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Abstract
The term “democracy” is ambivalent—in the history of the United States, it has played both god term and devil term, and inspired both sacrifice and trembling. Robert L. Ivie has mapped the discourse by which American policy elites have said “no” to democracy—the rhetoric of “demophobia.” This essay complements his analysis by mapping the discourse by which Americans began to say “yes” to democracy during President Thomas Jefferson's administration—the rhetoric of “demophilia.” Understood as a discursive formation, demophilia creates space for rhetoric and deliberation that is closed by demophobia. In the process, demophilia disciplines democracy by producing deliberative subjects properly attuned to civil speech.
Acknowledgements
He would like to thank those who participated in these meetings for their time. A special thanks goes out to Greg Goodale and Nate Stormer for organizing my visits, for their hospitality, and for their general brilliance. He would also like to thank Raymie McKerrow, and the two anonymous reviewers, for guiding this essay through the review process and helping to whip it into shape.
Notes
1. Fisher Ames, Speech at the Massachusetts Ratifying Convention, January 15, 1788, in The Debate on the Constitution: Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters During the Struggle over Ratification, ed. Bernard Bailyn, Library of America Series (New York: Literary Classics of the US, 1993), 1:894.
2. On democracy as a central problem in post-Revolutionary America, see Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776–1787 (1969; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 471–518; Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America (1979; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1–65; Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 211–47; Gary Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York: Viking, 2005), 366–422; Terry Bouton, Taming Democracy: “The People,” the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007).
3. These claims often preceded through a metonymic chain that linked Shays's Rebellion and other such uprisings with democracy—see Jeremy Engels, Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010), 103.
4. Gerry quoted in Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1911), 1:48; 2:57.
5. James Madison, “Federalist 10,” in The Federalist, intro. and notes by Robert A. Ferguson (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2006), 56.
6. “From the (New-York) Herald,” Catskill Packet & Western Mail, May 23, 1795, 1.
7. Ali Kahn, “The Observer—No. III,” Boston Gazette, March 24, 1803, 2.
8. Robert L. Ivie, Democracy and America's War on Terror (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 12. Drawing out the Greek roots of the concept, Jennifer R. Mercieca uses the term “misodemia” rather than “demophobia” in Founding Fictions (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 18.
9. Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (1971; New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 38.
10. John Dewey, Freedom and Culture (1939), in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 13, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 173.
11. Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816, in Thomas Jefferson, Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson, Library of America Series (New York: Literary Classics of the US, 1984), 1400.
12. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 140, 148–50. He speaks of “surfaces of their emergences” in The Archeology of Knowledge, 41.
13. Kendall R. Phillips, “Spaces of Invention: Dissension, Thought, and Freedom in Foucault,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 35, no. 4 (2002), 333.
14. From January to May, an essayist writing under the pseudonym Aurelius composed six essays titled “Progress of Democracy” for Boston's Port-Folio, and beginning in February, the Boston Gazette ran a series of editorials from essayist Ali Kahn under the heading “The Observer.” Aurelius's essays appeared in Boston's Port-Folio on January 15, January 22, January 29, March 5, March 26, and May 14, 1803. Ali Kahn's essays under the title “The Observer” began in February 1803 and were a fixture in the Boston Gazette into 1804, ranging over topics domestic and foreign, but always with a strong anti-democratic bent.
15. The notion of constitutive exclusion is developed in Jodi Dean, Solidarity of Strangers: Feminism After Identity Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 78–84. The idea of a “constitutive outside,” a more general concept, is developed in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985; London: Verso, 2001).
16. For a helpful reading of the “state of exception,” see Georgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
17. On “demotic moments,” see Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 238–54.
18. On “fugitive democracy,” see Sheldon S. Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 31–45.
19. On the rhetoric of Regulation, see Jeremy Engels, “Reading the Riot Act: Rhetoric, Psychology, and Counter-Revolutionary Discourse in Shays's Rebellion, 1786–1787,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91 (2005): 63–88.
20. On the anti-democratic rhetorics of Ancient Greece, see Harvey Yunis, Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Classical Athens (Ithaca, NY: Cornel University Press, 1996), and Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
21. Isocrates, Antidosis, in Isocrates Volume II, Loeb Classical Library Edition, trans. George Nolin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), 265, 271.
22. On the Levellers, see Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 104–42; on Hobbes's critique of democracy, see Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 25–54.
23. Otis quoted in Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 476.
24. Porcupine's Gazette, March 30, 1799.
25. On the radicalism of the Boston Gazette during the Revolutionary-era, see Eric Burns, Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2006).
26. On Jefferson's democratic image, see Merrill D. Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (Charlottesville: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation and the University Press of Virginia, 1998). According to Sean Wilentz, “Thomas Jefferson, more than any other figure in the early Republic, established (and was seen to have established) the terms of American democratic politics.” Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005), xx.
27. On the influential partisanship of the Independent Chronicle, see Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001), 107–8, 141, 223.
28. “The Examiner—No. 1,” Independent Chronicle, June 6, 1803, 1.
29. “The Examiner—No. 2,” Independent Chronicle, June 9, 1803, 2.
30. “The Examiner—No. 1.”
31. “The Examiner—No. 1.”
32. On voting in the early 1800s, see Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 26–76.
33. “The Examiner—No. 2.”
34. William Sullivan, An Oration, Pronounced July 4th, 1803, At the Request of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston, In Commemoration of the Anniversary of American Independence (Boston: Gilbert and Dean, 1803), 13, 12, 5–6.
35. “The Examiner—No. 6,” Independent Chronicle, July 11, 1803, 1.
36. “The Examiner—No. 6.”
