sense, neither romance nor tragedy can do them justice. Scott’s skepticism about narratives of self-emancipation and revolutionary agency is well-taken. These narratives do rest, as he says, on a set of relatively simplistic assumptions about already-constituted subjects locked in conflict with one another, and on a strong romanticism about emancipation from oppression. Without denying the subtlety of his argument, though, I believe that his attempt to resolve these problems only reproduces them. Scott’s solution to problems of romanticism is to choose a different genre of storytelling. Whatever advantages tragedy might have over romance – and Scott makes a persuasive case for these – it is still a plot genre. In this sense, it has all of the broader limitations of any narrative genre as a mode of storytelling. Tragedy still sacrifices complexity for the sake of style. Like other genres, it begs the most important interpretive question, deciding ahead of time what kind of story is being told and foreclosing an open-ended investigation of the subtleties and opacities of actual events. Borrowing a phrase from Scott, tragedy fails to capture the “constitutive ambiguities” of the Enlightenment and colonialism. Even more troublesome, romance and tragedy are both normative modes of storytelling. Each brings its own agenda to the table and predetermines the moral of the story before it even starts. Tragic stories are indictments of the circumstances in which tragic heroes must act; romance celebrates the character of heroes who overcome adversity in acting. Both of these genres build their stories around a preselected agenda and preclude open-ended inquiry about the normative character of the events in question. A second set of problems arises from the way Scott tries to characterize conscription by modernity. He sees Michel Foucault as an ally in this endeavor. Scott prominently employs Foucault’s idea of productive power to characterize modernity’s form of inscription. The Enlightenment, that most modern of intellectual movements, produces subjects whose fate is tragic in a postcolonial context. By emphasizing conscription within the longue durée of modernity, however, Scott risks making this kind of productive power the active agent of his story, while the subjects produced by it are mere artifacts. These subjects act freely, to be sure, but only thereby to subjectify themselves within a pre-given range of possibilities. This is particularly true because the story is emplotted as a tragedy. Here the options are, by definition, few and closed. This adherence to genre convention produces a kind of soft structuralism in which people’s actions are drained of interest and agency, while the structuring force of colonial enlightenment takes center stage. The problem in this case is not taking adequate account of the dynamic relation between context and creative adaptation. As I have argued elsewhere, we must recognize the constructed character not only of the subjectivities acting in a given situation but also of the situation in which they act.37 The concepts, practices, institutions, and laws that subjectify people are simultaneously

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subject to their action. Power is not a one-directional force that creates subjects, but a dynamic feature of a much broader, multidimensional field of action. Seen from this perspective, colonial enlightenment is not a nonnegotiable, structuring power with purely tragic consequences. Rather, it is a loose family of ideas, practices, and conventions that are transformed even as they have a crucial impact on Haitian postcolonial history. In this sense, the very question of “conscription by modernity” is somewhat suspect. It arrives on the scene with an already assembled conceptual structure, asking us to sort features of Haitian history as European or not, modern or not. Toussaint Louverture is seduced into a modern European identity that betrays him, in contrast to some unspecified other type of subject formation. When applied to the events and legal texts I have been examining, these concepts become potential hermeneutic traps. They cause us to inspect nineteenth-century Haitian constitutionalism from the binary perspective of European versus other, imposing a kind of either/or framework on an inherently hybrid situation. Rather than operating in a world of “European or not,” we find Haitian constitutionalists picking up legal devices that are European in origin as tools at hand because they are already, to some extent, familiar idioms of legal and political self-organization. It would be overly simplistic to say that this causes Haitians to participate in “European” forms of thought and practice, since those legal forms had already migrated to the Americas and were in use in a variety of contexts. To elucidate this situation more subtly, we need to ask about the metropolitan-colonial transmigration of ideas and practices in a more complex manner. We need to look for forms of improvisation, conservation, reproduction, mimicry, and/or rejection of practices, conceptual drift, creative and constitutive misunderstandings, and epistemic gaps between colony and metropole and within the colony itself.38 These paint a much more complex picture than one asking whether or not something is a form of European modernity. A third set of problems is related to these. Scott focuses on issues of character and self-formation. This narrows his investigation of the conscripting power of modernity in unfortunate ways. To be sure, he is maneuvered into this position by C. L. R. James on one side and Foucault on the other. James focuses largely on the character of Toussaint Louverture, and Scott follows suit. Foucault is the perfect accomplice for this malfeasance: his genealogies of governmental power are always stories of self-cultivation and individual subject-formation.39 What is left out is the parallel story of collective action-upon-self.40 This would be an account of the way in which groups are shaped in regimes of governmentality, including the way they shape themselves and the very regimes of government acting on them. It is a project that is impossible to theorize in the terms Foucault gives us, limited to concepts of individualization, subjectification, truth-telling, and so on. These technologies of the self have a role to play in a story about the government of collectivities, but its center of gravity must be located elsewhere.

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This broader project requires the kind of insights I  have been developing here:  insights about collective norm- and culture-formation. Such a project draws inspiration from Benedict Anderson, Ernesto Laclau, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Michel Foucault in the ways I  have outlined in previous chapters. It helps us describe how groups are acted upon by regimes of governmentality, how collective identities are created, and how individual orientations and identities are orchestrated to produce collective results. I believe that this is ultimately what David Scott’s questions about “conscription by modernity” invite us to consider: how the conditions of modernity – its characteristic norms, institutions, legal devices, and epistemologies – shape the formation of sovereign imaginaries. In particular, it poses the question of how they normatize certain ideas, shape the formation of politically empowered collectivities, and constitute collective agency while also curtailing it. This is where the rubber really hits the road in the questions Scott so thoughtfully poses. Modernity’s most potent insertion into Haitian politics, I believe, is at the level of the political imagination itself. This is not a “tragic” story in any straightforward way, but a complex play of conscription and creative improvisation.

8 Imagining the Power of the People Critical Reflections on the Sovereignties of Our Time

All essential concepts are not normative but existential. –Carl Schmitt1

We have come a long way from Thomas Hobbes’s image of the sovereign that is an artificial man with an artificial soul. At the beginning of the book, I used that vision to pose the problem of the power of the people. This is a question about the ways meaning is created in politics and takes on a binding, animating force in our political imagination. Such imagined sovereignties are not dreams or phantasms, but durable elements of our shared conceptual landscape. Investigating them requires us to examine the historically specific articulation of ideas about popular politics. I have traced some of the processes, transformations, and conditions of possibility that create such ideas. I have tried to show by what means they capture our imagination and take on real force. This investigation provides us with critical insight into the folkways of our own thinking about politics. Above all, it shows that we cannot understand the power of the people as a fully coherent, rationally compelling doctrine, even during the golden years of its development. The motivational and organizational force of this notion, its historical importance, and its ability to launch movements and mobilize adherents far outstrip any rational account that could be mounted to justify it. Instead, I have tried to outline some of the heterogeneity and complexity of this idea while also tracing the paths of its creation. To close, I would like to draw together some of the threads of this discussion. I am particularly interested in the issue of how we should interpret the critical force of this genealogy of the present. Does the magic of political imaginaries vanish into the dawn as they are disenchanted by the light of critical reason? Or, on the other hand, is the dogmatism of our folkways immune to criticism in ways that render all of this a purely academic exercise? Or, is there some middle possibility, one that allows us to inhabit the tensions of a 167

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problematic worldview and be the better for it? I will prefer that middle path, trying to provide a more nuanced notion of how we might think about this critique. I believe that it should be taken as destabilizing foundationalisms and dogmatisms in our thinking, but it does not strip our political imaginaries of meaning or completely denaturalize them. This is a piecemeal, immanent critique, targetted at freeing the imagination for new ways of thinking.

Problematization as Critique Revealing the problematic character of imagined sovereignties renders the familiar foreign again. We see ideas of popular politics as an unstable, changing set of constructs that shape thought and practice. They form an unsettled web of symbolic contents and acts of imagination, and thus are not purely intentional, rationally worked out products. Seen from this angle, the power of the people is a set of discursive resources, schemas of practice, and articulations of the social and the political that can be deployed for various purposes. These constructions take many different kinds and have varying kinds of normativity, because the circumstances of their creation are in many ways contingent and historically specific. Seen from this angle, the idea of basing sovereignty in an abstract collective identity can appear odd in many ways. It is not clear how or why identity-group formation should constitute political sovereignty. Why should the self-identity of a group, natural or constructed, confer on it the right to create binding laws? What, in normative terms, does the simple fact of group identity have to do with sovereignty? Why do we see ideas of self-determination that make sense for individuals as also applying to some (but not all) forms of collectivity? It is not at all obvious why the legitimacy of self-rule should consist in a coherent, stable, reproducible identity. If one examines it intensely enough, the idea of a popular sovereignty constituted through collective identity could seem like a kind of category mistake. It confuses things that are of very different ontological or epistemic type.2 Just as a chimera is assembled from parts of a lion, goat, and snake, popular sovereignties are imagined by knitting together ideas of collectivity, power, binding force, universalism, time, space, and so on. The disparate nature of these ideas highlights the artificiality of their combination. A  particular collective identity is a descriptor that names no material object and lacks normative force in itself. Having a collective identity does not prima facie confer rights of collective agency, collective legislation, or collective self-determination. That, the archives show us, is an added dimension that is negotiated along with the identity concept itself. It is an imagined sovereignty that is supplementary to some imagined community. The two products of imagination are most often articulated together – “we, the people hereby assert our right to collective self-determination”  – but that does not imply any necessary connection between them.

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This denaturalization reveals the compromises that have been made to create ideals like the power of the people. In so doing, it restores the psychic tension that accompanied their original formation. Psychic accommodations that were made to defuse the problems of political normativity are brought back to consciousness. This destabilizes the natural rectitude or power of the people, rendering taken-for-granted ideas fluid and returning us to the point when problematics chafed and bothered. This problematization is immanent within the conceptual horizon of popular politics. It calls into question a whole class of concepts like popular sovereignty, constituent power, grassroots mobilization, and popular authorization. The moments I  have examined highlight the contingency and dynamism of these ideas, revealing their polysemous and negotiated character. Similarly, the varied processes that create these constructions come to the fore, the ones I have been calling processes of normatization. They are practices that are culturally immanent, historically specific, and highly contingent, yet also part of the very substance of modern politics. Given these problems, we must ask to what extent our own thinking is implicitly captive to dogmatic assumptions about popular power. In what ways should we think of politics as rooted in collective identity formations, and to what extent should we acknowledge that it is not simply a matter of procedures or competing claims, but shared identities and cultures? I have argued that we often engage in a kind of folk-thinking about popular politics, seeing it as a naturally justified basis for all kinds of other beliefs, projects, and practices. To the extent that one participates in these ways of thinking, one takes it as based in uncontroversial and unproblematic facts about the rectitude of the people. These ideas appear natural and thus uncontroversial and incontestable, moments of fixed belief that take on a dogmatic character. The insights that I have marshaled in this book undermine the natural rectitude of popular politics to a considerable extent. They dislodge the naturalism attached to the folk paradigm and force us to confront the residues of dogmatic thinking in our attitudes toward democratic politics. They reveal a slow agglomeration of ideas and practices that become our shared, taken-for-granted world. These elements of the imagination add up, in the end, to a vividly imagined political reality. These insights also undermine attempts to use taken-for-granted ideas as a basis for justifying other projects and beliefs. This would include, for instance, an uncritical embrace of democracy as a panacea for social and political problems. An idea like the power of the people cannot serve as an unquestioned basis for constitutions, democratic regimes, or social movements. We cannot unreflectively justify the US efforts at regime change in another country, or the Tea Party movement, or even the American civil rights movement based solely on “the power of the people.” We cannot view popular politics as a fixed idea that provides a normative bedrock for other positions. To do so would be to accept this idea at face value without acknowledging the typically unnoticed

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processes at work in its creation. Foundational impulses in our political imaginaries are inconsistent with the problematic, piecemeal process of their construction. Such foundationalism is difficult to sustain when we realize what unstable ground it is. Consider, for instance, the critical impact of this analysis on the popular-universalist imaginary. This view assembles an unstable set of elements in a way that we have found compelling for a long time. From a distance of several centuries, however, we can see that a chief problem of the popular-universalist imaginary is its adherence to a logic of identity. This imaginary demands that the people speak, will, and act as a unified whole. When such a unified people cannot be produced, it provokes a crisis in both a political and a conceptual register: politically, because a lack of unity is felt as a constant rupture of the body politic; and conceptually, because the impossibility of such unity indicts the broader view of sovereign power, of which it is an element. If no self-identical, unified people can be produced, the connection between power and the people always seems hypothetical and counterfactual. Revealing these limitations can have a therapeutic function. In its demand for unity, the popular-universalist imaginary turns many characteristic features of politics into problems rather than resources. Contradictory social forces, the insurgency of the marginalized, cross-border, cross-jurisdictional dialogue, and the claims of those “not entitled to speak” are all features of politics that appear as destabilizing and disunifying from this perspective. As a result, notions of constituent power that depend on a unified nation or people do not work, and other, psychic means are used to smooth over the problem. Such histories pose the question of how we should change our attitudes toward imagined sovereignties. If we give up a naïve acceptance of the folk paradigm, can we still endow popular politics with normative significance? Does the constructed, historically contingent, changing character of our political practices impugn their normative import?

