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Abstract
Thinkers attempting to challenge existing conceptions of political life often find that they encounter limitations in dominant modes of spectatorship and communication. If popular audiences are unsuitably oriented toward the presentation of certain content, this introduces a fundamental obstacle for political theoretic efforts to shape ideas and interactions. This dissertation develops an interpretive approach attentive to such communicative obstacles and to how interventions across intellectual history attempt to engage them. I argue that popular audiences pose two interrelated challenges: their conditions and capacities arouse conceptual concerns over collective agency and judgment in political theoretic of accounts of political life; yet these very conditions and capacities likewise constitute the communicative dynamics that authors must navigate in the course of their political theoretic interventions. As such, political theoretic accounts of political life are entangled with their authors’ attempts to shape their audiences in new ways.
I call such efforts to reshape audiences the politics of audience, and propose that the challenges different audiences pose for interpreting political theoretic texts should inform how political theorists approach democratic thought and practice across intellectual history. Specifically, this dissertation traces the works of Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Arendt, arguing that these authors engage audiences precisely to make them amenable to new collective interactions. These authors confront audience limitations identified in their theoretical texts by turning to plays, novels, and other popular media emerging in their social contexts that promise to shape audiences anew, from Machiavelli’s efforts to shift how spectators judge princely action by satirizing such action in his comedy, La Mandragola; to Rousseau’s efforts to overcome spectator passivity hindering collective self-legislation by challenging what popular audiences do when reading his pedagogical work, Emile; to Arendt’s efforts to resist modern propaganda by presenting political biographies as exemplars of authority in Men in Dark Times. I argue that these texts constitute distinct political interventions in engaging collective actors in different ways in light of new political challenges.
Attending to the dynamic roles that audiences play in political life carries significant implications for democratic theory. Current democratic theorists often marshal these authors’ ideas to generate accounts of “the people” and their possibilities for political action. In contrast, I argue that the people are not simply the subject matter of canonical texts, whose powers are described therein. Rather, they are a dynamic force that these authors address, manipulate, and attempt to transform by engaging them as popular audiences. Beyond the discrete content of their arguments, Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Arendt’s turns to different modes of popular engagement illuminate enduring communicative challenges at the heart of democratic life. In turn, this dissertation’s attention to such challenges advances an interpretive claim: namely, that democratic theory is not only a body of knowledge about certain subjects (say, institutions, or collective agency) but, further, a set of shifting communicative practices by means of which the people are constituted and transformed.