37. On the centrality of the distinction between the few and the many in Athenian democracy, see Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). The founders of the United States, themselves astute students of Ancient Greece and Rome, hoped they had solved the problem by creating a Constitution that would balance the needs and desires of the few and the many. Nevertheless, some Americans continued to see the conflict between mass and elite as an organizing structural conflict. For example, take William Manning's 1799 A Key of Libberty. For Manning, the Constitution was a product born out of this conflict between the few and the many. He explained that after Shays's Rebellion, “the Few were all alive for the support of the government, and all those who would not be continually crying, ‘Government, Government,’ or who dared to say a word against their measures, were called Shaysites and rebels and threatened with prosecutions, etc.” John Adams, too, thought society was inevitably divided into mass and elite, democracy and aristocracy. For him, there was no way to mitigate this social tension; a strong executive (like himself) could only attempt to keep the pendulum from swinging too far in either direction. Adams was critical of the aristocracy, which he believed to be avaricious. But his deepest fear, Gordon Wood argues, was that “unchecked, the people would not only turn on the aristocracy, robbing them and ruing them without hesitation, but they would also despoil and plunder among themselves.” William Manning, The Key of Libberty (1799), in The Key of Liberty: The Life and Democratic Writings of William Manning, “A Laborer,” 1747–1814, ed. Michael Merrill and Sean Wilentz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 165–6; Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 578.
38. “The Examiner—No. 3,” Independent Chronicle, June 16, 1803, 2.
39. “The Examiner—No. 3.”
40. On the understanding of mixed government that animated American constitution making, see Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 197–255.
41. Plain Truth, “On Democracy,” No. 1, Independent Chronicle, July 18, 1803, 2.
42. Plain Truth, “On Democracy,” No. 4, Independent Chronicle, August 1, 1803, 1.
43. See Engels, Enemyship, 157–205.
44. Plain Truth, “On Democracy,” No. 9, Independent Chronicle, September 8, 1803, 1.
45. Plain Truth, “On Democracy,” No. 1.
46. Plain Truth, “On Democracy,” No. 1.
47. Plain Truth, “On Democracy,” No. 2, Independent Chronicle, July 21, 1803, 2.
48. Plain Truth, “On Democracy,” No. 2.
49. Plain Truth, “On Democracy,” No. 2.
50. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (1904–5; Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing Company, 1998).
51. Plain Truth, “On Democracy,” No. 2.
52. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 588–92, 602–15.
53. Plain Truth, “On Democracy,” No. 2.
54. The foundational nature of the democratic demand is stressed in Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005).
55. Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens, 4.
56. Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, in Writings, ed. Peterson, 493. The strategy of appealing to timeless, unobjectionable principles is what Stephen Howard Browne calls “the Jeffersonian style” in Jefferson's Call for Nationhood: The First Inaugural Address (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003), 90.
57. “The Examiner—No. 3.”
58. See Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York: The Free Press, 1998).
59. Ivie, Democracy and America's War on Terror, 19–20, 32.
60. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. Linda Ferreira-Buckley and S. Michael Halloran (1783; Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 264–65, 288–89; George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, ed. Lloyd F. Bitzer (1776; Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), 98–99. Deeply influenced by Campbell and Blair, the earliest rhetorical theorists in the United States, including John Witherspoon, John Quincy Adams, and Samuel Knox, had little to say about the forms of eloquence beyond the pulpit, bar, and legislature. However, demophilia soon proved this division untenable, and as the United States became more democratic in the 1820s and 1830s, rhetoric finally broke free from its eighteenth-century shackles.
61. Here, Thomas Farrell's Norms of Rhetorical Culture is an exemplar. Farrell argues that “the public sense of rhetoric is not some recent ideographic invention of Jeffersonian Democrats” but instead “is always present to us in principle, because the autonomous individual, pressed far enough along his journey, is finally perishable. In other words, rhetoric viewed aesthetically is an intrinsic feature of the human condition.” While Farrell is rightfully critical of the “disturbing excesses of transcendental hermeneutics,” of the de-contextualized, de-historicized analyses of rhetoric offered by Gadamer and Habermas, I think he evinces similar excess by denying that deliberation as ideal and practice could be the invention of political actors. Thomas B. Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 132, 102.
62. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (1993; New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), and “The Idea of Public Reason,” in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, ed. James Bohman and William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997), 93–141. For other works that stress the importance of reason-giving to deliberation, see also Amy Guttmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 52–127; James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000), 23–70; and Joshua Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” in Deliberative Democracy, 67–91.
63. J. Michael Hogan, “Rhetorical Pedagogy and Democratic Citizenship: Reviving the Traditions of Civic Engagement and Public Deliberation,” in Rhetoric and Democracy: Pedagogical and Political Practices, ed. Todd F. McDorman and David M. Timmerman (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2008), 75–97; Robert Asen, “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 189–211; William Keith, Democracy as Discussion: Civic Education and the American Forum Movement (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007).
64. Mark Garrett Longaker, Rhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 167.
65. Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer, “Introduction,” in Counterpublics and the State, ed. Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 4. The story of rhetoric's devolution from a civic practice is told in Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight Over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1990).
66. Edward Tyrrell Channing, Lectures Read to the Seniors in Harvard College, ed. Dorothy I. Anderson and Waldo W. Braden (1856; Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), 20.
67. Channing, Lectures Read to the Seniors in Harvard College, 79.
68. On the orator hero ideal, see James Perrin Warren, Culture of Eloquence: Oratory and Reform in Antebellum America (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).
69. I take the idea of “objective violence” from Slavoj Zizek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), 2.
70. Plain Truth, “On Democracy,” No. 6, Independent Chronicle, August 15, 1803, 1.