The Existential Force of the Political Imagination Commenting on the character of the political, Carl Schmitt once wrote that “All essential concepts are not normative but existential.” He is thinking, he says, of “concepts such as God, freedom, progress, anthropological conceptions of human nature, the public domain, rationality and rationalization, and finally the concepts of nature and culture itself.”3 Here Schmitt halfway captures an important insight. The concepts he lists are indeed existential. They constitute important parts of the immanent cultural background that gives groups their cohesiveness and coherence, their felt sense of collective identity. Yet, for precisely that reason these concepts are also deeply normative. They put limits on thinking and behavior, shaping ideas of what is true, correct, possible, and desirable. This is fairly obvious for concepts like freedom and rationality, less so, though still true, for conceptions of God or human nature.

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Schmitt was half right in his assertion, then. Many essential concepts are both normative and existential. I have tried to show that at least one concept essential to contemporary politics has both of these characteristics. Ideas of popular power define groups and endow them with special status. This holds true for the power of the people, constituent power, and the whole cluster of concepts that attribute normative force to collective identities. The power of the people is indeed a normative idea, easily recognizable as kin of “freedom” and “rationality,” but it is also in many ways an existential idea. Popular sovereignty is articulated and deployed for many different purposes. It is an element of a political imaginary that cannot be taken at face value but must be seen as part of a broader politico-conceptual landscape: a politics of politics that has imaginary and cultural dimensions. Recognizing the importance of these ideas shapes our attitude toward critique. Even though imagined sovereignties are constructed in incomplete and chimerical form, we should not think of them as false forms of representation. They have important motivational, rhetorical, and constitutive consequences. People act on the basis of these ideas. They are deeply structured into our practices, laws, institutions, and material environment. The deployment of such concepts wins arguments and establishes agendas for collective action. They create meaning and constitute social identities. They provide a source of self-understanding and are an important part of the texture of social and political interaction. They structure our actions, providing taken-for-granted ideas of what is natural and possible. They motivate us to act by defining what is real, therefore necessary and urgent. They constitute an important part of the organizational schema through which we understand politics. In short, imagined sovereignties have an existential force that we cannot ignore. Imagined sovereignties exercise other important functions in contemporary politics as well. They have formed a crucial ideational element in struggles for national independence, stabilizing fragile collective identities against internal fragmentation or outward identification with colonial powers.4 They are counterfactual fictions that help to create political unity and consensus. Individuals have thought of themselves as members of such collectivities at various times and seek to have others recognize them in similar ways, giving these constructions existential meaning. Even more importantly, such identities are often the very content of politics, subject to constant struggle and negotiation in themselves. Although the power of the people is an abstraction and an imagined sovereignty, we cannot ignore its important role in actual political practice. Moreover, this importance extends back to the beginnings of our contemporary political culture. In these originary scenes of Western democracy, we see a process of cultural development that is partial, incomplete, in tension, at times inconsistent, and yet accreted slowly to form a durable system of belief. My narrative illustrates a small part of this process, spanning a century of significant political upheaval. This revolutionary period resulted not just in changes of regime in France and Haiti but in the development of new forms of

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thought and belief. It included new articulations of an idea that had circulated in various forms before: the power of the people. This is not a randomly chosen example, of course. We cannot escape the fact that we have a 250-year-old political tradition based on such ideas. The power of the people may be fraught with conceptual and historical tensions, but it has served as a normative touchstone in our culture for a very long time. In all of these senses, imagined sovereignties have a potent existential force, constituting our reality and setting the terms within which we act. This force remains even when we expose their origins to view. Although this is a form of demystification, my assertions about the imaginary character of popular sovereignties do not undercut their normative character. An imagined normativity is still, in a very real sense, a normativity. To see how these normative accretions are constructed yet binding, Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities is again helpful. He shows that imagined communities are communities precisely because they are imagined. Imagination in this sense is constitutive of community; it creates real feelings of kinship and likeness that orchestrate emotions and motivate action. Such a visceral, existential impact would be possible only when community animates the imagination. The same holds for popular politics. Collective agency is a completely intangible idea, one that borders on fictitious. Its normative force is doubly intangible. Yet we attribute enormous importance to the sanctity of popular politics and the will of the people. The power of the people must animate our imagination in very special ways to have the force that it does. Even when we expose the processes and practices that create such ideas, they retain their ability to spark the imagination, quicken the heart, and move people to act. Given the facticity of these ideas and their immanence in our own practices, we should not focus our critical energies on uprooting them. To do so would simply recapitulate a kind of Schmittian modernism, deracinating culturally immanent ideas of sovereignty to replace them with something else. (I take this to be the aim of Schmitt’s Political Theology, for instance, with its striking, counterintuitive redefinition of sovereignty.5) Instead, we must absorb the critical force of this argument without dismissing imagined sovereignties like the power of the people. We must find ways to square the circle, understanding the problematic character of our imaginary abstractions without denying their real force in organizing our lives and adding meaning to our political interactions. I believe that we will be better served by adjusting our understanding of political normativity to fit the actually existing pathways of its formation, than by rejecting our current beliefs out of hand. As we have seen, these ideas are frequently problematic and unsettled. Rather than viewing this as an irreparable deficit, we should derive energy from these tensions, letting them incite us to new ways of thinking and acting. We must think of the present as part of a genealogy of the future, an unfolding story that will one day reveal unresolved problematics in the past that were not papered over or forgotten, but converted

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into resources for thinking about that which was to come. These problematics and tensions provide us with a provocation to think differently. They spur a broader investigation into the ways that normativity is created and push us to come to a better understanding of the ways we add meaning and value to political ideas and practices. They provide the internal energy and unsettled resources for new political imaginaries.

Revolution, Westphalia, Performativity The challenge is to bring critique into delicate balance with the existential force of deeply seated imaginaries. When this works properly, we can open important windows into our current modes of politics, freeing the imagination to think otherwise. To begin this undertaking, I will briefly examine three ways in which our ideas about popular politics are expanded by the critical force of my argument. They focus on what I  have called revolutionism, Westphalianism, and performativity. Grappling with these topics opens up our thinking, respectively, about time, space, and the character of the political. Revolutionism. Our imagination often fixes on revolution as a privileged political moment, one that liquidates old orders and creates fluidity in the constitution of something new. My discussion re-situates this kind of thinking within broader currents of the political imagination. Our visions of revolution are themselves products of the creation of political meaning. To valorize revolutionary moments is to normatize them. In particular, their normatization occurs through specific forms of temporality: a rupture with the past that overturns what is old in favor of something new. In so far as we value revolution, the new is also taken to be good. We implicitly value the new order, perhaps by virtue of who accomplishes the change, what it represents, or, more tenuously, by virtue of novelty and rupture itself. In this light, the interesting question is not whether revolution constitutes a genuine moment of political freedom, but rather, how we come to think so. Such an idea foregrounds particular kinds of institutional and legal change while pushing into the background longer lines of conceptual and practical continuity. It is important to recognize that emphasizing one over the other is to make a choice, one that is often naturalized as fact and thus not recognized as such. To privilege revolutionary moments as such is to normatize certain conceptions of popular politics. As we have seen, these moments are always traversed by more tensions and problematics than we tend to recognize. Correspondingly, they are, like other aspects of popular politics, cathected with meanings that are attached to them in complex and interesting ways. The same holds for our fascination with foundings, archê, and new beginnings, ideas that Hannah Arendt did so much to put on our agenda.6 I have been examining declarations of independence and constitutional drafts, the kinds of documents classically associated with the project of constituting

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sovereignty. Yet we see that such documents mark new beginnings in one sense and ongoing problematizations in another. They map a set of broader problematics in the creation of political meaning. They are, in this sense, attempts to codify practices already in progress, to retrospectively justify things already done, to constitute something wished for and project it onto a hopeful horizon. Instead of seeking to locate political normativity in revolution, archê, or new beginnings, we should bring that very impulse under critical scrutiny. The question is why one should value these kinds of political moments. If such a choice is forgotten and naturalized, we risk masking the lines of continuity and transfiguration that characterize the formation of popular politics. With these insights in the background, it is worth posing the question of the extent to which any revolution is a rupture with the past and to what extent it refigures older legacies. We can see this in the two world-historical revolutions that I  have examined here. In these events, we are constantly reminded of the long lines of continuity connecting them to their pasts and the events that came after. They reflect not only archê in some sense but also processes of change with faster and slower tempos, reversals, and fits and starts. Though much in each case is radically new, it occurs within a broad horizon of developing practices and shared ideas. This is very much part of the point of Chapter 7. Just as Haitian constitutionalism represents creative improvisation within the terms set by European modernity, so revolutions have much the same character. They have certain conditions of possibility, conceptual and cultural resources at hand, and contingencies and problematics that they are forced to deal with. Westphalianism. In the same way that revolutionism gains its value from temporality, so Westphalianism is a frequently privileged form of spatiality. It maps territory, jurisdiction, sovereignty, and populace onto one another. A bounded, determinate territory defines a particular legal jurisdiction. A populace is delimited by both of these features, being composed of the citizens (a legal status) of the territory. Those citizens are held to be jointly sovereign over the laws that define their own status and rule the jurisdiction in which they reside. The Westphalian imaginary is something like a conceptual layer cake. Its careful layering of the four elements on top of one another produces a self-governing, sovereign nation-state. From what has been said so far, it should be clear that Westphalianism is a powerful form of imagination. It simultaneously invokes an imagined community and an imagined sovereignty. The two forms of imagination are chimerical, in the sense that they appear as one creature composed of multiple, unlike elements. The Westphalianism I  have been characterizing here is not the original, seventeenth-century deployment of the “Westphalian” nation-state, which was a way of imagining monarchical sovereignty. Rather, the version I have been concerned with is a transmogrification of those ideas in the age of democratic revolutions, in which the people is imagined as the placeholder of royal

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sovereignty. We have observed the internal tensions and problematics of this project. Westphalianism helps to resolve certain problems of popular politics as a bearer of sovereignty. It makes possible a more determinate notion of the people and provides a way of associating sovereignty with it. Yet, as we have seen, this is not a complete solution. The Westphalian mapping remains problematic because of ambiguities in the connection between collective political identity and sovereignty. Even in the paradigmatic case of France, the imagination of a Westphalian state founded on popular sovereignty is fraught with problems. Moreover, Westphalianism is destabilized when its mapping does not achieve the desired results. As we have seen in the case of Haiti, the populace remains stubbornly diverse and the people impossible to consolidate into an idea of a unified political will. As a result, this layer of the Westphalian cake collapses, bringing the entire confection down with it. Although they evoke the idea in various ways, Haitian revolutionaries and constitutionalists cannot easily enter into a Westphalian imaginary to frame the popular politics of their emerging state. They choose other paths, ones not grounded in Westphalianism: the broad enfranchisement of a diverse, despatialized citizenry not limited to the bounds of the half island. This alternative imaginary casts Westphalianism in new light. We can see the artifice that produces the Westphalian mapping and imagine how things might be otherwise. Sovereignties need not be imagined as properties of a territorially delimited community. They may always be chimerical, but those chimeras can take many different forms. In this world of broader horizons, peoples, nations, and other groups are compounded out of various elements, sometimes attributed a universal status, sometimes a particular one, and sometimes both at once. The people sometimes has a virtual status, an entity that cannot be represented because it is nowhere present. At other times such a collectivity is expanded wildly beyond the Westphalian nation-state, including the originary inhabitants of entire continents in a despatialized diaspora. Throughout these permutations, collective political identity retains its problematic character. The profusion of innovative attempts to develop sovereign peoples and nations illustrates the problematic character of the endeavor:  the way it confounds practice and chafes at the intellectual conscience. The body of the king could house sovereignty, but the body of the people never really quite manages. As a result, collective political identity remains unstable and open, and any dogmatic attempt to fix it is likely a psychic compensation for that fact rather than a conceptual victory. Performativity. Let us, then, consider the varied forms that imagined sovereignties can take. I have argued that the power of the people often has a performative dimension. In this view, popular power is created through particular forms of action. It emerges out of a variety of practices: some everyday, some exceptional, some linguistic, some inarticulate. They are a wide variety of discursive, print, legislative, and political activities: the publication of pamphlets

