Book Project: Worthy of Freedom
My dissertation examines the origins of democratic republicanism in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. I show that Dutch republicans grounded their arguments in the notion that each person’s basic equality is only respected within a popular government. Ultimately, I argue that democratic republicanism helps us reframe how we think about freedom and popular self-government in contemporary political theory.
Drawing on the thought of seventeenth-century Dutch republicans Johan and Pieter de la Court, Franciscus van den Enden, and Baruch Spinoza, I contend that the human passions play a foundational role in defending democratic politics. Against the elite assumptions of mixed constitutionalism, these thinkers grounded democratic legitimacy in the passions and their cultivation through reason, showing how democracy is founded on the basic premise that each person is born equal and that no one person ought to live under the rule of another. Through the ongoing participation of the demos, each person not only advances their own interests but cultivates their rational capacity, making democracy the only regime that fully honors human equality.
Oligarchic Democracy
Recent evidence suggests that oligarchs hold disproportionate influence over electoral representative institutions and limit people’s participation in both formal and informal spaces of democratic politics. My research explores oligarchic democracy and people’s experience with the presence of oligarchy.
In a forthcoming article in Perspectives on Politics, I introduce the concept of oligarchic fatigue to describe the political exhaustion that arises when people’s attempts to engage in democratic practices are obstructed by oligarchic domination. I identify freedom as a guiding principle for democratic innovations to address fatigue.
In another project, I turn to the same thinkers as in my dissertation to analyze how democrats responded to oligarchic domination in the seventeenth-century Dutch republic. From 1650 to 1672, an oligarchy governed the republic claiming to be a period of ‘true freedom.’ I contend that democratic republicans offered an approach to addressing oligarchy that is especially useful at a moment when democratic legitimacy and popular sovereignty are increasingly contested.
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Democratic Innovations
The crisis of democracy demands new innovative thinking to promote democratic renewal. My research explores the tension between institutionalizing democratic innovations and the spontaneity of people’s behavior. In my reading of democratic participation, both are key to maintain popular power. In a current project, I ask how the tension between institutionalization and spontaneity poses challenges and opportunities to democratic innovations.