Popular sovereignty suffers many fictions, principally regarding equality. This chapter addresses a neglected form of inequality, by focusing on the concerns of borderland dwellers – citizens of the polity who reside at the outermost territorial reaches of the state. On paper, peripheral citizens are identical to any others. But borders necessarily operate over and against peripheral interests, representing the polity against its periphery. This chapter provides an in-depth illustration of security in the US–Mexico borderlands. It foregrounds three features of the borderlands: Surveillance, or the broadening of physical and technological infrastructure; heterogeneity, the multiple forms of authority; and vigilance, the increased role that citizens play in law enforcement. It advances two claims. The first is that state authority is heterogeneous and increasingly personalized in the borderlands and thus unaccountable to democratic control. The second is that policies in the borderlands are designed not in the name of peripheral citizens but against them – a condition that resembles a kind of colonialism.

In discussions of the fate of democracy, populism has proven to be ubiquitous, yet elusive. Populism carries with it the promise of popular sovereignty – the potential for ordinary people to overthrow corrupt elites. However, it also poses a danger to political institutions and crucial elements of the liberal order, sometimes merging with anti-immigrant sentiment. This chapter addresses the challenge of populism in the US context, with a specific focus on the role played by the rhetoric of antagonism in populist appeals. I argue that (1) antagonistic claims are central to understanding what distinguishes populism from other forms of popular appeals, (2) the US context is somewhat unique in that historically, populist appeals have incorporated antagonism across geographic regions, and (3) the nationalization of American politics has led populist rhetoric to seek other targets, fundamentally changing its relationship to political institutions.

The Precipice of Hope: a conversation with Hahrie Han The concluding contribution to the volume features a conversation with scholar and activist Hahrie Han. Drawing on Han’s extensive experience as an adviser to popular movements across political divides, the conversation revisits the main questions of the volume: what is popular sovereignty and how can we understand and repurpose this historically important concept today? What is a people and under what conditions can a sense of solidarity across a vast array of social and political differences be build? Last but not least, are the idea and regulative ideal of rule of the people, and the very existence of a people that can govern itself, necessarily fictional, and to what extent is fiction an indispensable dimension of political concepts and norms.

The greatest challenge to liberal democracy today comes from the political ascent of movements that, in the name of democratic equality and popular sovereignty, attack the foundations of the liberal constitutional order. Comparing two influential accounts of these tensions, the chapter interrogates the meaning of popular sovereignty to shed light on the vulnerabilities and strengths of liberal democracy. While Schmitt insisted on differentiating liberalism from democracy to attack liberalism, Tocqueville insisted on the same to advance liberal self-understanding and to guard against modern threats to freedom. If for Schmitt, the difference between democracy and liberalism concerns the meaning of equality, for Tocqueville the crucial question is who and how delimits the popular will. While both saw pluralism as a challenge for constitutional democracy, Tocqueville considered it an indispensable aspect of popular sovereignty. Schmitt, by contrast, rejected the possibility and desirability of a pluralistic democracy.

Thomas Hobbes’ affinity for certain core conceptions of liberalism has been noted by critics and admirers alike. Nonetheless, these proto-liberal aspects have tended to be overshadowed by his more obvious institutional support for absolute monarchy. This tension has sparked generations of disagreement. While building on familiar scholarly debates, the chapter sheds light on three less explored Hobbesian conceptual revolutions. The first is Hobbes’ distinction between persons and individuals. The ascendancy of the individual at the expense of the personage gives rise to a second building block of modern conceptions of popular sovereignty: namely, the reign of quantity and the depreciation of quality. Assuming an underlying identity among such individuals, popular sovereignty is predicated on an ability to measure their respective wills quantitatively. Finally, the Hobbesian theory model of solidarity is distinguished by its aspiration to uniformity. What Hobbes castigates as asperity on the part of individual subjects must be resisted not only because the existence of discrepant wills challenges uniformity, but also because such persons are representative of differences.

This second edition of The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald offers both new and familiar readers an authoritative guide to the full scope of Fitzgerald’s literary legacy. Gathering the critical insights of leading Fitzgerald specialists, it includes newly commissioned essays on The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, Zelda Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald’s judgment of his peers, and Fitzgerald’s screenwriting and Hollywood years, alongside updated and revised versions of four of the best essays from the first edition on such topics as youth, maturity, and sexuality; the short stories and autobiographical essays; and Americans in Europe. It also includes an essay on Fitzgerald’s critical and cultural reputation in the first decades of the twenty-first century and an up-to-date bibliography of the best Fitzgerald scholarship and criticism for further reading.

Chapter 3 examines what it means to break a promise, and how doing so might be more virtuous than keeping it. Various promises are broken in The Ambassadors, although ironically their not being kept makes no difference, since what had been promised happens anyway. The chapter focuses on this odd paradox as a means of solving the central puzzle of the novel: Strether’s belief at the end of his summer in Paris that he has remained “just the same for himself on all essential points as he had ever been” (XXII, 284) while undergoing a profound transformation. As I see it, Strether’s developing sense of morality is a creative force, an act of the imagination.

In describing the significance of the idea of popular sovereignty, Tocqueville alluded to its theological properties, indicating that its power relies at least in part on belief. Edmund S. Morgan declared, The success of government [...] requires the acceptance of fictions, requires the willing suspension of disbelief, requires us to believe that the emperor is clothed even though we can see that he is not. I trace the long lineage of these observations, focusing mainly on three formative moments. The first is Platos Republic, in which Socrates anticipates reason of state, by allowing rulers to lie, to protect the state. The second is Hobbess appeal to consider society as though it had emerged from a social contract, which shaped modern political thought from the seventeenth century to the present. The third is Rousseaus observation that the legislators work involves an undertaking that transcends human capacities and, to execute it, an authority that is nil, a problem that he proposed to solve by means of a civil religion. The continuing relevance of these observations not only poses important challenges, but also presents opportunities, for popular sovereignty.

The Cambridge Edition of Tender Is the Night declares that it “chronicles the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychiatrist, and his wife, Nicole, who is one of his patients.” Likewise, Penguin describes the book as “the account of a caring man who disintegrates under the twin strains of his wife’s derangement and [their] lifestyle.” This chapter challenges the androcentric, victim-blaming nature of these long-accepted readings and argues that we have not paid sufficient attention to the sexual violence that permeates Fitzgerald’s novel. More specifically, it explores the conceptual, contextual, and formal ways that the book creates sympathy for Dick Diver, and then it asks readers to consider how our understanding of the text might change if we shift our attention to Nicole, whose adolescent violation is both the inciting event of the novel and occupies its center, literally and figuratively. Taking into consideration Fitzgerald’s literary aspirations alongside the novel’s formal complexity, the chapter argues that Tender Is the Night shares some of the modernist qualities of Fitzgerald’s contemporaries as well as their intensifying anxieties over female sexuality and concludes that by tending to Nicole’s trauma, Tender is as much a novel of recovery and redemption as one of dissipation and decline.

My first chapter, on The Portrait of a Lady, focuses on Isabel Archer’s promise to her stepdaughter Pansy not to abandon her. Since James does not disclose what is passing through Isabel’s mind when she decides to return to Pansy’s father Gilbert Osmond at the end of the novel, we have no way of knowing whether this promise plays any part in her reasoning. The crucial point, however, is that the promise is kept regardless of Isabel’s intentions, proof. I argue, that James views Isabel’s character as itself a kind of promise, one that exceeds the novel in which she appears.