Jason Frank's rich and engaging book, The Democratic Sublime: On Aesthetic and Popular Assembly, picks up and extends questions and interventions he first introduced in his 2010 book Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America. There he argued, “the people are a political claim, an act of political subjectification, not a pre-given, unified, or naturally bounded empirical entity” (Frank 2010: 3). He turned in particular to moments when “the underauthorized—imposters, radicals, self-created entities” claimed the mantle of authorization to speak in the name of the people even as they rejected the institutionalized channels of popular representation (ibid.: 8). The aesthetic dimension of these practices—of what Frank now calls the “people out of doors” (20)—was already suggested in that text. In the introduction, for example, he offered a close reading of an engraving by Polish artist Daniel Chadoweicki, which depicted the burning of British stamps in Boston in 1765. “The image,” Frank wrote there, “graphically suggests that the people, while requiring an observable representation to be, also exceeded the confines of any given representation” (Reference FrankFrank 2010: 23). Chadoweicki's engraving dramatized the boundaries that constitutes the assembly of individuals into a collective, even as it illustrated the contestation and potential expansion of the people in its inclusion of a young African boy and a white woman within the image's frame.

I start with Frank's earlier engagement with this image because it already signals an interest in the ritualistic, spectacular, and pedagogical practices through which the self-created authority of the people was imagined and enacted. With The Democratic Sublime, Frank makes central this aesthetic-political problem of envisioning the people and their will. Surveying the wider terrain of the transition from monarchical to popular sovereignty in the Age of Revolutions, Frank examines the practices through which an assemblage of individuals is transformed into an empowered people. In doing so, he makes three significant contributions to democratic theory specifically, and political theory more broadly. First and most importantly, Frank opens up a foreclosed line of inquiry into the aesthetic dimensions of democratic politics. If the aestheticization of politics is associated with monarchy and fascism and thereby taken to be the antithesis of democratic politics, Frank shows how democracy generates a distinctive set of dilemmas of envisioning the people's sovereignty. His point is not simply that there is also a democratic aesthetics, but instead that popular sovereignty heightens the need for aesthetic strategies that make the people's power visible, tangible, and sensible. This is because, as Frank puts it, citing Remo Bodei, “the people do not enjoy the privilege of correspondence between the physical and political body” (4). Both the people's “concrete material existence as well as their continuous persistence across time” require the exercise of political imagination (4).

Second and relatedly, Frank's concern with how the people and their political power become tangible shifts democratic theory's preoccupation with who the people are to foreground the question of “how individuals come to experience/feel themselves as a part of the mobilized and empowered collectivity in the first place” (95; emphasis added). Where democratic theory's “boundary problem” has been concerned with the characteristics that demarcate the people and the exclusions that attend any definition of the people, Frank asks us to consider the strategies by which identification with and attachment to a collective agent called the people is enacted. In taking up this question, Frank alerts us to the work of engendering a reverential and democratic self-regard. That is, individuals have to not only see themselves as a part of a collective agent but have to recognize themselves in the political power that that agent wields. If the boundary problem examines the constitutive exclusions of the people and thus looks at the people from without, this approach considers the internally generated and experimental practices through which a sense of peoplehood is produced. This viewpoint allows us to consider how “competing strategies of envisioning popular will were implicated in different conceptions of popular agency and power” (25), a point to which I will return.

Third, to unearth the long-neglected strategies and practices of envisioning popular will, Frank also expands the canon of democratic theory and asks us to reimagine what might count as a text of/for political theory. The effort to distinguish democracy first from the iconography of monarchy and later from fascist aestheticization contributed to a disavowal of a democratic aesthetics in the writings of early democrats like Thomas Paine as well as among contemporary democratic theorists from Jürgen Habermas to Claude Lefort. In the face of this studied neglect of the aesthetic dimensions of democratic representation within democratic theory, Frank turns to a counterintuitive resource—democracy's critics and skeptics. For instance, Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville, each the subject of a chapter in The Democratic Sublime, perceptively recognize the enthralling appearance of popular sovereignty and serve as guides in Frank's efforts to disinter the enduring practices of popular assembly. The enlistment of democracy's critics in its theorization highlights an unexpected appreciation for the democratic sublime.

Similarly and in a larger departure for the field of political theory, Frank draws on Victor Hugo's Les Misérables to reconstruct what he calls the poetics of the barricade and engages the work of contemporary visual artist Glenn Ligon to query the boundaries between identification/disidentification, visibility/evanescence that attend instances of popular manifestations. Frank does not direct explicit attention to this expansive range of texts, but it suggests that posing new questions about democratic politics, and especially ones that are concerned with its aesthetic dimensions, requires more sustained engagements with a visual and literary archive.

Together, these interventions mark The Democratic Sublime as a field-defining book that maps the conceptual and political questions opened by an examination of popular manifestation as a central practice of democratic politics. In an effort to explore further directions in this new terrain, we might consider how different models of popular assembly and manifestation enact competing or alternative conceptions of the democratic sublime. As I noted above, Frank's framework focuses us on how individuals come to sense and feel themselves as part of an empowered collective. How do different forms of assembly stage and enact the individual's relationship to the empowered collectivity? And do these differences matter?

To draw out these questions, we might consider two kinds of popular manifestation—Rousseau's silent assemblies and the barricade. These two modes of assembly share certain features: they are ritualistic; they form the people by giving the “corporate unity of peoplehood . . . a distinctively tangible reality” (50); and they are involved in producing collective self-regard. Rousseau's insistence on silence, however, speaks to an anxiety about the forms of informal domination that can attend deliberation/discussion. It seeks to preserve individuation even at the moment of collective assembly. The anonymity of the building of the barricade obviates this individuation. But also, more importantly, the barricade's status as “part public information booth, part recruitment stations” (141) suggests different mechanisms of drawing the individual into a sense of the collective. The pedagogical functions of popular assembly, the education of the senses that remains a form of self-pedagogy, is a striking feature of the models of assembly Frank discusses. The kinds of lessons on offer in the diverse iterations of assembly and the specific kinds of challenges raised by popular sovereignty to which strategies of assembly are a response would be a fruitful extension of Frank's interventions.

As the examples of Rousseau's silent assembly and the barricade suggests, Frank's conception of popular assembly is capacious and allows us to think through the “surprisingly persistent power of the politics of popular assembly” (xiii). Our contemporary moment—from the memories of the Arab Spring and Occupy movements over a decade ago to the Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2020—speaks to this enduring power of popular manifestation. How do we think about the mediatization of these assemblies? The circulation, reproduction, and interchangeability of images of popular manifestation have become a recurring feature of our contemporary politics. To be sure, this landscape might be less of a qualitative transformation than an escalation of tendencies already present in the Age of Revolution. As Tocqueville already noted, 1789 was “a spectacle of incomparable beauty [in part because] all foreign nations saw it, all applaud it, all were moved by it” (quoted on page 171). How are external audiences implicated and enlisted in the power of popular assembly? Frank's important intervention, as I noted above, is to alert us to the strategies of producing identification with a collective and empowered agent and engendering a reverential self-regard. The relationship between the regard of others and the production of self-regard might be one of the shifting features of popular assembly, which we take up as we consider its different modalities.

The Democratic Sublime makes it possible to pose these questions because, as with Constituent Moments, it begins with a commitment to the enduring energy of democratic politics that looks beyond its constitutional and institutional configurations. In a contemporary moment of democratic crisis, breakdown, and backsliding, a turn to the potentialities and conundrums of popular manifestation revivify the study of democracy.