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and treatises, public debate, constitutional authorship, festivals, street gatherings, everyday conversation, and so on. These practices have a formative influence on how we think and act. They form folk epistemologies with real, binding consequences for the way our collective life is lived. Such practices have an implicitly self-referential character. By their very effects on political imaginaries, they have political significance. They are, in this sense, a popular politics of popular politics – political practices that contribute, over time, to the ideational grounds of their own legitimacy. I  have noted this in particular in the case of Saint-Domingan gens de couleur like Julien Raimond, who demonstrated his own political and discursive equality by arguing for it. The performative dimensions of Raimond’s political engagement were probably even more striking than the arguments he could marshal for political equality. There are many other, less striking examples of the same phenomenon: cases in which the publication of a pamphlet represents the view that there is a people with power, while simultaneously exemplifying a form of popular politics similar to what it proposes and drawing on such legitimacy to legitimate itself. This notion of performativity is rather different from that described by others who have written about popular politics. It is not the kind of intentional self-assertion portrayed by Hannah Arendt: a self-presentation in words and deeds within a domain we share in common.7 Arendt’s emphasis is very much on the self-disclosure of individuals as a way of creating an intersubjective domain of recognition. While sympathetic to Arendt’s view in certain ways, my conception is much less focused on the individual as intentional agent and much more concerned with the gradual consolidation of ideas into assemblages that become part of our taken-for-granted vision of politics. These are built on everyday acts, mostly of a sort that is not intentionally aimed at producing meaning. Thus I am relatively less interested in the existential self-presentation of individuals as a basis for an intersubjective community, and more focused on the slow sedimentation of shared contents of the imagination – the normative ideas that we share without necessarily being aware of it. Similarly, my description of imagined sovereignties does not necessarily involve what Jason Frank describes as dilemmas of self-authorization.8 Frank frames his work with the implicit observation that norms of legitimacy and sovereignty can become sources of exclusion, setting bounds on who is authorized to participate in politics. Groups that are not authorized to act in politics cannot through such means contest their own lack of authorization. Noting the many times that people have found their way out of such traps, Frank sees this as a dilemma to be navigated: he is interested in tracing the ways in which people can enact their own agency and authorize themselves to act. There is a performative element in his account of these moments, in which political action is subtly re-normed as it is being enacted. I find Frank’s discussion of these moments very insightful. My own attention is centered on a somewhat different and broader phenomenon, however.

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Rather than focusing on the immediate agency of the people acting within the context of norms that disqualify them from doing so, I am attentive to the ways in which acting contributes to broader background expectations that certain kinds of political action are legitimate. The imagination of these powers accretes over long periods of time and should not be seen only as discrete acts of self-authorization. Rather, particular collectivities authorize themselves to participate in an already-imagined possibility of sovereign action, the path for which has been prepared by other words and deeds. In this sense, my view is sympathetic to Frank’s and would include the dilemmas on which he focuses, but it also casts a broader net to examine the longue durée in which new imaginaries are performatively created. These insights about performativity and authorization have some bearing on recent discussions about the paradoxes of democracy. They center on the paradoxical situation in which the power of the people provides the normative basis for political processes at the same time as it is formed in them.9 The paradoxes diagnose a performative self-referentiality in politics: they occur when people must be able to act politically in order to gain political agency, but their ability to gain political agency depends on their ability to act politically. These paradoxes have been thought to require either a resolution or some kind of conceptual unraveling. The approach I  have been outlining suggests a third path, however, which is to recontextualize them within a much longer history of political problematics. The paradoxes are more visible from a theorist’s perspective than that of the people muddling through them. They show up within a rather abstracted view of politics governed by a set of logical entailments. They suppose that claims for authorization are advanced by a discrete, already formed group, that groups advancing such claims need a warrant of authorization in order to make them, that no group can have such a warrant before their claim is made, and no group can make a political claim without a warrant of authorization. From this perspective, any claim to self-authorization is performatively self-contradictory. If we think about everything I have detailed here, however, we see that this is a quite stylized analysis and the political world has a very different character. Ideas about popular politics, including those about who is authorized to participate, consolidate slowly, building a base for popular politics. In this sense, the power of the people is both a product of politics and its basis, in certain senses that are self-referential, but not any more paradoxical than the already-problematic character of political concepts. Correspondingly, the political unworking of such paradoxes need not be thought of as a matter of reconciling discrete acts that are either authorized or not. It can be viewed against the broader horizon where all authorizations are to some extent problematic and in formation. In this sense it is problematic rather than paradoxical. When viewed on the plane of political imaginaries, the working out of authorizations includes performative aspects of sovereignty, political claims-making, and the conditions under which such claims

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and performances are judged and accepted. That is to say that sovereignties are asserted in politics, rather than furnishing a preexisting or natural basis for politics. Politics precedes sovereignty, and sovereignty can only be claimed within politics. Performative political action is a necessary part of such processes, but within the complex politics of the formation of shared ideas. From this perspective, the paradoxes of democracy are deflated in urgency and come to seem much more like the normal tensions that inhabit our political processes. These three topics  – revolutionism, Westphalianism, and performativity  – show how criticism and existential force can be joined. Revealing the contingency of some of our habitual assumptions about popular politics can help to open up new possibilities. It pushes us to think of temporalities in a complex way not held captive to the image of revolution; it encourages us to experiment outside the bounds of the Westphalian mapping; and it drives us to embrace the challenges of a popular politics that revalues and refigures popular politics. By examining the history of our present imaginaries, we point toward new possibilities and reveal potential difficulties along the way.

Polymorphous Imaginaries If this is indeed an era of Velvet Revolutions, Tea Parties, and Arab Springs, it is not so in any simple sense. Popular politics is such a fixed point in the Western political imagination that it is hard to avoid falling into its thoughtways. Even the best of us succumb at times to the kind of naturalist, foundationalist thinking I have described, blinding ourselves to the tensions and problems inherent in such projects. I have tried to bring some of these points of difficulty back to consciousness. This is an inversion of our common sense to some extent: I have argued that our seemingly stabile, well-established political beliefs put strong limitations on what can be said and thought, while forgotten instabilities and tensions are an immanent resource, of which we could make much better use. We come to see that our present vision is only one among many, and things might well be otherwise. This critical-conceptual history attempts to open up new possibilities by reminding us of paths not taken and constitutive tensions that can provide new energy for future projects. I first framed the problem of political imagination by turning to Cornelius Castoriadis. His overriding focus is on the autonomy of the imagination. As a result, his thinking is inscribed within – conscripted by – a sterile opposition between structure and agency. Thus his constant imperative is to argue for agency over structure. My approach takes inspiration from Castoriadis but blurs the lines of this overly black-and-white picture. Our ability to imagine popular politics is subject to limiting conditions, points of fixity, the inertia of habit, and dogmatic adherence to the familiar, yet also to conditions of possiblity, opportunities, and resources that open up new directions and force us to act creatively as situations change. To think of this diverse domain using the twin poles of structure and agency flattens it into two dimensions and

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drains away the dynamic tensions that populate it. Our thinking constantly improvises upon shared background imaginaries that are themselves problematic and unsettled, at the same time that we are also conscripted by images, concepts, and circumstances not of our choosing. The sovereign imaginaries I  have outlined have had a varied history. The popular-universalist imaginary has become, for better or worse, the bulwark of our political tradition. Others, the black-universalist and agrarian-antislavery imaginaries, for instance, are what Foucault might call subjugated knowledges.10 They are concrete experiments in thinking-otherwise that can be brought back into active possibility by historical revision. This is not to say that such ideas are simply waiting to be “desubjugated” – released from the prison of historical irrelevance to revel again in their own freedom. Foucault’s language here comes dangerously close to the repressive hypothesis that he did so much to criticize: the idea that power represses its subjects, who can be liberated by some countervailing power.11 Foucault himself gives us persuasive reasons to reject such ideas: power is productive; it creates knowledges and subjects; and they are not waiting simply to be “set free” but are in fact created in new forms by the praxis that otherwise claims to liberate them. Gayatri Spivak has forcefully reminded Foucault of his commitment to such views on the occasions when he seems to deviate from them – including a suspiciously uncritical and romantic attachment to the idea of liberating subaltern subjects.12 Taking Foucault’s better self and Spivak’s reminders to heart, our approach should be more subtle. Indeed, we have already traced these lines in engagment with David Scott. A careful development of his views shows that we are all conscripted in particular and specific ways, and warns against any kind of romanticism about freeing our imagination in an open-ended, unqualified sense. These insights add weight to my argument against Castoriadis’s reductive focus on freeing the imagination. At the same time, I have sympathetically chided Scott for overemphasizing conscription. The approach I aim at is more oblique and the effect more ineffable. When we go back to reexamine past imaginaries in genealogical contrast, we gain a critical parallax on the common sense of the present day. It reveals limitations hidden in plain sight while bringing other ideas into dialogue with them. This critical history proliferates possibilities and unexploited options that already lie latent alongside, within, and among conditions of limitation. It shows us that limitation and possibility are intimately mixed together and available for future improvisation. Here the processes and problematics that I  have examined take on a practical-critical significance. The dynamics of conscription in postcolonial Saint-Domingue give us insight into the ways that thought can be simultaneously foreclosed and improvisational. We follow received scripts for much of our political thinking, but necessity and creativity sometimes lead us in more interesting directions. Understanding the conditions of limitation and possibility that operate in these situations is a vital contribution to finding new ways forward.

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In this sense, the problematic character of contemporary political imaginaries is precisely their virtue. When sovereignty was located in the body of the king, there was very little room for argument beyond the prerogatives of royalty and the question whether the particular person occupying the throne was the legitimate sovereign. Once sovereignty is detached from the concrete body of one person, however, it becomes abstracted, analogized, and imaginary. The fraught process of replacing this notion opens up many avenues for creative thought and action. All of this has enormous bearing on our attitude toward popular politics. Attempts to achieve fixity and declare legitimacy, to win the argument, only have the function of ending politics. By trying to locate sovereignty in a determinate group, place, and time, they ignore the contingency and normative fluidity that is inherent in such struggles, that which makes them truly worth our attention. This is not simply  – or even primarily  – an argument aimed at historical understanding of constitutional democracy. My target is the present moment, when popular sovereignty is held out as a political panacea for “failed states,” “ungoverned spaces,” and the “democratizing world,” while at the same time it seems to be demoted to historical irrelevance by the alleged failures of sovereignty itself. These antinomies  – democratic progress versus globalization, failed states versus failing regulatory regimes – throw the idea of rosy democratic futures into a different light. The overlay of complexity that they produce is appropriate. Rather than seeing democratization as a vector of inevitable progress, we must view it as a phenomenon of our shared imagination that grows strained in its present form. Instead of proposing a solution to these problems or, on the other hand, abandoning them, I  have tried to highlight ways of thinking that have different limits and conditions of possibility. In this sense, my intent is both critical and constructive. There is a further constructive side to this investigation when we consider the tactical potential of the insights I have outlined. The archives teach us many lessons about popular politics – not only about the way our imagination has ossified around certain fixed ideas but also about how it could be otherwise. The forms of normatization I have described are, inter alia, avenues of possibility for those seeking a more effective and robust popular politics. Even more expansively, there is no reason to limit oneself to the forms of normatization I have described. There are vast additional possibilities to be explored. In this book I have illustrated some of the dynamics and pathways of the collective imagination. This is a small and incomplete sample of the myriad ways that sovereignty has been imagined. Much more remains to be said. The archive of popular sovereignties includes many well-known examples and could include many others that are just emerging. The gradual assembly and dismantling of the Soviet Bloc throughout the twentieth century would provide a very different set of insights, from communist and Soviet ideas early in the century, to ComIntern support for anticolonial struggles in the developing

