Which matters should constitutional courts leave to the democratic process, and what is a tenable relationship between constitutional courts and popular sovereignty in a liberal institutional order? Federalism complicates this issue: There is more than one popular sovereign in the United States. Since popular sovereignty is exercised at the subnational level for some purposes and at the national level for others, courts can thwart popular majorities at one level of government while simultaneously upholding them at another. Promoting the health of the democratic process and limiting the harm majorities sometimes impose on minorities appear to be areas in which constitutional courts could play an important role. Yet, examination of two cases involving equal access to the political process in the context of federalism illustrate some reluctance of the recent US Supreme Court to take on such a role – political gerrymandering in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) and rights of minorities in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action (2014).

Popular accounts of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s contact with the film industry often spin a tale of professional decline. But rather than ruining his talent, time spent in Hollywood benefited Fitzgerald by providing the financial and creative resources he needed during a complex moment in American cultural life. Furthermore, rather than being revenge tracts, Fitzgerald’s Hollywood fiction and his unfinished novel offer some of the early examples of American film theory by carefully examining studio culture and the writer's place within it. While it is true that Fitzgerald had his share of troubles as a screenwriter, many of these difficulties were of his own devising. Fitzgerald was heavily invested in the notion of the artist as a solitary man of genius. His collaborators often resented his claims to superior taste and judgment, especially since his scripts often weren’t filmic enough. But from the beginning of his career he was a hard-working professional writer who was savvy about making money – especially from the film industry – on the commodities he produced. Hollywood wasn't the setting for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s failed second act; it was part of the same successful performance.

This chapter explores the contrast between two types of ultimate authority (the tyrant and the sovereign) and the material limits on both through a study of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos. It begins with an examination of the shared terrain between the two terms, and then moves to a study of the discursive development of tyrannos in ancient Greece. Two insights result: first, notions of sovereignty depend on some idea of limits or boundaries, whether recognized or not, to differentiate it from illegitimate tyranny. Second, the legitimacy problem is always political, depending on power and contestation; claims to either sort of ultimate authority will never find secure or self-evident foundations. Oedipus – a benevolent tyrant who has faith in his power because he escaped his fate and has bested the Sphnix – ends up unwittingly demonstrating the limits of both types of claims to ultimate authority. Attempting to find freedom beyond democratic knowledge and the constraints of time and inheritance, Oedipus’s refusal to remain bounded by the material limits of human existence results in his tragic downfall.

Around the world today, right-wing authoritarian movements labeled populist claim to be vehicles of popular sovereignty. Analysts have debated the definition of populism and the economic and cultural sources of these movements. Few have closely analyzed the “stories of peoplehood” advanced by authoritarian populist movements, or explored how they can be countered by more inclusive and egalitarian stories of peoplehood. This chapter suggests criteria for developing better stories of peoplehood, using the example of American stories that might compete effectively with the Trump movement’s narrative of “making America great again.”

During the peak of his contemporary popularity, F. Scott Fitzgerald lived abroad – mostly in France – for five years and eight months, much of that time pursuing a frenzied social life that impeded his literary work. His European travels included lengthy stays from May 1924 through the end of 1926 and then from March 1929 through September 1931, as well as a five-month sojourn in mid-1928. On foreign shores he experienced misery and elation: his wife Zelda's romance with French aviator Edouard Jozan; completion, publication, and celebration of his third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925); new friendships with Ernest Hemingway and with Gerald and Sara Murphy; innumerable alcoholic binges and embarrassments; false starts on a fourth novel and increasing self-doubts; domestic rivalry and acrimony; Zelda's first nervous breakdown and treatment; his hotel life and fugitive magazine fiction. Only after returning to the United States did Fitzgerald publish Tender Is the Night (1934), a work that despite its flaws plumbs the paradoxes of desire more profoundly than did Gatsby. Understandably, Tender has preoccupied scholars and biographers seeking insight into the author's life abroad, for its thinly veiled treatment of the Fitzgeralds' domestic calamities, set against the crazy violence of postwar Europe, reveals much about the author's own identification with expatriate culture. But the many short stories set at least partly in Europe likewise merit closer attention, less for their biographical connections than for their representations of the American migration to Europe after World War I.

