contact
Noah Eber-Schmid
Department of Political Science
Indiana University, Bloomington
Woodburn Hall
1100 E. 7th St.
Bloomington, IN 47405-7110
nebersch@iu.edu
research.
democracy's fanatics
Extremism and the foundations of American popular democracy
(book manuscript under review)
Democracy's Fanatics is a work of historical and contemporary political theory that looks to the American Founding era (1770-1800) to explore the messy and sometimes troubling shape of popular democratic thought and practice during times of intense political conflict. While many scholars have acknowledged the crooked path taken by the development of American democracy, few have recognized that moments of tension, violence, and extremism have in some cases served the pursuit of political equality. Democracy’s Fanatics addresses the important but under-examined question of how extremism, fanaticism, and zealotry shaped popular democratic politics (i.e., practices that aim to deepen and expand political equality) in the American Revolution and early Republic. Through studies of the early memorialization of the Boston Massacre, popular debates over Shays’s Rebellion, the thought and practices of the Democratic Societies, and the use of the French Revolution in American political debate, this work challenges conventional interpretive approaches to the history of the American democratic tradition and draws out new implications for theoretical approaches to contemporary American democracy.
Since the American Revolution, democratic theorists have often presupposed that dispassionate rationality, reciprocity, and nonviolent tolerance are necessary conditions for the sustained development of democracy. Intractable oppositional parties that reject frameworks of consensus, terms of mutual respect, and use force to accomplish their political goals are often excluded as irrational anti-democratic extremists outside the bounds of legitimate political contest. My book problematizes this exclusion, offering new insights into the divisive and violent nature of democratic politics in the early American polity. I argue that the development of American popular democracy during the Founding era, and the continual struggle to deepen and expand political equality today, relies in part on the efforts of democratic extremists, zealots, and fanatics who have tactically resorted to political extremism in their efforts to pursue political equality. My work demonstrates that American democratic theorists and citizens must recognize the historical and potential contributions of extremism to the practice and expansion of popular democracy in the United States and address the theoretical question of what role a democratic politics shaped by extremism plays in the democratic life of the American polity.
American Jacobinism
the french revolution, American anti-Jacobinism, and antidemocratic anxieties
American Political Thought 11:3 (Summer 2022): 320-346. doi:10.1086/720949
Scholars examining popular political discourse at the turn of the nineteenth century have often noted American anti-Jacobins’ and Federalists’ histrionic denunciations of the French Revolution. Looking at popular anti-Jacobin political writings of the period, I argue that the meaning of “Jacobin” and “Jacobinism” shifted from referring to the feared extremes of French Revolutionary politics to the feared extremes of American popular democracy. The latter meaning, which I denote as “American Jacobinism,” formed as a response to a perceived threat to American sovereignty: the practices and claims of persons demanding to be included within the popular sovereign. By redeploying Jacobinism as a means of associating democratic actors and claims with extremist excesses, anti-Jacobin discourse demonstrates how political fear and ideological-linguistic manipulation are used to constitutively exclude persons from a sovereign “people,” obstructing democratic deliberation and delegitimating democratic claims.
Political theorists often interrogate the constitution of “the people” as a formal theoretical problem. They have paid less attention, however, to how this problem confronts actors directly engaged in political crises, not as a problem of formal theory, but as an urgent problem of practice. Between 1771 and 1783, prominent Bostonians delivered passionate orations to memorialize the Boston Massacre on the annual observance of “Massacre Day.” Rather than focusing abstractly on the people as a formal problem, I turn to this neglected political holiday, examining it through through the lenses of affect, performance, and narrative, to demonstrate how orators confronted the pressing problem of making a people. Using public rituals and speech to promote an identity that united powerful emotions with political principles, orators negotiated the paradoxical nature of the people by constructing a model of subjectivity, the patriotic zealot, that intensified political differences and motivated extreme political action.
Patriots in the court of pandaemonium
People, Paradox, and the Making of American Zealots
The Review of Politics 82:4 (Fall 2020): 571-594. doi:10.1017/S0034670520000571
Loyalists and Royalists
Toward an anglo-American theory of political loyalty
(Andrew R. Murphy, co-author)
(article in progress)
Civil wars and revolutionary movements raise powerful questions of political loyalty and attachment, of social and political identity. Those leading such movements often articulate their reasons for making a sharp political break with past practice in highly public, principled documents (e.g., the Declaration of Independence). Much of the canon of modern political thought consists of conceptual or philosophical efforts to elaborate such movements. But what about those who seek not to achieve independence, but rather to maintain the (territorial or political) integrity of an already-existing order? What might we say about their arguments in favor of the status quo, or their defenses of incremental change over radical disruption? In this paper, we offer a preliminary exploration of this phenomenon by looking at two historical cases in the Anglo-American tradition. In the great English conflict of the mid-1600s, royalists rallied to the defense of their king as he faced off with Parliament. A century or so later, American Loyalists articulated a positive and substantive vision that posed fundamental questions to the American revolutionaries’ efforts to advance independence from Great Britain. This paper represents our first pass at a large body of discourse in early modern England and revolutionary-era America. We sketch out some of the broad contours of royalist and loyalist thought during times of great upheaval, providing a broad overview while acknowledging internal variations. Loyalty only becomes an explicit political position, one might say, when its “taken-for-grantedness” can no longer be taken for granted. Thus defenses of established order and constitutional forms rarely appear in isolation, and tend not to be theorized in their own right, but define themselves over and against revolutionary movements. Through our comparative examination, we rescue the analysis of loyalty from its shallow appreciation as the negation of rebellion, demonstrating that political loyalty is as much the product of systematic political thought and a response to the crucible of political crises as are calls for revolution. The scholarly attention lavished upon rebellion and revolt, upon those who brought down regimes and sought to erect new ones, in both the English and American cases, has obscured the fact that loyalty is, in a sense, the default setting in political behavior for most people most of the time. The vast majority of seventeenth-century English and eighteenth-century Americans, after all, were not revolutionaries, and a political theory that speaks to the political experience of ordinary individuals must somehow come to grips with that reality.
Noah Eber-Schmid is a political theorist and assistant professor of political science at Indiana University, Bloomington. He received his Ph.D. in political science at Rutgers University and his MA in politics at New York University. His research is focused on the history of American political thought and contemporary democratic theory, emphasizing political extremism, popular democracy, and the people in the past and present of American politics. His current research centers on the interaction of political extremism (passion, violence, incivility, and terror) and popular democratic politics during the American Revolution and the early American Republic. His work has appeared in American Political Thought and The Review of Politics and is forthcoming in the Cambridge History of Democracy. He has previously taught at Bucknell University and the University of Oregon.