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world, to anti-imperial movements like the Hungarian insurgencies, the Prague Spring, Solidarity, and the Velvet Revolution  – examined with insight by Hannah Arendt, Vaclav Havel, and many others.13 The archive of anticolonial struggle itself contains many insights. I  have considered an early example, the revolution in colonial Saint-Domingue, but there are many others. The unstable emergence of other Caribbean nations from French, Spanish, and English colonialism furnishes many examples that are all the more interesting because of their characteristic differences and complex interconnections. The dazzling particularity and ongoing drama of African decolonization comprise another treasure trove of archives. The complexity of India’s uprising against Britain, its subsequent partition into Muslim and Hindu states, and the crosscutting complexity of religion and caste undoubtedly have much to teach us, as we have seen, for instance, in Partha Chatterjee’s work.14 A very different kind of example might come from the material practices of distance and separation described by James Scott.15 The quiet resistance to modernity that Scott finds among the hill tribes of Southeast Asia, when seen from a different angle, amount to practices of popular politics that imagine sovereignties of various kinds. They may not be articulated as such, they are certainly not articulated as imaginations of states or nations, but their material manifestations allow us to discern certain ways of imagining politics that amount to something new and different. They are imaginations of counter-sovereignty, or counter-imaginations of sovereignty. My insistence on the material dimensions of the collective imagination allows just these kinds of unarticulated innovations to be interpreted. Another archive ripe for investigation is the ongoing evolution of the European Union. Here preexisting identifications and long-standing national regimes problematize efforts to find overarching political frameworks that might have a new relation to citizens and other political units. The scene displays many of the kinds of tensions I have observed elsewhere, as the existing Union is problematized by north-south and east-west rifts, questions about economic and national sovereignty, the control of borders, and politics surrounding immigration and membership. At the same time, the Union’s very existence is sometimes seen as a rubric supporting separatist movements that might allow Catalonians or Scots, for instance, a more direct and independent relationship to “Europe,” whatever that might mean. In short, problematization is one of the most striking features of the European Union. Among others, Étienne Balibar and Jürgen Habermas have contributed much to our understanding of the issues that chafe and bother these efforts of unification.16 Beyond these examples, the archival possibilities are vast. The insights I  have developed here could do much to recover the legacy of forgotten utopian projects. They could be used to probe seemingly innocuous political practices and apparently banal texts to unearth meaning from a multitude of sources. Such forms of inquiry can open up counterfactual, forgotten, and

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buried possibilities, articulating new kinds of collectivities and new spaces and places. They make possible a dialogue between past and present, revealing the wealth of normative resources that time, context, and historical contingency have produced. In all of these places and times, we see the shifting mosaic of collectivities, conceptions of membership, ways of relating parts to wholes, and ways of endowing imagined collectivities with normative force. They are fabulous creatures of the imagination. Taken together, the sovereign imaginaries that I  have examined form a whole menagerie:  a heterogeneous collection in which we rarely see the same kind of creature repeated. They do not reassemble the same parts over and over again but endlessly permute different strategies of normatization in diverse and free-ranging efforts of construction. What connects them is their common focus on imagining sovereignties of various kinds. My goal has been to pry our imagination loose from the kind of naturalism that comes from misunderstanding the character of our most central ideals, from failing to notice that they are constructions of our own creation. The ossification of such ideas into taken-for-granted clichés about the power of the people is a failure of the imagination in so many ways. My aim is not to argue against these ideas by denaturalizing them. Rather, it is to uncover points of unreflective fixity in our thinking, points that could benefit from close examination and the realization that things might well have turned out otherwise. In this light, it is hard to sustain anything but curiosity about the wide diversity of forms that popular politics can take. We come to see how these forms populate our imagination as creations both fantastical and problematic. The diversity of our fantastical constructions has the ability to amaze and delight, to pose the possibility of projects as yet unimagined.

Notes

1 Imagining Politics 1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, trans. Donald Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 30. 2 Here I draw inspiration from Nancy Fraser’s “folk paradigms of justice.” Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (London: Verso, 2003), 11–16. 3 I am guilty of this tendency myself. Kevin Olson, Reflexive Democracy: Political Equality and the Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); “Participatory Parity and Democratic Justice,” in Nancy Fraser, Adding Insult to Injury: Nancy Fraser Debates Her Critics, ed. Kevin Olson (London: Verso, 2008), 246–272. 4 Étienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, trans. Christine Jones, James Swenson, and Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002), 146–176; Citoyen Sujet et Autres Essais d’Anthropologie Philosophique (Paris:  Presses Univeritaires de France, 2011), 465–515; Masses, Classes, Ideas:  Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994), 191–204. 5 Jason Frank, Constituent Moments:  Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 253. 6 Stéphane Beaulac, The Power of Language in the Making of International Law: The Word Sovereignty in Bodin and Vattel and the Myth of Westphalia (Leiden: Marinus Nijhoff, 2004), chap.  5; Richard Falk, “Revisiting Westphalia, Discovering Post-Westphalia,” Journal of Ethics 6 (2002):  311–352; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 2000); Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 7 Falk, “Revisiting Westphalia, Discovering Post-Westphalia,” 311–352. 8 Spruyt, The Sovereign State, 35. 9 Spruyt, The Sovereign State, 36–42. 10 Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 118–119. 183

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11 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 170–178. 12 Étienne Balibar, We the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 101–114; Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2004); Eva Erman, “The Boundary Problem and the Ideal of Democracy,” Constellations 21, 4 (2014):  535–546; Sofia Näsström, “The Legitimacy of the People,” Political Theory 35, 5 (2007):  624–658; Sarah Song, “The Boundary Problem in Democratic Theory: Why the Demos Should Be Bounded by the State,” International Theory 4, 1 (2012):  39–68; Frederick Whelan, “Democratic Theory and the Boundary Problem,” Nomos XXV:  Liberal Democracy, ed. J. Roland Pennock and John Chapman (New York: New York University Press, 1983). 13 Brown, Walled States, 52–53. 14 Brown, Walled States, 114. 15 Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2004). See also Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and Françoise Vergès, La République Coloniale: Essai sur une Utopie (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 2003).

2 “Sovereignty Is an Artificial Soul” 1 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 9. Emphasis in the original. 2 Horst Bredekamp, “Thomas Hobbes’s Visual Strategies,” in Patricia Springborg, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, 29–60 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Murray Forsyth, “Thomas Hobbes and the Constituent Power of the People,” Political Studies 29 (1982): 191–203; Noel Malcolm, “Hobbes’s Science of Politics and his Theory of Science,” in Jean Bernhardt, ed., Hobbes Oggi: Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi Promosso da Arrigo Pacchi, Milano-Locarno 18–21 maggio 1988, 145–157 (Milano, Italy: F. Angeli, 1990). 3 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies:  A  Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). 4 Peter Hayes, The People and the Mob: The Ideology of Civil Conflict in Modern Europe (London: Praeger, 1992); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Ideology in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004); George Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848 (New York:  Wiley, 1964); Jeffrey Schnapp and Matthew Tiews, eds. Crowds (Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 2006); Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e), 2003). 5 Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 44, p. 425–439; quote is from 426. 6 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2004), 96, 130–131. 7 Ernesto Laclau, “Populism: What’s in a Name?” in Francisco Panizza, ed. Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, 32-49 (London:  Verso, 2005), 39. Cf. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2001), 122–127.

Notes to Pages 21–39 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

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Laclau, On Populist Reason, 108, 120. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 93. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 99–100. Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory:  Capitalism, Fascism, Populism (London: New Left Books, 1977), 176–194. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 122–127. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 93–94, 115. Ernesto Laclau, “Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality in the Constitution of Political Logics,” in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), 44–89. Cf. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1949). Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). Anderson, Imagined Communities, 44–45. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 24–36. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 170–178; Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (London: Verso, 1998), 29–57. Here Anderson draws on Winichakul Thongchai, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994). Anderson, Imagined Communities, 53–60. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 5. Kevin Olson, “Governmental Rationality and Popular Sovereignty,” Current Perspectives in Social Theory 25 (2008): 329–352. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 116. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 116. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 114. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 119. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 85. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 170. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 19. Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 2007 [1996]), 92. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 110–111. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 120. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 125. Emphasis in the original. Laclau’s own arguments against criterial views of populism notwithstanding. On Populist Reason, 3–20. Cf. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 131–134, also 122–127. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6–7.

3 How Do We Write a History of Normative Practices? 1 Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 34.

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2 Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), 127–131, 143–145. 3 Castoriadis, Imaginary Institution of Society, 180–181. 4 Cornelius Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable, trans. Helen Arnold (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 73–74. 5 Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable, 72–73; Imaginary Institution of Society, 148. 6 Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable, 78–79; Cornelius Castoriadis, World in Fragments:  Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, trans. David A. Curtis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 8–9. 7 Castoriadis, World in Fragments, 9. Emphasis in the original. 8 Castoriadis, Imaginary Institution of Society, 132–133, 142–143; World in Fragments, 6–9. 9 Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable, 73. 10 Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 9, 2 (1983): 79–115. 11 Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable, 78. 12 Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham:  Duke University Press, 2004), 50. 13 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 23. 14 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 23. 15 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 2; cf. 183. 16 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 63; cf. 29–30. 17 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 29. 18 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 3–22. 19 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 29, 138–139. 20 Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture, 1789–1790 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 48–65. 21 Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 65, 75. 22 Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 242–244. 23 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 115. 24 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 17. 25 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 143–154. 26 David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity:  The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 27 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 149. 28 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge:  Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 194. 29 Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 194–195. 30 Michel Foucault, “Méthodologie pour la Connaissance du Monde: Comment Se Débarrasser du Marxism” [1978], in Foucault, Dits et Écrits III (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 595–618. My translation. Castoriadis comes to similar conclusions about the exhaustion of political imaginaries and the need for new thinking. Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable, 83. 31 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 88–89. See also Wendy Brown, States of Injury:

Notes to Pages 50–55

32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

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Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 16–17. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 2003), 38. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 39. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 37. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 36–40. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). In contrast, James Martel argues that Derrida takes a genealogical approach to sovereignty. James Martel, Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin and the Eschatology of Sovereignty (New York: Routledge, 2012), 38–39. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 36. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 43–44. Kevin Olson, “Governmental Rationality and Popular Sovereignty,” Current Perspectives in Social Theory 25 (2008): 329–352. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 45. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 37. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 44. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1; Bonnie Honig, Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2009); Martel, Divine Violence. Eric L. Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Brown, States of Injury, 55.

4 The Problem of the People in Enlightenment France 1 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 2006), 84. 2 François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 46. 3 A crude but indicative measure is the ninefold increase in the published frequency of the word “peuple” from 1741 to 1791. This is the frequency of the word’s use as a percentage of all French words used per year in the Google Books dataset. N  =  10,333,961 individual occurrences of “peuple” in 236,087 distinct publications during 1700–1900. A  remarkably similar trend holds for “nation” and “publique.” Google French Corpus dataset of July 1, 2012, version 20120701. Data provided by Google Labs. See also Jean-Baptiste Michel et al. “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,” Science 331, 6014 (Jan 14, 2011): 176–182; Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, 33. 4 The use of “masse,” for instance, doubles in the two decades between 1780 and 1800. Having said that, it is important to note that the amount of written discourse about crowds and masses, even at its peak, is only a sixth as much as written mentions of the people. Google French Corpus dataset of July 1, 2012, version 20120701. Data provided by Google Labs. A  parallel look at the representation of crowds in visual media during this time can be found in Jack

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6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Notes to Pages 55–61 Censer and Lynn Hunt’s innovative multimedia project, “Imaging the French Revolution: Depictions of the French Revolutionary Crowd,” American Historical Review 110, 1 (2005): 38–45; and the project’s Internet component, Imaging the French Revolution: Depictions of the French Revolutionary Crowd, http://chnm .gmu.edu/revolution/imaging. Michel Foucault, “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations,” trans. Lydia Davis, in Essential Works of Foucault, vol. 1, Ethics (New York: New Press, 1997), 111-119; Joseph Margolis, “Foucault’s Problematic,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 1, 2 (1998): 36–62. Cf. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1947), 64–68. Dale Van Kley, The Damiens Affair and the Unraveling of the Ancien Régime 1750–1770 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Ancien Régime: A History of France 1610–1774 (Blackwell, 1996), 387–404. Arlette Farge, Fragile Lives: Violence, Power and Solidarity in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), 173–177, 206–225. David Pottinger, The French Book Trade in the Ancien Regime, 1500–1791 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 64–65. Arlette Farge and Jacques Revel, The Vanishing Children of Paris: Rumor and Politics before the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Farge and Revel, Vanishing Children, 104–113. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979), 3–6. Camille Falconnet de la Bellonie, La Psycantropie ou Nouvelle Théorie de l’Homme (Avignon: Louis Chambeau, 1748) vol. 1, p. 184. My translation. Voltaire, Letter to Damilaville, 1 April 1766 (D13232), in The Complete Works of Voltaire, vol. 114:  Correspondence, ed. T.  Besterman (Banbury, UK:  Voltaire Foundation, 1973), 155–156. My translation. Fanny Cosandey, ed., Dire et Vivre l’Ordre Social en France sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: EHESS, 2005). Gabriel François Coyer, Dissertation sur la Nature du Peuple, in Bagatelles Morales et Dissertations par Mr. L’Abbé Coyer; avec le testament litteraire de Mr. L’Abbé Desfontaines. Nouvelle edition. Londres: Knoch & Eslinger, 1757. British Library. Leonard Adams, Coyer and the Enlightenment. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 123. (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1974). Adams, Coyer and the Enlightenment, 29. Coyer, Dissertation, 225. Coyer, Dissertation, 227. Coyer, Dissertation, 234. Coyer, Dissertation, 234–235. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, trans. Donald Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 39. Kevin Olson, “Reflexive Democracy as Popular Sovereignty,” in Boudewijn de Bruin and Christopher Zurn, eds., New Waves in Political Philosophy (London: Palgrave, 2009), pp. 125–142; the quotation is from Rousseau, On the Social Contract, book I, chap. VI, p. 24.