There is a vital French tradition of political and social action in the name of the people and popular sovereignty, and French leaders and citizens have continually invoked popular sovereignty to claim political legitimacy and make demands for different political and social ends. At times the concept has been used to support a liberal ideal of the nation, at other times it has buttressed far-right claims to the nation. This chapter considers the concept of popular sovereignty within French politics and society at key historical moments – the Revolution, the brief second Republic, the Paris Commune, the interwar internal battles of the Third Republic, to populist street protests of the twenty-first century that do not adhere to a strict spectrum of left or right. The chapter does not simply track the historical existence of claims to popular sovereignty, but shows its uses across the political spectrum, the impact of couching political and social claims in the language of popular sovereignty and the demands of the people, and the malleability of that concept across centuries of a national politics and society.

This essay first argues that popular sovereignty or self-rule depends on self-understanding and then points to a set of practices and activities that make this kind of popular self-understanding more likely, even or especially in a populace as vast, complex, and divided as that of the United States of America in 2020. Brief analyses of works by Walter Lippmann, John Dewey, Walt Whitman, and Danielle Allen set the theoretical context for an overview of face-to-face conversation programs and an argument about the necessity of programs such as these to complement legal and institutional efforts to strengthen democracy.

This chapter reconsiders the significance of The Beautiful and Damned (1922) to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s development as a writer and his place in American modernist literature. This second novel occupies a minor position in the Fitzgerald canon and is often regarded as a move away from his experimentations with romanticism, aestheticism, and decadence to naturalism. By contrast, this chapter argues that the novel remains committed to fin-de-siècle theories of aesthetic hedonism propounded by Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde in formal, thematic, and intellectual terms and brings them into productive tension with naturalism. The Beautiful and Damned is informed by Paterean theories of perception and hedonism in its preoccupation with the brevity of life, the fragility of beauty, and the necessity of cultivating a heightened mode of perception and consciousness. Naturalism, meanwhile, is deployed strategically as in the narrative to expose the naïve and illusory nature of the aesthetic hedonism of its protagonists. This chapter further argues that Fitzgerald’s reliance on fin-de-siècle tropes should not be understood as anomalous or derivative but, rather, that it situates The Beautiful and Damned in a broader “new decadent” literary movement within American modernism.

“Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art”: This maxim from Fitzgerald’s notebooks squares with his ambition to be among the greatest American writers of his time. Fitzgerald’s evolving sense of who his era’s giant writers were – through the judgments of what he called “the cultural world” – led him by the time he wrote The Great Gatsby and just after to align his work with an elite, international modernism. But as this chapter demonstrates, Fitzgerald’s fiction remained relatively conventional in the context of revolutionary modernism, in good part because of his care for ordinary readers. And the high regard he professed for writers like Joyce, Stein, and Conrad did not preclude his generous interest in more ordinary contemporaries. His wide, eclectic reading of his contemporaries reveals the actual catholicity and conventionality of his literary tastes. The argument suggests that while Fitzgerald’s reputation was bolstered by his positioning himself on the side of the anti-commercial and avant-garde values of the modernist literary field, it was his professional commitment to good, affective writing that proved most crucial to his winning what he most coveted: literary immortality.

Chapter 2 focuses on the heroines of three James texts from the late 1890s, The Spoils of Poynton, In the Cage, and The Turn of the Screw. The lack of money and social standing of all three women exempt them from the realm in which promises are given and received, As a result, their duty is limited to ensuring that the people for whom they work recognize their own. This paradoxical notion of a promise given by proxy, as it were, accounts for the striking formal experiments performed by all three texts, the principal one being that all three heroines arrive too late for their own stories.

My introduction makes four closely related arguments: that the promise functions as the governing trope of James’s work, that James rearranges the moral landscape of the nineteenth-century novel, that the depictions of promise-giving in James’s fiction challenge a number of moral philosophy’s accounts of the nature of obligation, and that the relation between morality and literature is better posed in terms of form than in terms of content. I explore a range of ethical dilemmas posed by philosophers working in moral philosophy, speech act theory, and the philosophy of identity. In addition I sketch out a short history of the nineteenth-century novel, focusing on the centrality of the promise to British, French, and American writers.