Eighth Reading Group: Democratic Individualism
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University of Edinburgh
12 January 2018, 1-5pm To what extent is democracy compatible with individual potential? Can moral perfectionism overlap with democratic instrumentalism? Political theory from Plato and Augustine, Hobbes and Rousseau, has sought to articulate the relationship between the “city of man” and the “city of God”, often imagined as one of absolute separation, occasional collision or neat coincidence. In 1984, George Kateb coined the phrase “democratic individuality” to argue that Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman, rather than offering a distinct alternative to, and critique of, the structures of American democratic life, exhibited a politically-powerful conjoining of democracy and individuality. Kateb would write in 1995 that “[d]emocracy becomes, in its political process, the register of … individual diversity”. |
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This BrANCA reading group will explore the place and force of the political in American transcendentalist writing, specifically through the writing of Margaret Fuller, until relatively recently a neglected figure in discussions of antebellum political writing. Our primary texts will be her essay “The Great Lawsuit”, published in the Dial in 1843, and her article “1st January 1846”, one of her regular pieces for the New-York Tribune newspaper. Both texts map out a vision of individual agency that has a tense relationship to the actual conditions of American democratic life, as Fuller balances the imperatives of a “higher law” with the realities of a participatory democracy. We’ll explore the viability or otherwise of Kateb’s conviction of the compatibility of the idea of a sacred self with that of secular democratic engagement. Alongside the two Fuller texts, we’ll also look at a chapter from Daniel Malachuk’s recent book, Two Cities, which offers a strong reading of Fuller’s place in these debates around liberal democratic theory and its intersection with strands of American idealism.
Readings:
Available at the link below and via Dropbox after registration
To register, please email Nick Spengler: Nicholas.Spengler@ed.ac.uk
Readings:
Available at the link below and via Dropbox after registration
- Margaret Fuller, “The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman versus Women” (1843) https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=VnsAAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
- Margaret Fuller, “1st January 1846” (1846)
- Daniel S. Malachuk, chapter 2 of Two Cities: The Political Thought of American Transcendentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016)
To register, please email Nick Spengler: Nicholas.Spengler@ed.ac.uk