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26 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Contract Social: Ou, Principes du Droit Politique, in Rousseau, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 3 (Paris:  Pleiade, 1964), 379. Donald Cress smoothes over the rough texture of Rousseau’s conceptual construction by translating it as “the entire populace,” supplying a more elegant concept than Rousseau was able to muster. Rousseau, On the Social Contract, book II, chap. VI, p. 37. 27 Rousseau, Du Contract Social, 362. Again, the awkward character of this construction tends to be smoothed away by overly adept translation. Cress: “the people as a body”; Hopkins, on the other hand, intensifies the unity: “the whole body of the People” (in Barker). See, respectively, Rousseau, On the Social Contract, 25; Social Contract, ed. Sir Ernest Barker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 183. 28 Rousseau, Du Contract Social, 379. 29 Rousseau, Du Contract Social, 362. My translation. 30 Rousseau, Du Contract Social, 378–379. 31 Patrick Riley, The General Will Before Rousseau (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1986). 32 Pascal’s Pensées were written during the 1640s and 1650s and published posthumously in 1669. Riley, General Will Before Rousseau, 14–24. 33 Eric L. Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 33–62. 34 Riley, General Will Before Rousseau, 138–180. 35 Rousseau, On the Social Contract, book II, chap. VII, p. 40. 36 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Considerations on the Government of Poland and on Its Planned Reformation [1772], in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 11 (Dartmouth: University Press of New England, 1990), chap. 1, p. 170. 37 William Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 1993), 53–57; Bonnie Honig, “Between Decisionism and Deliberation: Political Paradox in Democratic Theory,” American Political Science Review 101, 1 (2007):  1–17, and Emergency Politics:  Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Alan Keenan, Democracy in Question: Democratic Openness in a Time of Political Closure (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Frank Michelman, “How Can the People Ever Make the Laws? A Critique of Deliberative Democracy,” in James Bohman and William Rehg, ed., Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, 145-171(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London:  Verso, 2000); Paulina Ochoa Espejo, The Time of Popular Sovereignty: Process and the Democratic State (University Park:  Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011); Kevin Olson, “Paradoxes of Constitutional Democracy,” American Journal of Political Science 51, 2 (2007):  330–343, and “Reflexive Democracy as Popular Sovereignty,” in Boudewijn de Bruin and Christopher Zurn, ed., New Waves in Political Philosophy, 125–142 (London: Palgrave, 2009). 38 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, trans. Angela Scholar (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2000 [1770]), book 9, p. 395. Translation lightly altered. 39 Rousseau, On the Social Contract, book II, chap. VII, p. 38–41. 40 Rousseau, On the Social Contract, book II, chap. XI, p. 47. 41 Rousseau, Government of Poland, 173. 42 Rousseau, Government of Poland, 172.

190

Notes to Pages 64–72

43 Denis Diderot, ed., Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers, par une Société de Gens de Lettres. Geneve [Paris & Neufchastel], 1772; 1754–1772. 28 vols. Goldsmiths’ Library, University of London, microfilm reel 994. Volume 12. 44 Jonathan Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2011), 56–92; Georges Minois, Censure et Culture sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 213–217. 45 Quoted in Frank Kafker and Serena Kafker, The Encyclopedists as Individuals: A Biographical Dictionary of the Authors of the Encyclopédie (Oxford:  Voltaire Foundation, 1988), 176. My translation. 46 Wilda Anderson, “Encyclopedic Topologies,” Modern Language Notes 101, 4 (1986): 922; Richard Schwab, “The Extent of the Chevalier de Jaucourt’s Contribution to Diderot’s Encyclopedie,” Modern Language Notes 72, 7 (1957): 507–508. 47 James Doolittle, “Jaucourt’s Use of Source Material in the Encyclopedie,” Modern Language Notes 65, 6 (1950), 387–392. 48 Jean Fabre, “L’article ‘Peuple’ de l’Encyclopédie et le Couple Coyer-Jaucourt,” in Images du Peuple au Dix-huitième Siecle: Colloque d’Aix-en-Provence, 25 et 26 oct. 1969, at the Centre Aixois d’Études et de Recherches sur le Dix-huitième Siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1973), 11–24. 49 Diderot, Encyclopédie, vol. 12, 475. My translation. 50 Diderot, Encyclopédie, vol. 12, 477. 51 Diderot, Encyclopédie, vol. 12, 476. My translation. 52 Diderot, Encyclopédie, vol. 12, 476. 53 Diderot, Encyclopédie, vol. 12, 476. 54 Voltaire, Letter to Damilaville, May 12, 1766 (D13295), in The Complete Works of Voltaire, vol. 114:  Correspondence, ed. T.  Besterman (Banbury, UK:  Voltaire Foundation, 1973), 218–219. 55 Diderot, Encyclopédie, vol. 12, 477. My translation. 56 Diderot, Encyclopédie, vol. 11, 36. 57 Diderot, Encyclopédie, vol. 13, 550. My translations. 58 For instance, the public good is defined as “that which is advantageous to the public or to society.” (My translation; italics in the original.) 59 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd ed., trans. G. E.  M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), § 546. 60 Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 54–57. 61 Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution:  1789–1820 (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1983), 26–27. 62 George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959); The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848 (New York: Wiley, 1964); Colin Lucas, “The Crowd and Politics,” in Colin Lucas, ed., The Political Culture of the French Revolution, vol. 2 of The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, 259–285 (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987). 63 L’Ami des Patriotes, 4 December 1790, in the collected edition of 1791, vol. 1, no. 2, p. 36n1. Newberry Library. 64 Jon Cowans, To Speak for the People: Public Opinion and the Problem of Legitimacy in the French Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2001), chap. 3–4;

Notes to Pages 72–80

65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74 75 76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

191

Keith Baker, “Public Opinion as Political Invention,” in Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century, 167– 199 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Mona Ozouf, “L’Opinion Publique,” in Keith Baker, ed., The Political Culture of the Old Regime, Keith Baker, vol. 1 of The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, 419–434 (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987). Cowans, To Speak for the People, 69. Emmanuel Sieyès, “What Is the Third Estate?” [1789], in Sieyès, Political Writings, Michael Sonenscher, ed., 92-162 (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 94–98. William H. Sewell Jr., A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyes and What is the Third Estate? (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 2–7. Sieyès, “What Is the Third Estate?” 134. Italics in the original. Pasquale Pasquino, Sieyes et l’Invention de la Constitution en France (Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, 1998); Murray Forsyth, Reason and Revolution:  The Political Thought of the Abbé Sieyes (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987). Emmanuel Sieyès, “Préliminaire de la Constitution” [1789], in Écrits Politiques, ed. Roberto Zapperi, 189–206 (Paris: Editions des Archives Contemporaines, 1985), 200. My translation. Emmanuel Sieyès, “An Essay on Privileges,” in Sieyès, Political Writings, Michael Sonenscher, ed., 69–91 (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003). Cf. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976). Emmanuel Sieyès, “Observations sur le Rapport du Comité de Constitution, Concernant la Nouvelle Organisation de la France” [1789], in Sieyès, Écrits Politiques, Roberto Zapperi, ed., 245-271 (Paris:  Editions des Archives Contemporaines, 1985), 247. My translation. Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution, 131. Pierre Rosanvallon, in contrast, characterizes the term as Sieyès’s invention:  Le Peuple Introuvable: Histoire de la Représentation Démocratique en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 36–37. Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution, 45–60. Anonymous, Mémoire sur les Moyens: 1° de Communiquer Sur-le-champ au Peuple, Occupant les Dehors du Lieu où se Tient l’Assemblée, les Délibérations Qui y sont Prises; 2° de se Faire Entendre dans une Grande Assemblée . . . (Paris: Impr. de Vve Hérissant, 30 October 1789). Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Translations from this text are mine. Anonymous, Mémoire sur les Moyens, 2–3. Anonymous, Mémoire sur les Moyens, 3–5. Anonymous, Mémoire sur les Moyens, 6. Anonymous, Mémoire sur les Moyens, 5. Images du Peuple au Dix-huitième Siecle: Colloque d’Aix-en-Provence, 25 et 26 oct. 1969, at the Centre Aixois d’Études et de Recherches sur le Dix-Huitième Siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1973). Anonymous, Mémoire sur les Moyens, 4. Anonymous, Mémoire sur les Moyens, 4. Anonymous, Mémoire sur les Moyens, 2. Jacques Proust, “L’Image du Peuple au Travail dans les Planches de l’Encyclopédie,” in Images du Peuple au Dix-huitième Siecle, 65–85. See note 64.

192

Notes to Pages 81–89

87 Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 88 Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1988), 5, 29, 39, 86, 96, 133, 134, 243–261. 89 Ferdinand Pouy, Histoire des Cocardes Blanches, Noires, Vertes, and Tricolores, 2eme édition (Paris: Baur et Détaille, 1872), 51–52. 90 Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 58–59. 91 Pouy, Histoire des Cocardes, 33. 92 Richard Wrigley, The Politics of Appearances:  Representations of Dress in Revolutionary France (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 102–103. 93 Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, 36–37. 94 Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, 37–39. 95 Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, 33–60. Quotation from p. 58. 96 Assemblée Nationale Constituante de France, Archives Parlementaires de 1787 à 1860, première série, vol. 8, p. 286ff. Hereafter “Archives Parlementaires.” Cf. Keith Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 261–264. Étienne Balibar first attracted my attention to this material: Balibar, We the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 33, 243n4. 97 Archives Parlementaires, vol. 8, 20 août 1789, p. 528. My translation. 98 Archives Parlementaires, vol. 29, 10 Août 1791, p. 325–326. My translation. 99 Archives Parlementaires, vol. 29, 10 Août 1791, p. 330. My translation. 100 Sieyès, “What is the Third Estate?,” 138. 101 Archives Parlementaires, vol. 29, 10 Août 1791, p. 330. My translation. 102 Archives Parlementaires, vol. 29, 10 Août 1791, p. 330. My translation. 103 Archives Parlementaires, vol. 29, 10 Août 1791, p. 330. My translation. Thouret later articulates what we might call a naturalist philosophy of language, saying that he wants inalienability to be understood in “the true, natural, and direct sense of the word,” p. 331. 104 Archives Parlementaires, vol. 29, 10 Août 1791, p. 331. My translation. 105 Title III, art. 1. Reprinted in Les Constitutions de la France depuis 1789 (Paris: Édouard Proux, 1848), 11. My translation. 106 François Furet and Denis Richet, French Revolution (New  York:  Macmillan, 1970), 137–168. 107 Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 59; Pouy, Histoire des Cocardes, 45; Wrigley, The Politics of Appearances, 103–104. 108 Maximilien Robespierre, “Second Discours sur le Jugement de Louis Capet” [speech to the National Convention, December 28, 1792], Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, volume 9 (Paris: Éditions de Miraval, 2007), 183–203. 109 Robespierre, “Second Discours,” 193. My translation. 110 Coyer, Dissertation, 225. See p. 59. 111 Furet and Richet, French Revolution, 170–182, 188–191, 200–201. 112 Preamble to the Constitution of 24 June 1793, entitled Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen. Reprinted in Les Constitutions de la France depuis 1789 (Paris: Édouard Proux, 1848), 44. My translation. 113 Constitution of 24 June 1793, article 7.  Reprinted in Les Constitutions de la France depuis 1789 (Paris: Édouard Proux, 1848), 46. My translation.

