
Contents
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“The centre and circumference of all democracy!” “The centre and circumference of all democracy!”
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Tautology, Circle, Tangent: Equality and Sovereignty in Democracy in America Tautology, Circle, Tangent: Equality and Sovereignty in Democracy in America
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One Cogged Circle: Ahab’s Revolving Sovereignty One Cogged Circle: Ahab’s Revolving Sovereignty
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Circles Upon Circles: Emersonian Forms and Leviathan Covenants Circles Upon Circles: Emersonian Forms and Leviathan Covenants
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Vortical Democracy Vortical Democracy
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Cite
Abstract
Chapter 4 argues that Melville’s circular figures of democratic sovereignty rival Alexis de Tocqueville’s analysis of the people as a great sphere, “the cause and the end of all things.” Both Tocqueville and Melville use circles to stage the paradox of democratic sovereignty-namely, its recourse to a tautology that identifies the people as both origins and ends of power. But even as Tocqueville and Melville recognize the possibilities for the perversion and destruction of democracy in such circles, both also identify circles with the art of collective action. For Tocqueville, this art appears in the local politics of townships, while Melville finds the fullest expression of this artful circle in a giant pod of whales, the fullest realization of a democratic community in all of his work. With this image of radical “cetocracy,” Moby-Dick figures forth a sovereignty that is aesthetic, egalitarian, collective—and nonhuman.
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