Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American LiteratureFictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America

US literary critics and historians often tell a version of the same story about sovereignty in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. It proceeds as follows: Classical republican ideas were circulated and then debated alongside vigorous discussions of John Locke’s model of liberal individualism. Imperfectly synthesized, so the tale goes, republicanism and liberalism came to define nineteenth-century US politics, culture, and letters. Although this narrative was initially extolled by scholars such as Gordon Wood and Warner Berthoff, subsequent generations left it intact but critiqued. Joyce Appleby highlighted liberalism’s shortcomings, Gillian Brown located individualism and republicanism in the home, and Saidiya Hartman examined this political tradition’s role in inflicting violent spectacles on enslaved people. Cathy Davidson gave us one of the most enduring and generative histories of print and literature built around these political traditions. From the 1980s forward, in fact, most New Americanist and historicist literary scholarship wrestled with the possibilities and problems of these transatlantic intellectual discourses even as this work forged new paths of inquiry into sentimentalism, colonialism, indigeneity, the black Atlantic, aesthetics, and biopolitics.Could it be time to turn our critical attention elsewhere, declaring the cultural study of sovereignty in nineteenth-century American literature generally settled? Paul Downes’s and Stacey Margolis’s latest monographs demonstrate otherwise. Though topically and theoretically distinct, Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature and Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America demand that we revise sovereignty’s story in US culture. They do not so much call on us to forget what we have learned as they compel us to reckon with what we have learned to forget. Downes gives us a Thomas Hobbes whom Carl Schmitt would hardly recognize; this Hobbes offers no refuge to tyrants and neocons but rather rattles liberalism and capitalism epistemologically to their cores to recover resistance’s supplementary force. Margolis reframes mass democracy as having less to do with sovereignty than with public opinion. While the former left women, people of color, and the poor politically estranged, public opinion emerged as “the one facet of the democratic public sphere that seemed truly open” in the fiction examined by Margolis (21). Both published shortly before the 2016 presidential election, Downes’s and Margolis’s powerful studies are as timely as they are indispensable for any serious nineteenth-century Americanist, literary historian, or political theorist.Downes argues that Hobbes powerfully deconstructs liberal social contract philosophy. Hobbes accomplishes this feat by imagining a democratizing supplement or “a social sovereignty that belongs to the community but which does not contract with the community” (17). Whereas others could read the leviathan only as arbitrary power’s literal embodiment, Downes recovers its figurative signification as an artificial persona representing “the resistance offered by performative representational institutionality to any personification, ontologization, or idealization of externality, whether it be a liberal version of ‘the people’ or of God’s lieutenant, or of wisdom, morality, or ethnic purity” (61).Foregrounding Hobbes’s antitheological grasp of sovereignty, Downes reminds us that his state of nature is one devoid of inalienable rights granted by an extralegal deity. This means that all people are created equal because they share a common vulnerability: a propensity to abandon the social and slip back into a natural state of war against one another in an attempt to impose inequality temporarily. In place of a monarchist Hobbes, Downes gives us a seventeenth-century master Derridean. A self-preservation and self-destruction binary underwrites and threatens liberalism’s legitimacy, and we are left with the democratic supplement’s menacing force. Liberalism and capitalism produce profound inequalities, but the natural law that all people remain equal because everyone can perish in war means the insurgent can summon Hobbes’s leveling ghost to supplant one social order with one less destructive and unequal.To outline this deconstructionist Hobbes, Downes devotes several chapters to rereading Leviathan (1651) painstakingly alongside other historically situated philosophical tracts. These sections recall the meticulous cultural readings of the US Constitution and the law provided in work by Colin Dayan, Deak Nabers, Eric Slauter, and Ivy Wilson. These chapters prove necessary and engaging, but they postpone the turn to literary materials, which range from Edward Taylor to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Downes concludes by brilliantly revisiting Nat Turner’s legacy. Rather than revolting against a “slaveholding ideology” predicated on Hobbesian absolutism, Turner harnessed the terror associated with “a Hobbesian state of nature” to revolt against a slave state sustained by liberal capitalism and a suppression of the deconstructive reading of Hobbes (223).Further expanding recent studies of liberalism’s limits by Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Siân Silyn Roberts, Margolis addresses how “rational ‘individual actions’ can produce ‘cumulative madness’” (10). The financial panic stands out as an illustrative example for her, as economic collapses often stem from sound individual assessments of risk. When single decisions become replicated by networks, however, financial disaster can strike. For this reason, she insists we should not hold the so-called wisdom of crowds in high regard. Gossip, information, and contagion flow through networks, and most importantly for Margolis, public opinion can sustain or undermine the state because of its networked form and content. These assertions become the basis for her compelling argument: “postrevolutionary fiction began to explore the mechanisms that produced public opinion by developing a series of thought experiments on the new democratic reality” (20).Fictions of Mass Democracy appeared the same year as Caroline Levine’s Forms (2015), and both broaden our understanding of network theory’s relevance to formal analysis. Margolis’s book has more to offer for those who study the nineteenth-century United States. She is no less theoretically sophisticated than Levine or Downes and compellingly redirects Chantal Mouffe’s, Claude Lefort’s, and even Jürgen Habermas’s thought in fresh ways, but her argument arises from a series of intensely illuminating and energetic readings of fiction. These qualities make her book hard to put down.Margolis surveys work by Charles Brockden Brown, Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Jacobs, and Fanny Fern. Her reading of Edgar Allan Poe stands out especially, belonging alongside the field’s best, such as those by Jonathan Elmer and Meredith McGill. Focusing on “The Man That Was Used Up” especially, Margolis establishes how gossip networks operate against rather than in concert with print publicity. Orchestrated media campaigns often do not stand a chance against rumor’s democratic power. Noting that being “‘used up’ meant to be perpetually in the public eye” in the nineteenth century, she argues that “the fact of the gossip” about the General, not the content, generates his mystery and celebrity (55). The many opinions about him, much like his discretely dismembered body, create unity out of multiplicity. Margolis forebodingly acknowledges that opinion echo chambers can dangerously polarize citizens, but, she asserts convincingly, Poe reminds us that these same networks produce public opinion in the first place. Public opinion in the nineteenth-century United States was about as direct as democracy could get.Historically rigorous, formally astute, and theoretically provocative, these latest books by Downes and Margolis assuredly will shape discussions surrounding democracy’s place in nineteenth-century US literature and culture in the years to come.

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