Notes to Pages 89–101

193

114 Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, 83–97. 115 Jennifer Harris, “The Red Cap of Liberty:  A  Study of Dress Worn by French Revolutionary Partisans 1789–94,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 14, 3 (1981), 283–312; Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 75–76. 116 Furet and Richet, French Revolution, 206–214. 117 Furet and Richet, French Revolution, 258–262. 118 Preamble to the Constitution of 5 Fructidor, year III (22 août 1795), entitled Déclaration des droits et devoirs de l’homme et du citoyen, articles 17 and 18. Reprinted in Les Constitutions de la France depuis 1789 (Paris: Édouard Proux, 1848), 67. My translation. 119 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer:  Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 176. 120 Reinhart Koselleck and Rolf Reichardt, eds., Die Französische Revolution als Bruch des Gesellschaftlichen Bewußtseins (Munich:  Oldenbourg, 1988); Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past:  On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New  York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 43–57; Alain Rey, “Révolution”: Histoire d’un Mot (Paris:  Éditions Gallimard, 1989); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 193, 197–198; Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, “Sur le Sens du Mot Révolutionnaire” [1793], in Oeuvres de Condorcet, vol. 12 (Paris:  Firmin Didot Frères, 1847), 615–624; Jürgen Habermas, “Popular Sovereignty as Procedure” [1988], in Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 463–490.

5 Chimeras of Political Identity 1 Jean Joseph Mounier, speech before the Constituent Assembly of France, 4 September 1789. Archives Parlementaires de 1787 à 1860, première série, vol. 8, p. 624. 2 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 17–35. 3 Jon Cowans, To Speak for the People: Public Opinion and the Problem of Legitimacy in the French Revolution (New  York:  Routledge, 2001); Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie 1775–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); Jeremy Popkin, Revolutionary News: The Press in France 1789–1799 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990). 4 Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 19–21. 5 Kevin Olson, “Constructing Citizens,” Journal of Politics 70, 1 (2008):  40–53; and “Governmental Rationality and Popular Sovereignty,” Current Perspectives in Social Theory 25 (2008): 329–352. 6 Hesiod, Theogony, lines 319–322, trans. C.  Schlegel and H.  Weinfield (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 33; Homer, Illiad, books 6, 16, trans. Ennis Rees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 119, 328; Hyginus, Fabulae, num.57 (New  York:  Garland, 1976), 22; Ovid, Metamorphoses, bk. VI:339, IX:648, trans. Mary Innes (New York: Penguin, 1970), 143, 220. 7 Étienne Balibar, Citoyen Sujet et Autres Essais d’Anthropologie Philosophique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011), 480.

194

Notes to Pages 101–112

8 Étienne Balibar, “Ambiguous Universality,” in Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene (London: Verso, 2002), 146–176; La Crainte des Masses: Politique et Philosophie Avant et Après Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1997), 337–351; Citoyen Sujet, 465–515. 9 Harold Parker, The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries: A Study in the Development of the Revolutionary Spirit (New York: Octagon, 1965 [1937]). 10 Emmanuel Sieyès, “What Is the Third Estate?” [1789], in Sieyès, Political Writings Michael Sonenscher, ed., 92–162 (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 136. 11 Sieyès, “What is the Third Estate?” 134. 12 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, trans. Donald Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), book I, chap. 1, p. 17. 13 Rousseau, On the Social Contract, book I, chap. 6, p. 24. 14 Rogers Smith, Stories of Peoplehood:  The Politcs and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 64–69, 103–116. 15 Smith, Stories of Peoplehood, 1–7, 103–106, 112. 16 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 178–185. 17 Jason Frank, Constituent Moments:  Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 8. 18 Frank, Constituent Moments, 237–254. 19 Frank, Constituent Moments, 5. 20 Frank, Constituent Moments, 6. 21 Jacques Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” trans. Tom Keenan and Tom Pepper, New Political Science 7, 1 (1986): 7–15. 22 Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” 10. 23 Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 2005), 306. 24 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 80. 25 Cf. Alain Badiou, “Twenty-Four Notes on the Uses of the Word ‘People’,” in Badiou et al., What Is a People? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), notes 18–21. 26 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, part one (New  York: International, 1947), 57. 27 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction:  A  Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), chap.  3; The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 52–65; Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), chap. 2, 4. 28 My thinking here is much indebted to Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 17–19.

6 Sovereign Imaginaries of the Revolutionary Caribbean 1 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 76. 2 C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, rev. ed (New York: Vintage, 1989 [1963]), 47–50.

Notes to Pages 112–116

195

3 Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Haiti, State Against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990). 4 Julius Scott, “The Common Wind:  Currents of Afro-American Communications in the Era of the Haitian Revolution” (PhD diss. Duke University, 1986), 68–69; Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 47–52. 5 There was a wide array of terms for mixed-race people in Saint-Domingue. They preferred gens de couleur (people of color) over sang-mêlé (mixed-blood) or more “precise” terms like mulâtre (mulatto). I will follow that preference here. As awkward as it is, I  will use the term without translation to avoid confusion. The English equivalents “colored” or “people of color” carry strong resonances of contemporary racial discourse that would be highly misleading in this context. 6 Malick Ghachem, “The ‘Trap’ of Representation:  Sovereignty, Slavery, and the Road to the Haitian Revolution,” Historical Reflections 29, 1 (2003):  123–144; Saint-Victor Jean-Baptiste, Haïti, Sa Lutte pour l’Émancipation:  Deux Concepts d’Indépendance à Saint-Domingue (Paris: Nef de Paris, 1957). 7 Anon. [Charles de Bleschamps], Essai sur l’Administration des Colonies Françoises et Particulièrement d’une Partie de Celles de Saint-Domingue (Paris: Monory, 1788). Cf. John Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 266ff. 8 In the estimate of the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois. Quoted in Prosper Boissonnade, Saint-Domingue à la Veille de la Révolution et la Question de la Représentation Coloniale aux États Généraux (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1906), 69–71. 9 Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 75. 10 Boissonnade, Saint-Domingue à la Veille de la Révolution, 30–43. 11 David Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 2002), 157–170. 12 Jean-Baptiste, Haïti, 88–98. 13 Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, 161. 14 Gabriel Debien, Esprit Colon et Esprit d’Autonomie à Saint-Domingue au XVIIIieme Siècle, 2nd ed. (Paris: Larose, 1954). 15 The stages of this process are recorded during April and May 1790 in the “Extrait des Registres de l’Assemblée Générale de la Partie François de Saint-Domingue,” Archives Nationales de France, series D, subseries XXV, carton 59, dossiers 583–584. Hereafter cited as AN D/XXV/59/583–584. 16 Décret de l’Assemblée générale de la partie françoise de Saint-Domingue, rendu à l’unanimité, en sa séance du 28 mai 1790. Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Manuscript version “Extrait des Registres” 28 mai 1790, AN D/XXV/59/584. 17 Quoted in Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville, Discours de J.P. Brissot, député, sur les causes des troubles de Saint-Domingue: prononcé à la séance du premier décembre 1791 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, no date [1791?]), 16. Newberry Library.

196

Notes to Pages 117–122

18 Décret de l’Assemblée générale . . . du 28 mai 1790, p. 4. 19 Assemblée Nationale de France, Archives Parlementaires de 1787 à 1860, première série, vol. 12 (March 8, 1790): 71–72. 20 Jason Frank, Constituent Moments:  Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), passim. 21 Adolphe Cabon, Un Siècle et Demi de Journalisme en Haïti (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1940); M. -A. Ménier and G. Debien, “Journaux de Saint-Domingue,” Revue d’Histoire des Colonies 36 (1949): 424–475. 22 John Garrigus, Before Haiti:  Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 185–186. 23 Julien Raimond, Observations sur l’Origine et les Progrés [sic] du Préjugé des Colons Blancs contre les Hommes de Couleur (Paris: Belin, 1791), 10. 24 Fick, The Making of Haiti, 79. 25 Garrigus, Before Haiti, 205, 217. 26 Garrigus, Before Haiti, 67, 236–263. 27 Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988), 169–170. 28 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 92. 29 Letter from Dubourg and Savary to the National Assembly, 2 February 1792, AN D/XXV/110/868. 30 “Les commissaires conciliateurs des citoyens blancs . . . L’artibonite 15 avril 1792, à l’assemblée coloniale,” AN D/XXV/110/867. 31 See, for example, Dubourg and Savary, Letter to the National Assembly, 2 February 1792, AN D/XXV/110/868; “Adresse à l’Assemblée-Nationale, pour les Citoyens-Libres de Couleur . . .,” 18 Octobre 1789, signed de Joly, Raymond [i.e., Raimond], Ogé, etc., AN D/XXV/110/876. 32 Dubourg and Savary, Letter to the National Assembly. 33 Inter alia, “Adresse à l’Assemblée-Nationale,” cited in note 31; “À messieurs les membres de l’assemblée Nationale à Paris,” 16 Novembre 1791, AN D/XXV/110/867; “À la croix des Bouquets, le 10 Janvier 1792,” AN D/XXV/110/867; “Copie de la réponse des comméssaires des parroisses des provinces de l’Ouest et du Sud, réunnis à la Croix-des-Bouquets, à la première lettre de MM les commessaires nationaux-civils,” 20 janvier 1792, AN D/XXV/110/873. 34 Raimond, “Assertions Contenues dans les Lettres de Raimond du 4 Mars à 21 Octobre 1791,” AN D/XXV/56/549. 35 Nancy Fraser, “Reframing Justice in a Globalizing World,” in Nancy Fraser, Adding Insult to Injury: Nancy Fraser Debates Her Critics, ed. Kevin Olson (London: Verso, 2008), 273–291. 36 Garrigus, Before Haiti, 218. 37 Kevin Olson, “Participatory Parity and Democratic Justice,” in Nancy Fraser, Adding Insult to Injury:  Nancy Fraser Debates Her Critics, ed. Kevin Olson (London: Verso, 2008), 246–272. 38 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 226–256. 39 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 47–65; The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (London: Verso, 1998).

Notes to Pages 122–128

197

40 Augustin Cochin, Les Sociétés de Pensée et la Démocratie Moderne (Paris: Copernic, 1978). 41 Frank, Constituent Moments, 8, 32–34. 42 David Geggus’s analysis of these dynamics is particularly acute. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, 81–92. 43 Dubois, Colony of Citizens, 379–382. 44 Toussaint Louverture, Lettres à la France:  Idées pour la Liberation du Peuple Noir d’Haïti (1794–1798), ed. Antonio Maria Baggio and Ricardo Augustin (Bruyères-le-Chatel, France: Nouvelle Cité, 2011). 45 David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity:  The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 46 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), chap. 3, esp. p. 82. 47 Carolyn E. Fick, “Dilemmas of Emancipation: From the Saint Domingue Insurrections of 1791 to the Emerging Haitian State,” History Workshop Journal 46 (Autumn, 1998): 7–8; Fick, Making of Haiti, 144–5. 48 Sidney W. Mintz, Caribbean Transformations (Chicago: Aldine, 1974), 184–194. 49 Fick, Making of Haiti, 180–181; Laurent Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (New York: Picador, 2013), 6, 33. 50 Mintz, Caribbean Transformations, 154–156. His term is “westernization.” 51 Yvan Debbasch, “Le Marronnage:  Essai sur la Désertion de l’Esclave Antillais,” L’Année Sociologique 12 (1961): 1–112. 52 Jean Casimir, La Culture Opprimée (Delmas, Haïti: Lakay, 2001), 115. 53 M. L.  E. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description Topographique, Physique, Civile, Politique et Historique de la Partie Française de l’Isle Saint-DomingueI, 3rd ed. 3 vols. (Saint-Denis, France: Société Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer, 2004 [1796]), II: 1131–1136; Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, 3rd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 54 Fick, Making of Haiti, 61. 55 Yvan Debbasch, “Le Marronnage, seconde partie: La Société Coloniale Contre le Marronnage,” L’Année Sociologique 13 (1962): 117–195, at 117–119. 56 Dubois, Colony of Citizens, 87–88; Casimir, La Culture Opprimée, 117. 57 Moreau de St. Méry, Description I, 64–69; John K. Thornton, “‘I Am the Subject of the King of Congo’:  African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of World History 4, 2 (Fall, 1993), 181–214, esp. 200; Fick, Making of Haiti, 103. 58 Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, 81–92. 59 Casimir, La Culture Opprimée, 110–120. 60 Casimir, La Culture Opprimée, 114. 61 Anon., My Odyssey: Experiences of a Young Refugee from Two Revolutions, by a Creole of Saint Domingue, trans. Althéa de Puech Parham (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959), 34. 62 For all of the epistemic and interpretive reasons given here, I am much less inclined to accept the story at face value than have other commentators. Compare, e.g., Fick, Making of Haiti, 110–111. 63 Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 57–59, 60, 75, 81; Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca:  Cornell University

