contact
Noah Eber-Schmid
Department of Political Science
Indiana University, Bloomington
Woodburn Hall
1100 E. 7th St.
Bloomington, IN 47405-7110
nebersch@iu.edu
current research.
Hardcover and E-Book available from Oxford University Press
Founding 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 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
Noah Eber-Schmid is an assistant professor of political theory in the Department of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. He received his PhD in political science from Rutgers University and his MA in politics from New York University. His research and teaching focus on the areas of American political thought, contemporary democratic theory, and the history of modern political thought, with an emphasis on political extremism, the people in the past and present of democratic politics, and the contested limits of democratic political practices. In addition to his forthcoming book with Oxford University Press, his work has also appeared in American Political Thought and The Review of Politics, and is forthcoming in the Cambridge History of Democracy and Contemporary Political Theory.