Revolutions and Anniversaries: J. Franklin Jameson, One Hundred Years Later

The "Paris IAS Ideas" online talk series features short and stimulating presentations from fellows of the Paris Institute for Advanced Study, marking the beginning of 1-month writing residencies.

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Presentation

J. Franklin Jameson wrote one of the most important accounts of the origins of the American Revolution in 1926, the 150th anniversary of that revolution's start. One hundred years later, as the US prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary, it is a good moment to reassess Jameson's understanding of the causes the American and French Revolutions. In the current moment, when they are under unusual threat, it seems especially important to consider the weight that Jameson gave to ways of thinking and feeling necessary for imagining democracy: what are they? how did they emerge? and, it is now important to ask, how and why have they withered?

Jameson, contrary to prevailing currents, gave considerable weight to the relationship between particular ways of thinking and feeling (as have thinkers as different as Tocqueville and Arendt at different moments) that have collectively worked to sustain experiments in democracy. At this moment of democratic backsliding and even crisis in many parts of the globe, Jameson provides a launching point for a wide-ranging exploration of the nature of these forms of thought and emotion and the question of not only the sources of their emergence but also the sources of their potential decline.