198

64 65 66 67 68 69

70

71 72 73

74

75 76 77 78

Notes to Pages 128–134 Press, 1988), 110, 142, 165; Nicole Pellegrin, Les Vêtements de la Liberté: Abécédaire des Pratiques Vestimentaires en France de 1780 à 1800 (Aix-en-Provence:  Alinea, 1989), 118; Ferdinand Pouy, Histoire des Cocardes Blanches, Noires, Vertes, and Tricolores, 2eme édition (Paris:  Baur et Détaille, 1872), 33, 45, 49–50; Richard Wrigley, The Politics of Appearances: Representations of Dress in Revolutionary France (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 102–103. Scott, “The Common Wind,” 168–169; Dubois, Colony of Citizens, 93 Julien Raimond, “Assertions Extraits de la Correspondance de Raimond,” compiled by the Comité de la Marine et des Colonies. AN D/XXV/56/549. My translation. Quoted in Pierre de Vassière, Saint-Domingue: La Société et la Vie Créoles sous l’Ancien Régime, 1629–1789 (Paris: Perrin, 1908), 368. My translations. Anon., “Mémoire historique des dernières révolutions des Provinces de l’Ouest et du Sud, de la partie Française de St. Domingue . . .,” no date, AN D/ XXV/110/872, p. 3. I continue this line of thought in greater detail in “Epistemologies of Rebellion: The Tricolor Cockade and the Problem of Subaltern Speech,” Political Theory 43, 6 (2015): 730–752. Rogers Smith, Stories of Peoplehood:  The Politcs and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1–7, 103–106, 112; Linda Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2; Jason Frank, Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), passim. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Médéric Louis Elie, Considérations Présentées aux Vrais Amis du Repos et du Bonheur de la France: à l’Occasion des Nouveaux Mouvemens de Quelques Soi-Disant Amis-des-Noirs (Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1791), 3–4. Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 42–47. Jeremy Popkin, You Are All Free:  The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 289–326. E.g. Henri Grégoire, letter to the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, 2 March 1802, reprinted in Dorigny and Gainto, La Société des Amis des Noirs, 1788–1799 (Editions Unesco/EDICEF), 395–396; Julien Raimond, “Assertions contenues dans les lettres de Raimond du 4 mars à 21 octobre 1791,” AN D/XXV/56/549. Brissot, Discours sur les Causes des Troubles de Saint-Domingue; Brissot, Discours sur un Projet de Décret Relatif a la Révolte des Noirs: Prononcé a l’Assemblée Nationale, le 30 Octobre 1791 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1791). Newberry Library. Cabon, Journalisme en Haïti. See also Moreau de St. Méry, Description I, 493–496. Moniteur Général de la Partie Française de Saint-Domingue (Cap Français), Prospectus, no date [c. Nov 1791]. Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Moniteur Général, Prospectus. Mona Ozouf, “La Révolution Française et l’Idée de l’Homme Nouveau,” in Colin Lucas, ed., The Political Culture of the French Revolution, vol. 2 of The French

Notes to Pages 134–145

79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

199

Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, 213–232 (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987). Scott, “The Common Wind,” chap. 1–2. Scott, “The Common Wind,” 81. Affiches américaines (supplément) 7 juillet 1790. Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, 69–80. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra:  Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 241–286, quote on 241. In relative terms, anyway. “Breaking news” of the storming of the Bastille appeared in the principal Saint-Domingue paper Affiches Américaines a full three months later, on October 14, 1789. Scott, “The Common Wind,” 130. Scott, “The Common Wind,” 146–158. Dubois, Colony of Citizens, 85–86, 105–108; David Geggus, “Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean, 1789–1815,” in D. B. Gaspar and D. Geggus, ed., A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, 5–15. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). Félix Carteau, Soirées Bermudiennes, ou Entretiens sur les Événemens qui ont Opéré la Ruine de la Partie Française de l’Île St.-Domingue (Bordeaux:  Pellier-Lawalle, 1802), 75–77. Le Patriote François, ed. J. -P. Brissot de Warville, 138 (December 24, 1789), 3–4. Le Patriote François, 117 (December 3, 1789), 138 (December 24, 1789), 144 (December 30, 1789); Archives Parlementaires 11 (1789): 38, 710. Le Patriote François 144 (December 30, 1789): 4. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 31–43. Cf. Nancy Fraser, “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere,” in Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World, 76–99 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). Cf. Judith Butler, “‘We, the People’: Thoughts on Freedom of Assembly,” in Alain Badiou et al., What is a People? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). Anderson, Imagined Communities, 24–36, 62–63.

7 Conscripted by Modernity? 1 Toussaint Louverture, letter to Napoléon from the dungeon of Fort Joux, 30 Fructidor, an XI (Sept 17, 1802). Reprinted in John Relly Beard. Toussaint L’Ouverture: A Biography and Autobiography, 279 (Boston: James Redpath, 1863). 2 Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge: Polity, 1987). 3 Consider, for instance, Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, rev. ed. (New  York: Penguin, 2006). 4 David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity:  The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint

200

5 6 7

8

9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Notes to Pages 146–157 L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1989 [1938/1963]). Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, 168. S. N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129, 1 (2000): 1–31. Charles Taylor, “Two Theories of Modernity,” Public Culture 11, 1 (1999): 153– 174; Charles Taylor, “Modernity and Difference,” in P. Gilroy, L. Grossberg, and A. McRobbie, ed., Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall, 364–374 (London: Verso, 2000). This is, in fact, Hegel’s position in the famous master-and-slave dialectic of the Phenomenology of Spirit. That is not surprising, since that passage was arguably inspired by the Haitian Revolution. Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, 196–198. Talal Asad, “Conscripts of Western Civilization,” in Christine Gailey, ed., Dialectical Anthropology, v. 1, 333–351 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992), 340. John Garrigus, Before Haiti:  Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 308–310. Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, 8 vols. (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1989 [1847]), vol. 3:  144–145; David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier:  Race, Colour, and National Independence in Haiti (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1979), 36. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, “Proclamation du Général en Chef au Peuple d’Haïti,” January 1, 1804. Reprinted in Lois et Actes sous le Regne de Jean Jacques Dessalines (Port-au-Prince: Presses Nationales d’Haiti, 2006), 8–11. My translation. Garrigus, Before Haiti, 310. Deborah Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 122–160. Garrigus, Before Haiti, 311, citing Madiou, Histoire 3: 546–553. Constitution Impériale d’Haïti, 20 Mai 1805, Art. 1.  Reprinted in Louis-Joseph Janvier, Les Constitutions d’Haïti (1801–1885), 2 vols. (Paris: Flammarion, 1886), 31. My translation. Janvier, Constitutions d’Haïti, 40. Reinhart Koselleck and Rolf Reichardt, eds., Die Französische Revolution als Bruch des Gesellschaftlichen Bewußtseins (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1988). Constitution Impériale d’Haïti, 20 Mai 1805, Art. 18. Janvier, Constitutions d’Haïti, 32. Constitution Impériale d’Haïti, 20 Mai 1805, Dispositions Générales, Art. 28. Janvier, Constitutions d’Haïti, 40. Constitution Impériale d’Haïti, 20 Mai 1805, Art. 14. Janvier, Constitutions d’Haïti, 32. My translation. Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, 45–160. Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, 170–171. Constitution d’Haïti, Revisée au Grand-Goâve le 2 Juin 1816, an XIII de l’Indépendence, article 16. Reprinted in Janvier, Constitutions d’Haïti, 114.

Notes to Pages 157–173

201

27 Preamble to the [French] Constitution of 5 Fructidor, year III (22 août 1795), also known as La Déclaration des droits et devoirs de l’homme et du citoyen de 1795. See earlier discussion in Chapter 4. 28 Constitution d’Haïti de 1816. Janvier, Constitutions d’Haïti, 116. 29 Constitution d’Haïti de 1816. Janvier, Constitutions d’Haïti, 117. 30 F. E. Dubois, Précis Historique de la Révolution Haïtien de 1843 (Paris: Bourdier, 1866), 131ff. 31 Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, 8:40. 32 Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, 8:48. 33 République Haïtienne, Constitution de 1843. Reprinted in Janvier, Constitutions d’Haïti, 155. 34 République Haïtienne, Constitution de 1843. Janvier, Constitutions d’Haïti, 160. 35 Jacques Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” trans. Tom Keenan and Tom Pepper, New Political Science 7, 1 (1986), 7–15; Judith Butler, “‘We, the People’: Thoughts on Freedom of Assembly,” in Alain Badiou et  al., What is a People? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). Also see Chapter 6. 36 Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988), 260. 37 Kevin Olson, “Constructing Citizens,” Journal of Politics 70, 1 (2008): 40–53. 38 I have undertaken this project in microcosm in “Epistemologies of Rebellion: The Tricolor Cockade and the Problem of Subaltern Speech,” Political Theory 43, 6 (2015): 730–752. 39 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (New York: Vintage, 1990); The History of Sexuality, vol. 3: The Care of the Self (New York: Vintage, 1988); The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–1983 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 40 Kevin Olson, “Governmental Rationality and Popular Sovereignty,” Current Perspectives in Social Theory 25 (2008): 329–352.

8 Imagining the Power of the People 1 Carl Schmitt, “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations” [1929], trans. Matthias Konzett and John McCormick, in The Concept of the Political, expanded ed., 80–96 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 85. 2 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1949), 16–23. 3 Schmitt, “Age of Neutralizations,” 87. 4 Respectively, Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large:  Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 161; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:  Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), chap. 4. 5 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology:  Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 6 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998 [1958]), 222–225, 235, 240, 243–247; On Revolution, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 2006), 214–215; Patchen Markell, “The Rule of the People: Arendt, Archê, and Democracy,” American Political Science Review (2006): 1–14.

202

Notes to Pages 176–181

7 Arendt, The Human Condition, 175–188, 199–210. 8 Jason Frank, Constituent Moments:  Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 9 William Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 1993), 53–57; Bonnie Honig, “Between Decisionism and Deliberation: Political Paradox in Democratic Theory,” American Political Science Review 101, 1 (2007):  1–17; and Emergency Politics:  Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Alan Keenan, Democracy in Question: Democratic Openness in a Time of Political Closure (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Frank Michelman, “How Can the People Ever Make the Laws? A  Critique of Deliberative Democracy,” in James Bohman and William Rehg, ed., Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London:  Verso, 2000); Paulina Ochoa Espejo, The Time of Popular Sovereignty: Process and the Democratic State (University Park:  Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011); Kevin Olson, “Paradoxes of Constitutional Democracy,” American Journal of Political Science 51, 2 (2007):  330–343; and “Reflexive Democracy as Popular Sovereignty,” in Boudewijn de Bruin and Christopher Zurn, ed., New Waves in Political Philosophy, (London: Palgrave, 2009), 125–142. 10 Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 7–9. 11 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 3–13. 12 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” rev. ed., in Rosalind Morris, ed., Can the Subaltern Speak: Reflections on the History of an Idea, 21–78 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 13 Arendt, On Revolution, 247–273; The Human Condition, 212–220; Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1985). 14 Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire:  History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2006). 15 James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed:  An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 16 Étienne Balibar, We the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2004); Jürgen Habermas, Europe: The Faltering Project (Cambridge:  Polity, 2009); The Crisis of the European Union: A Response, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2012).

