My research focuses on political reaction and the work of social criticism in Western liberal democracies. My dissertation, “Another Romanticism: Rethinking Social Criticism from Rousseau to Tolstoy,” combines close readings of literary and political texts with historically-situated analysis to explore the theory and practice of romantic dissent in the 19th century. In future work, I plan to examine the shared foundations of armed and nonviolent theories of protest in the early 20th century.
Dissertation
Another Romanticism: Rethinking Social Criticism from Rousseau to Tolstoy
The romantic tradition has long been considered incompatible with the demands of political practice. Withdrawal from society, glorification of subjective experience, aversion to compromise, fanatical attachment to group identities—the hallmarks of romantic thought are widely seen as symptoms of political dysfunction. Accordingly, political theorists as dissimilar as Hannah Arendt and William Riker have agreed that the enduring appeal of romantic concepts has had ruinous effects on politics in the past two centuries. Yet most critics have treated German and British romantics as representative of romanticism more broadly, overlooking competing developments in the same tradition. My dissertation, “Romanticism’s Democratic Legacy,” reconstructs the political thought of 19th century American and Russian romantics to uncover the constructive potential of the romantic tradition. I draw on the essays, poems, speeches, journalism, and marginalia of five authors—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Leo Tolstoy—to argue that they transformed romantic concepts into potent rhetorical techniques to motivate democratic reform.
Concurrent Work
In a paper titled “Appealing to Disgust: The Alternative Right, Herder, and the Renaissance of Romantic Nationalism,” I examine the rehabilitation of 19th century romantic nationalism in contemporary far-right movements. Connecting statements of founders of the French Nouvelle Droit with those of leaders of the American Alternative Right, I show how each draws from the German romantic tradition to attack liberal cosmopolitanism as a form of cultural imperialism. I also argue that far-right movements have mirrored the rhetorical techniques of early German romantics’ views, using certain corporeal metaphors—such as indigestion, bodily intrusion, excretion, and nausea—to provoke public disgust toward “otherness.”