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Index

abolition (of slavery), 133, 135–136, 138 Agamben, Giorgio, 90–91 agency, subaltern, 147–148 Anderson, Benedict, 12, 25–29, 41, 92, 97, 102–103, 122, 142, 172 collective imagination and, 107 contrasts with Ernesto Laclau, 27–28, 36–38 contrasts with Michel Foucault, 29 materiality of the imagination and, 27 post-Westphalian community, 28 sovereignty and, 35–36 Arab Spring, 1, 3, 178 archival silence, 125, 128 archives, 5, 27, 124–125, 180, 181 of anticolonial struggle, 181 eighteenth century France, 16 Haitian constitutional, 16 Haitian Revolution, 16 issues of interpretation, and, 127–130 of popular politics, 15–17, 180–182 Arendt, Hannah, 49, 173 performativity and, 176 Asad, Talal, 149–150 Balibar, Étienne, 10, 16, 101 Bellarmine, Robert, 8 Boisrond-Tonnerre, Louis, 151–153 Bonaparte, Napoléon, 154 Boukman rebellion, 124, 127 Bourdieu, Pierre, 59, 107 Brissot, Jacques-Pierre, 119, 123, 136 Brown, Wendy, 13–14, 53 Buck-Morss, Susan, 133

Casimir, Jean, 127 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 16, 40–43 critique of structuralism, 41–42 Jacques Lacan and, 40 political imaginaries, 39 radical imagination, 144–145 similarities with Benedict Anderson, 41 censorship, 57 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 48 chimera, 98–99, 101, 107, 168, 174, 175 citizenship, 81, 101, 106, 110, 146, 155 double meaning of, 158 French, 90 Haitian, 158–161 post-Westphalian, 160, 161–162, 163 racial character of, 157, 158, 161–162 unstable character of, 161–162 cockade, tricolor, 81–82, 87, 128–129, 132, 138 Code Noir, 120 collectivity analogy with individual, 22, 62, 73 forms of, 19 problematic character of, 55 relation to normativity, 15 universal, 10 Constitution of 1791 (France), 83–86, 100, 107 Constitution of 1793 (France), 88–89, 90 Constitution of 1795 (France), 90, 106, 157 Constitution of 1816 (Haiti), 157–158 Constitution of 1843 (Haiti), 158–161 Constitution, Haitian Imperial, of 1805, 153–156

215

216 costume, national, 89–90 Coyer, Gabriel-François, 45, 59–61, 62, 63, 64–65, 66–67, 68–71, 87, 90–91, 97, 101, 104, 105, 107 Damiens the regicide, 58 David, Jacques-Louis, 89–90 Declaration of the Rights of Man, 83–86, 88–89, 117, 120, 153 Derrida, Jacques, 50, 53, 103 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 151–153, 154, 156–157 dogmas of popular politics, 7, 13 collective political identity, 9–10 folk foundationalism, 7–9 revolutionism, 10–11 Westphalianism, 11–13 Dubois, Laurent, 17 Engels, Frederick, 106 Enlightenment, 109, 110 implicit racial character of, 155–156 relation of Haiti to, 162 tragedy of colonial, 146, 163–166 Eurocentrism, 10, 108–109, 145 Europe, 4, 17, 54, 121, 122, 133, 134, 135, 141, 181 people of Europe, 2 European Union, 181 ambiguous sovereignty of, 2 festivals, revolutionary, 82–83, 89 Filmer, Robert, 6 folk foundationalism, 7–9, 20, 49 in democratic theory, 9 and subaltern agency, 147–148 forgetting, 108 Foucault, Michel anticolonial struggle, 148 collective action, 165 collective identity, 96 collective self-government, 51–53 colonial modernity, 164–165 contrasts with Charles Taylor, 49 contrasts with Cornelius Castoriadis, 49 dismissal of sovereignty, 50–53 governmentality, 165 Hobbes’ Leviathan, 39 incitement to discourse, 95–96 materiality, 16 political imaginaries, 16, 39, 48 problematization, 15, 16 founding, 10, 173

Index Frank, Jason, 11, 16, 103, 118, 123, 130, 176 Fraser, Nancy, 121 French Revolution, 71, 91, 98, 109, 142, 204 anti-colonial revolution and, 109 idea of regeneration and, 134 ideals of, 16, 109, 112, 127, 128, 129, 157 ideological influence of, 150, 163 as ideological threat, 128 mythology of, 109 in the political imagination, 54 power of the people and, 142, 151 race and, 132 relation to Haitian Revolution, 110, 114, 116, 129, 145 rhetoric of, 159 Rousseau’s role in, 44–46 as rupture with the past, 91, 154, 174 symbolic aspects, 107, 128, 132 General Assembly of Saint-Domingue (1790), 116, 118 general will, 62, 63, 71, 73, 101 and Haiti, 153 habituation, 106–108 Haiti constitutional history, 5 as an empire, 154 proclamation of independence, 151–153 as Westphalian state, 175 Haitian Revolution, 5, 17, 110, 111, 124, 133, 137, 156 ideological roots, 112 material roots, 112 relation to French Revolution, 145 Hobbes, Thomas, 167 composition of sovereignty and, 18 rhetorical difficulties, 20 Honig, Bonnie, 16, 53 Hunt, Lynn, 71, 80, 96 identity, collective, 19 as dogma, 9–10 formation of, 141 problems of, 154 imaginary agrarian-anti-slavery, 124–131 Castoriadis’ conception of, 40–43 deprived-fraction, 55, 58–60, 68–70, 91, 92 eighteenth century French, 56 existential force of, 170–173 Foucault’s conception of, 48

Index Lacan’s conception of, 40 material character of, 27, 40–41 political, 39–40 popular-universalist, 56, 70, 72, 86, 92, 99–100, 155, 170, 179 relations between, 146 Taylor’s conception of, 43–44, 47 transitions between, 69–71, 92 imagined sovereignty analogy to imagined community, 38, 97, 172 existential force, 171–172 incitement to discourse, 14, 93, 94–96 incitement to practice, 96 Internet, 2, 138 intersectionality, 113–115 James, C. L. R., 146, 148–149, 163, 165 Jaucourt, Louis de, 45, 64–67, 68–71, 97, 101, 104, 105 Lacan, Jacques, 29–33, 40 Laclau, Ernesto, 21–25 contrasts with Benedict Anderson, 36–38 despatialization of political identity, 23 displacement of normativity, 24 dissolution of identity, 24–25 epistemic sophistication, 23–24 Jacques Lacan and, 29–33 normativity and, 33–35 virtualization of political identity, 23 Law of 1685. See Code Noir Louverture, Toussaint, 124, 125, 144, 146, 148–149, 150, 151, 156, 163, 165 marronage, 126–127, 131, 135, 138, 139 Martel, James, 53 Marx, Karl, 106 Megaphone of the People. See Porte-Voix du Peuple Mills, Charles, 17 Mintz, Sidney, 126 Mobile Speaking Seat. See Siège Orale Mobile modernity alternative, 148 conscription by, 151, 156–157, 162–163, 165–166 dilemmas of, 147 European, and anticolonial rebellion, 146 Haiti and, 156–157 improvised, 162–163, 164–165 political imagination and, 166 slavery and, 147

217 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de, 62, 64, 118, 132 nationalism, 12, 25, 26, 27, 28, 36, 122 new beginnings, 10, 173 normativity relation to collectivity, 15 normatization, 100–105, 137, 143 collective identity and, 98 discursive character of, 97–98, 112 forgetting and, 108 habituation and, 106–108 history of, 111 material character of, 81–83, 112, 130, 131 narrative techniques of, 147 performative character of, 112, 140, 175–178 racial character of, 132 relation to publicity, 112, 140 spatial character of, 104–105, 174–175 symbolic character of, 81–83, 130 temporal character of, 101–104, 131, 173–174 through association, 105 universality and, 100–101 Occupy Wall Street, 1 Ochoa Espejo, Paulina, 16 Ozouf, Mona, 82–83 paradox of the people, 63–64, 177–178 Pascal, Blaise, 62 people, the abstract character of, 74–81 common, 9 as a construction, 20 Haitian, 113–115, 152–156, 161 normative character of, 9–10, 161 as political creation, 19 as representational fiction, 19 suffering, 9 as universal, 9 voice of, 10 People’s Screen. See Tableau Populaire performativity, 121, 123, 129, 139–140, 175–178 relation to publicity, 137 as self-referential politics, 176 Porte-Voix du Peuple, 75–81 power of the people, 1, 9, 11, 12, 14, 16, 19, 23, 41, 43, 49, 52, 53, 55, 56, 69, 72, 93, 94, 97, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 150, 160, 167, 169, 172 as basis of democracy, 7

218 power of the people (cont.) in Benedict Anderson’s work, 28 conflicts with other beliefs, 3 discursive character of, 168 epistemic aspects, 2 existential force, 171–172 as folk paradigm, 5–7 French Revolution and, 142 heterogeneity of, 167 history of, 15 as imagined sovereignty, 171 legitimacy and, 3, 13 nation and, 13 naturalized, 7 as normative, 8, 14–15, 38 as paradox, 177–178 performative aspects, 175 political imagination and, 2 populism and, 3 as practice, 168 related ideas, 9 as revolution, 10 symbolic aspects, 2 taken-for-granted ideas about, 182 universalism and, 10 power, constituent, 14, 52, 53, 73, 84, 85, 97, 98, 112, 169, 170 existential force of, 171 problematic of the people, 55, 56, 62, 70, 71, 73, 79, 80, 91, 94–98, 100, 106, 109, 143, 159, 160 incitement to discourse and, 95 problematization, 100, 108, 112 and conceptual innovation, 145 as critique, 168–170 public, 10, 80 public sphere, 96, 107, 122, 123, 132–137, 140, 141, 142 abolitionist, 138 decoupled, 135, 137, 141, 142 material character of, 70–71, 138 multilingual, 133, 135 phantasmatic, 136–137, 142 spatial character of, 80 technical innovations in, 74–81 transnational, 137 publicity as discursive justification, 153 relation to performativity, 137 race, 132 intersection with class, 113–114 intersection with nativity, 113–115

Index Raimond, Julien, 119, 121–124, 129, 133, 138, 139, 176 republicanism, French, 17, 109, 128, 130, 132 revolutionism, 10–11, 173–174 rights of man, 117, 120, 121, 124, 127, 131–132, 142, 153, 155, 161 Robespierre, Maximillian, 45, 83–84, 87–88, 90, 97, 105 romanticism about subaltern agency, 147–148 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1, 60–64, 69–71, 91, 97, 102 role in French Revolution, 44–46 rumor, 128, 141 Santner, Eric, 53, 62 Schmitt, Carl, 50, 53, 167, 170–171, 172 Scott, David, 47, 125, 146–151, 156, 163–166, 179 Scott, James, 181 Siège Orale Mobile, 75–81 Sieyès, Emmanuel, 72–74, 83, 84–85, 97, 101–102, 104 Smith, Rogers, 102, 130 Société des Amis des Noirs, 119, 122, 133, 136 sovereign imaginary as accumulation of meaning, 139, 140, 171–172, 174, 177 analogy to chimera, 98–99 defined, 94 democratic, 175 discursive character of, 107 epistemic freedom and, 145, 150–151 existential force, 171–172 in formation, 133 issues of interpretation and, 130 material character of, 107, 130 monarchical, 174 naturalization and, 94 performativity in, 175–178 publicity and, 134 racial character of, 132 spatial character of, 131, 174–175 temporal character of, 131, 173–174 tensions between, 111 Westphalian, 174–175 sovereignty, popular as category mistake, 168 connections with collective identity, 38 in eighteenth-century France, 108 Eurocentrism of, 145 Foucault’s dismissal of, 50, 51–53 foundationalism and, 9

Index in the French Constitution, 88 history of popular politics, as element of, 53 idea of the people and, 54 naturalization of, 108 normativity of, 9, 14, 150 as panacea, 180 as political imaginary, 14, 171 postcolonial, 149, 151 problematization of, 14, 112, 169 reflexive character of, 61 relation to collective identity, 98 relation to monarchical sovereignty, 18–19 relation to popular culture, 118 Rousseau’s conception of, 45, 46 Taylor’s analysis of, 44 temporal aspects, 103 tensions within, 19, 44, 96, 100 Westphalian state and, 12, 104, 175 Spivak, Gayatri, 179 Suárez, Francisco, 8 Tableau Populaire, 75–81 Tackett, Timothy, 45 Taylor, Charles, 16, 43–47, 56, 70, 148 conception of social imaginary, 43–44, 47 political imaginaries, 39 role of theory, 46–47 Tea Party movement, 1, 169, 178 Terror, the, 90 tragedy, 163–166 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 125, 130

219 universalism in the agrarian-anti-slavery imaginary, 132 ambiguities of, 92 black, 162 chimerical, 168 citizenship and, 88–89, 157 Eurocentrism of, 109 false, 37 French, 160 genealogy of, 101 in Haiti, 155–157 implicit racial character of, 132, 155–156 Kantian conception of, 123 of the nation, 87 national unification and, 73–74 normativity of, 100–101 of Occupy Wall Street movement, 1 pan-African, 161–162 pan-Caribbean, 161–162 political collectivity and, 9 as political imaginary, 99–100 popular, 91 problematic character of, 10 racial, 158 social identity and, 113 sovereignty and, 84–85 tensions within, 161–162 Westphalian state and, 12 Westphalianism, 11–13, 67, 104, 174–175 Zerilli, Linda, 130